Deeds & Words

Some friends of mine watch Survivor, others The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Me, I follow Sarah Palin stories, for exactly the same reason.

This week she announced the title of her book, “Going Rogue; an American Life.”

Why “rogue?” I thought maybe she got it confused with rouge, and planned to put henna highlights in her hair, or was thinking of the X-Men character who sucks the life energy out of people.

I was pretty confused until I looked up “rogue” in the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary.

Here is some information about the word:

It’s from 16th century cant, not to be confused with the French word rogue which apparently means arrogant.

Meanings include:

A beggar or vagabond, a dishonest, unprincipled person.
An inferior plant among seedlings.

An elephant driven away or living apart from the herd, of a savage or destructive nature. (Aha! It’s a Republican theme!)

An inexplicably aberrant result or phenomenon.
Something inexplicably faulty or defective.

Something lacking appropriate control, irresponsible or undisciplined.

Verb: to behave dishonestly, to swindle.

So, Mrs. Palin, my apologies. You picked exactly the right title!

>Two weeks ago I went wine-tasting with friends. Of the four of us, three of have our birthdays in the same one-month period, so it seemed like a good way to celebrate.

I wanted to go to the Dry Creek Valley wineries, and I didn’t want to worry about driving, so I hired a car. I used Pure Luxury, a Santa Rosa based limo service. Because I had purchased a Savings Card (formerly known as Sonoma Express) I was able to get a 20% discount for a weekday.

Pure Luxury will help you plan your wine tasting itinerary but I already a good idea of where I wanted to go. Our excellent driver, Scott, picked us up. I had requested an SUV but because the vehicle was out of service unexpectedly that day, we got a free upgrade to a limo. I was skeptical, until I got inside and felt the air conditioning and saw the little bar along the side with champagne, soft drinks and water, nestled into an ice well. We had brought a flat of bottled water as well, in case we fell through a temporal rift and ended up in the desert, something I understand does occasionally happen during wine-tasting treks.

Scott navigated through the construction on Highway 101 North and took us into the valley.

First stop: Dry Creek General Store. Not for food, just a bathroom break and photo op, although the store, which has a deli, benefits from being the only place you can buy food. The place was established in 1881 and the rustic building, covered with grape vines, is very attractive. It is as nice inside as out, with a genuine creaking wood plank floor to create the ambiance.

Second stop: Sbragia Vineyards. Go all the way up Dry Creek road until you are staring at Warm Springs Dam, then veer right and go up the hill. The tasting room is pleasantly modern with a patio on three sides and a stunning view looking southeast over the entire valley. Inside, the glass-walled space is light and open. Sbragia is best known for its reds. Greg and Mary were replenishing their cellar and were in the market for reds that were drinkable now. They bought two bottles of wine at Sbragia. The hostess (I do not know the correct term for the person who pours your wine at a tasting room) was casual and pleasant. I liked that her explanations about the grapes and the vineyards was not overly fancy. I bought a bottle of their Merlot.

Third Stop: Ferrari-Carano. Part of the purpose of this trip was to take pictures, and it would have been a crime to bypass these glamorous building and grounds. Before we got anywhere near the tasting room we wandered through their beautiful garden. Then we walked up a long walkway where a life-sized bronze statue of a boar greeted us. To the left stood a faux-chateau set amid vivid flower beds. Beyond that, the rows of grapes and a double stretch of yew trees led to the rusty western hills. Directly past the tasting room, Ferrari-Carano has an elaborate fountain flanked by pillars. The tasting room itself was luxurious and fancy. At least I thought so until we went down into their wine cave and found the truly luxurious and fancy tasting room; marble, chandeliers and glass. They could film a James Bond movie down there; Bond could be wine-tasting and playing high-stakes poker with the villain, the Bond girl at his side. It’s luxurious that way. Greg and Mary were more impressed with the wines than I was, and I found the hostesses at this stop to be the least hospitable of the three. They weren’t rude or inattentive, just not very engaged. Maybe it was just me.

Lillian found a place we could crawl into, underneath the outside stairwell, to get a nearly perfect picture of the fountain, so the stop was a success for me. Ironically, we stayed here the longest, mostly taking pictures.

Fourth Stop: Bella Vineyards and Wine Caves. Bella Vineyards is on West Dry Creek Road, which means you turn off Dry Creek and head into the hills. This vineyard is the antithesis of Ferrari-Carano in appearance. The gift shop is a converted barn. They have picnic tables out in front, shaded by old olive trees. The wine-caves are carved into the hillside on which their grapes grow. By now it was about ninety degrees in the sun, so the caves, which were in the sixties, were tempting.

No marble and glass here. The tasting area has wooden tables (they looked like planks braced on old wine barrels) and the hosts have a pre-set flight they pour. Bella makes no whites at all, but the first wine they offered the heat-wearied travelers was a rose, chilled, condensation trickling off the glasses onto our fingers. Then they offered four different Zins; the last one being an ancient vines zinfandel dessert wine, something I had never heard of. The wine was very sweet, with good body, not overly heavy. It was an extremely fruity wine, with almost a raisin flavor, and I mean that in a good way. The alcohol content is about 12%, lower than most dessert wines and lower, in fact, that some of their other zins. This is a family operation. Our hosts were cheerful and well-versed in the provenance of the wines. I bought one of their table zins for a friend at work. Greg and Mary purchased several wines including the dessert wine.

By now we were almost out of time if we wanted to have lunch too! Our fifth stop was the Costeaux Family Bakery, on the plaza in Healdsburg. We found a table outside, next to the small fountain. Service seemed a little slow, but Mary commented that our server also had two very large parties, eight or more, inside. My friends ordered the iced tea and pronounced it ambrosial; not too sweet, with a hint of ginger, very refreshing. Lillian had a seared ahi salad and the rest of us were seduced by the French dip, which was wonderful.

I had ordered the bakery’s triple-chocolate cake with a chocolate rose on top as a birthday treat. The server brought it out to have at our table while we ate lunch. The chocolate aroma alone was enough to knock someone out. The cake drew a lot of attention from passers-by—I mean lots of attention, like we were putting our chairs in a circle and holding our forks like defensive weapons. If you love chocolate, this dessert is worth splurging for.

I had one disappointment. I wanted to go to Yoakim Bridge Winery, but we ran out of time. They also do, as they describe it, “big, hearty reds.” Scott, our driver, said, “You should plan to go there, because the owners create such a fun atmosphere. It’s like tasting wine on their porch.”

After I had the trip planned, another person had said it was worth getting a reservation to tour the Raymond Burr winery, not as much for the winery as for the tour of the greenhouses (Burr collected and grew orchids). Sounds like there’s enough there for a second trip, easily.

When I was younger I never read magazines. The Sig-O and I invested in US News and World Report for one year. Maybe I read it twice (and it’s a weekly). Now that I’m older, and either a) busier; or b) have a shorter attention span, I read some.

I get three magazines; The Economist, Entertainment Weekly, and The Harvard Business Review. If I could time-travel and journey back in time to my, say, 27-year-old self, and told her I read the HBR, she would laugh uproariously and pronounce this as proof positive that future-me was an imposter.

Entertainment Weekly comes on Thursdays or Fridays. I love getting it; it’s a reminder that a weekend is arriving. After dinner I sit down and read it, or most of it, in one sitting. I don’t usually read music reviews. Music reviews baffle me. I read the movie and book reviews. Their book reviews are the weakest part of the ‘zine, but they often let me know about a book I want to get before I would heard about it otherwise. I agree with their movie reviews slightly more than half the time. Stephen King does an occasional column for them, and I always enjoy it even when I don’t agree with it. Their capsule TV guide descriptions make me laugh.

The Economist is a weekly and it takes me all week to read it. It’s like homework. Based in England, it lacks an America-centric focus. I think that’s refreshing. In their mission to cover world news, they spend more time on Africa and Asia than the American newsmagazines do. Very often I don’t understand The Economist and I have to go look things up after I read it. It helped me, better than anything else, begin to understand just what happened to our economy last year, but I disagree with their writers most of the time on health care.

HBR. . . I get HBR at work. It’s a monthly. I never read the whole thing. An example of an article I didn’t read, “How to keep your customers during the economic downturn.” I work for the welfare department. Business is booming, thank you. Articles about shares and dividends and blah-blah-blah—please, who cares? However, at the back of the book, every month, is a series of articles about management, leadership, process improvement, promoting a vision; stuff that sounds silly but that I really do need, especially if I’m trying to prepare other people to promote in an environment that now expects them to know all the latest management buzz-words. I usually read about two articles per month, and get reprints of at least one of them for my managers.

I also get a wonderful magazine called Parabola. Parabola is a journal of spiritual exploration. It is either bimonthly or quarterly, I forget which. Like the Economist, it is work to read. . . work in a good way. I never read it all at once; I don’t think I could. I read an article here or there, something that leaps out at me or catches my imagination. Parabola isn’t a magazine to me; it’s a deep, dark basket with different things inside. I may reach in and pull out a river-smoothed stone, or an apple, or a puzzle. Every issue is a surprise, and in every surprise there is at least one gift.

Well, of course he is. He’s not the bad guy, the Real Villain. One of the problems with The Tempest is that it’s hard to tell who the real Bad Guy is. Since the really bad stuff happened in the past, and Prospero is bound on vengeance, it could be Prospero, who is also the Good Guy. We watch Sebastian, Antonio, who usurped Prospero’s dukedom (helped by Prospero’s negligence), plot regicide before our eyes. He’s a good candidate for Real Villain. Caliban, however, is just a whining slave who schemes to have Prospero murdered. Maybe he’s only a mini-villain.

Shakespeare always did great villains, villains you could understand. This is what makes a villain really good—when you can understand their point of view, their feelings. If you identify, it is more dramatic when they do the very bad thing, because you say to yourself, “I’d never do that, no matter how bad things got!” Shakespeare helped us understand how years of humiliation would drive Shylock to make such a cruel bargain. He made us understand Richard III, Claudius, who poisoned his own brother, Iago, and Mr and Mrs MacBeth.

Caliban is a problem though. Part of the problem is mine. I still bring that twenty-first century mindset to the play, and it’s difficult for me to take Prospero’s side when I know the first thing he did, after landing on the island, was enslave the natives, Ariel and Caliban. Caliban is the twisted monster-slave. The story goes that his mother, Sycorax, was a witch and his father a demon. Caliban’s mother magically imprisoned Ariel in a pine tree. Prospero freed Ariel, and made a bargain with the air spirit. Caliban he simply enslaved.

Right away I’m thinking, “Sure, a strong woman, so she must have been a witch, must have slept with a demon. That’s what they always say.” In fact, Sycorax was exactly like Prospero, (a fact he never mentions, but Shakespeare makes sure we notice) controlling the magical island by the force of her will. In an early scene between Caliban and Prospero, Caliban whimpers that the island should be his, through his mother. The problem is, he’s right.

Why is Caliban a bad guy? Well, he’s ugly. He whines. More seriously, at some point in the not-too-distant past he tried to force himself on Prospero’s virginal daughter Miranda, who prior to that had befriended him and tried to teach him to read. Clearly, this was not-okay behavior, but a modern viewer might consider that Caliban was in his adolescence, and there were no other females on the island. Something tells me that Prospero and Caliban never had The Talk.

So, attempting to violate a marriageable virgin–that’s pretty bad. We’ll gloss over the fact that the only reason Miranda doesn’t get caught in some equally embarrassing hormone-driven scandal is because Daddy shipwrecks a prince for her to hook up with. To be fair, Miranda is not a manipulative Daddy’s Girl, like Bianca in Taming of the Shrew—she is genuinely sheltered and naïve.

Prospero verbally abuses Caliban and physically tortures him, onstage. All the rest of Prospero’s tortures are psychological. For Caliban alone he reserves physical pain. Caliban is treated, not like a fearsome monster who must be contained, but like a disfavored stepson, and that is no accident.

Caliban finds two shipwreck survivors, Stefano and Trinculo. Stefano has wine, and gives Caliban some. Caliban instantly switches allegiance, groveling before Stefano as if before a god. He offers to show Stefano and Trinculo the secrets of the island, and it’s easy to imagine the orphaned, innocent boy Caliban, making the same offer to Prospero, trying to buy affection.

He suggests that Stefano murder Prospero and become king of the island in his stead.

A villain? Not yet. A dishonorable, pathetic yet sympathetic victim who is making some bad choices, or indulging in a fantasy, but not a villain yet. Not yet.

Then without a moment’s hesitation Caliban also sells Miranda to Stefano as part of the deal, and my villain meter goes “ping!”

Being whiny, deceitful and passive is not villainous. Attempted rape is villainous but perhaps understandable in the circumstances, especially if he had some softer feelings for Miranda. Selling himself into servitude to another, and plotting murder, okay, yes, bad, very bad. But to make Miranda a fellow victim, so off-handedly? Now we see Caliban’s complete selfishness.

This throw-away line probably did not carry much weight in the seventeenth century. Girls were sold or bartered into marriages all the time. It was an arranged marriage that brought the King of Naples and Prospero’s other enemies into his power. The King’s daughter had just been married off to someone thousands of leagues from her home. That’s just the way things went. The shame would be if Caliban’s plot had worked and Miranda, who has a shot at marrying the prince of Naples, ended up stuck with the drunken steward Stefano.

It’s callousness that marks Caliban, not as a victim to be pitied, but a villain to be watched. He may hate Prospero, with good reason, but Miranda was never his enemy. If he had schemed to keep her for himself, that would have been creepy but poignant. Shakespeare calculates this to a nicety. If Caliban had plotted to abduct Miranda, whether out of lust, true affection or even to hurt Prospero, that would elevate him to the status of Real Villain, and would have tilted the dramatic tension in a way the bard didn’t want it to tilt. Caliban is part of the comic-relief subplot. When he sells out Miranda, we see him for what he is, self-centered and venial, a mini-villain.

It’s one line in the play, but I admire Shakespeare for keeping an eye on that simple detail, that one reminder of the core of this character, his selfishness. And I admire Shakespeare also for seeing, and showing the audience, Prospero’s role in helping Caliban become what he is. These are the details that make great villains, villains that hold our attention and create suspense, and make us wonder, long after the play is done, what we would have done if it had been us.

“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.”
The Tempest

The set was the first clue that the Sonoma Repertory Theater’s presentation of The Tempest was going to be different. A metal frame, swathed in heavy cotton cloth with fragments of text from the play stenciled onto it, greeted my eyes as I walked to my second-row seat. The frame, sitting close to the front of the stage, formed a portal. Behind it, two triangles of cloth, stretched taut, looked like sails, or wings. The backdrop was stenciled with alchemical symbols; a caduceus, an angel’s head, and characters that could have been Greek or Hebrew.

I knew to expect puppets. I just didn’t know exactly what that meant. Hand puppets? Marionettes? Shadow puppets? Several years ago, at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, I saw shadow puppets used beautifully in Life is a Dream. Looking at the stage for The Tempest, I could not imagine shadow puppets.

In fact, there is some shadow-puppet imagery in the show. The character puppets, though, are super-hand-puppets. This is nothing like Avenue Q. I don’t know exactly how to describe it. All the actors wore black and black masks. They were not invisible but we clearly were invited to ignore them. They held the puppets, which are about 3/4 life size, in front of them with one hand. The other hand was the character’s/puppet’s hand, if that makes sense.

The puppets themselves are detailed masks with rich costumes hanging from them. The heads swivel and tilt but the eyes and lips do not move. Emotion is portrayed by their posture—they grovel, they cower, crouch, dance, and stand upright. And of course, the actors’ voices convey most of the emotion. Five actors voiced all the parts.

Prospero is the only character who in not in “puppet mode” the entire time. This is a nice touch. It not only renders literal what Prospero is doing to the people he has drawn to his enchanted island, it allows him, when he puts aside the “mask” of Prospero, father of Miranda, former Duke of Milan, to be larger than life. And Prospero, whether you like him or hate him, is definitely larger than life.

This worked well. Most of the concepts employed worked. The shadow-puppet shipwreck at the beginning was convincing. One glaring exception is the “pageant” Prospero displays for Miranda and Ferdinand. This element plays as a light-shadow show on the backdrop, and looks like a made-for-TV-movie acid trip circa 1975.

The puppets are exquisite. Ariel is the strangest of the puppets (there were clearly more than one, at least three if we count the “witch” figure with which Prospero terrorizes his enemies). Miranda’s face is lovely and has an unfinished look befitting a character as naïve and sheltered as she is. My favorites, strictly in terms of looks, were Gonzalo and Trinculo, who is designed as a classic jester.

The least troublesome part of the play, the subplot in which a drunken Caliban enlists the aid of two shipwreck survivors, is as hilarious as it should be.

The Tempest is a problem for me. I know we’re not supposed to bring a twenty-first century sensibility to a seventeenth-century play, but I can’t stop myself. Prospero is not only cold, controlling and vengeful, he is unfair. I can’t get past the unfairness. That said, this production seems to focus on Prospero more as the magician, or perhaps the artist, making him, as I said, larger than life, manipulating the lives around him like so many puppets. Caliban and Ariel can be the root and wing of the artistic impulse, and at the end, Prospero does reluctantly acknowledge Caliban, that bit of “misbegotten darkness,” as his own.

I have to admit, given the custom in Shakespeare’s time of mounting the heads of criminals and enemies on pikes and displaying them, I found the final scene a bit macabre. Is that intentional?

The collaboration with The Independent Eye is playing through October 18. Tickets are $23 for adults and $18 for students and seniors. If you are looking for a theater experience that isn’t ordinary, this would be it. This production will work for older children, twelve and above, but be sure they’ve read a synopsis or already know the story, so they don’t have to struggle to decipher it, and can fully enjoy the spectacle.

Pore (v) to scrutinize, meditate on, or ponder

Pour (v) to direct the flow, usually of a liquid, as from a container or over or into something.

“Senators pour over Max Bacchus health care bill.” MSNBC ticker, 9/18/09.

It’s that time again. Soon we’ll hear the screams of football fans—oh, we’re hearing that already—the susurrus of gentle autumn rains, the rustle of fallen leaves, and the frantic clicking of hundreds of thousands of keyboards, as the NaNoWriMo community leaps into action, steadfast in our purpose.

What action? 1667 words of fictional prose per day, each day, through the month of November. What purpose? National Novel Writing Month.

The personal goal of each NaNoWriMo participant is to write a draft of a 50,000 word novel in a month.

The WriMo website has an application that lets you upload your masterpiece throughout the month, and counts the words. Don’t worry, the process is secure and no one can steal your work of staggering genius to pass off as their own. Each time you log on, the webpage shows you a bar with a graphical representation of how far you’ve come, as well as a numeric count of your words. If external stimuli help you, then this is a great tool.

If you are a gregarious writer—not quite the oxymoron it seems—many regions host Write-Ins during the month. If you are a gregarious writer who lives in an isolated area, you can read the blogs and posts, or listen to WriMo Radio. The project artfully combines community and competition. As an added bonus, established writers who support WriMo send encouraging and useful e-mails throughout the month.

If you complete 50,000 words, you get a certificate you can print out, and the word “winner” goes by your user ID on the website.

You might get a workable novel out of the deal, too.

Until he resigned from a White House job, I didn’t really know who Van Jones was. I think I had him confused with a 60s actor named Van Johnson (Yeah, I know. I’m old, okay?) I certainly didn’t know he’d written a book about eco-capitalism.

Jones quit his job for the reason most White House people do–he said something stupid on tape. The tape became a big deal because Glenn Beck went after him. Glenn Beck went after him because a group Jones used to be involved with, Color of Change, went after Beck for calling the President a racist, and yada-yada-yada.

So thanks, Mr. Beck! Without your help I would probably never have known about Green-Collar Economy! I’ve ordered a copy already.

Two weeks ago I got a Newsmax e-mail. Why do I get mail from Newsmax, a right-wing aggregator site with mostly-custom-made stories? It’s a short and stupid story: I filled out an online survey. Anyway, Newsmax had an urgent message from one of their “special sponsors,” a group called League of American Voters. They were carrying on because the League of Women Voters had sent them a cease and desist letter saying LAV had chosen their name to mislead the public. (League of American Voters, a new organization housed in a lobbying office in Washington DC, exists to try to stop health care reform.) They had a big button on their e-mail that said Donate. I took them at their word. I donated to the League of Women Voters. Never would have thought about doing that without the nudge!

This has got me thinking. Instead of just getting irritated when the right-wing pundits spout some irresponsible, inflammatory nonsense, I’ll just make a small donation to the advocacy group of my choice. It will have to be a small donation; otherwise these guys would bankrupt me in a month.

Imagine. Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks, Dick Armey’s lobbying group, deliberately misstated the number of people who attended Saturday’s 9/12 march in Washington. How about a nice donation to ActBlue to honor Mr. Kibbe?

The right tries to smear the National Day of Service? Then I think my local Volunteer Center needs a donation, courtesy of their cynicism.

Sarah Palin drops some ghostwritten lunacy on her Facebook page? Let’s see. . . National Organization for Women, or ProChoice America? That’s a tough decision.

If you are going to join me in doing this, practice safe donating. Be sure to find out if the deduction is tax deductible (if the agency is a 501 (c)3, yes; a 501 (c)4, no). Then, you may want to send the source of your inspiration a nice thank-you e-mail. I sent one to Glenn Beck, and one to the League of American Voters.

And if you’re like me you’ll have to set the bar pretty high or you’ll soon be out of money.

But imagine how much money these good organizations could get if we each donated $10 every time some wing-nut misrepresented the facts, or worse, just blatted out some wild statement with what a friend of mine calls “a reckless disregard for the truth.”

Beck, Kibbe, Palin and others are powerful resources, like gushing oil wells. It’s energy! Let’s use that energy! Let’s let them become the liberal fund-raisers they were meant to be!

Sonoma County held its annual Day of Caring on September 9. Ours is always the second Wednesday in September. It provided a nice lead-in to the national Day of Service held the following Friday, September 11.

This year the county combined its yearly service day with the kick-off for the Combined Fund Drive, making it, I suppose, the Day of Caring and Sharing. About eleven hundred employees from the county, the city, and various other employers like Redwood Credit Union, were given the day off with pay to help out the community. Some pruned blackberries at local and regional parks. Some people painted shelters or the homes of disabled or elderly people who couldn’t do it themselves. In some of those homes, they did yard work or made dump runs. A group also worked to clean up the historical Sonoma County Cemetery on Chanate Road.

This is a great event. I didn’t participate this year, but I have other years. In fact, one year that I worked the date really was September 11. I remember the sense of healing I had, coming together as a community, what a fine antidote to the fear and isolation of that other September 11 the day provided.

In previous years, the kick-off was held at Findley Center. When people returned in the afternoon, there were lots of goodies and swag; notepads, pens, tote bags, sunscreen, water bottles, gift coupons and so on. The economy is bad this year, so the county scaled back. The kick-off was held at the corner of the county complex. Workers got a water bottle and a T shirt at the end of the day. There were hot dogs and chips provided. The atmosphere was still festive with music from a local radio station, and a raffle.

People don’t do Day of Caring because they might get cool stuff. They do it because, well, they care, and the Day provides tangible ways to show that. I am proud of my county. I’m proud of the county departments who organize the event and the tasks, I’m proud of the employers who participate and let staff attend, I’m proud of the workers who stay behind and pick up the slack, and I’ve very proud of those folks who pull on work gloves and pick up the pruning shears and cut back blackberries in a shut-in’s yard (or a local park), often in ninety-degree weather. Every year this day reminds me of what we can accomplish when we work as a community.

I first heard the expression “a willing suspension of disbelief” at a science fiction convention. I was in my twenties. I didn’t get it. The words rolled around in my head but I couldn’t parse them. It took me awhile to figure it out, which says something sad about me, because I read and write fantasy and science fiction, and that’s all about suspending disbelief.

Disbelief, or skepticism, is a healthy survival skill. It’s that little voice that makes you go “Nyah-uh,” when the guy at the flea market says, “Yes, they are Jimmy Choos! And for you, only forty dollars.”

When we pick up a novel or sit down to watch a movie, we turn the skepticism switch in our heads to Off. That’s the “willing suspension” part. You’re not being tricked or fooled. You’re a partner in the make-believe, and you prepare for that.

Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes, you turn off the switch, and something happens that trip the switch to On.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve had two encounters with disbelief arising while I was reading/watching something. My reactions were completely different in each case. I’m trying to figure out why.

The first struggle with the willing suspension came while I was watching District 9. I’m not spoiling anything when I say the movie’s about aliens. Fairly early on, some information about the aliens and their technology came to light. Suddenly I wasn’t following this smarmy bureaucrat around a strange and frightening alien slum, I was sitting in theater thinking, “Nyah-huh!” Then I said to myself, mentally, “Let it go. It doesn’t matter.”

And that’s what I did. I was right. That glitch in the fictional reality didn’t matter when I watched the whole story. That’s the conscious, willing suspension of disbelief. The reaction I had is great for a discussion after the movie, but it didn’t ruin the movie for me.

So why, then, when I read Mainspring, Jay Lake’s steampunk-fantasy hybrid, couldn’t I will myself to do the same thing with his clockwork universe?

In Mainspring and its sequel Escapement, Lake has taken an old Victorian poetical metaphor, “God the Watchmaker,” and made it literal. Earth and the other planets rotate around the sun on brass orbital tracks, powered, like pocket watches, by springs. In Mainspring, an angel appears to our sixteen-year-old hero, Hethor, to tell him the mainspring needs tightening and he’s the only one who can do it.

It’s the early 1900s in Hethor’s universe, where North America never fought a war of independence and two great empires, the Victorian English and the Chinese, vie for dominion of the northern hemisphere. At the equator, a wall runs up into the sky, topped by the immense brass teeth of the planet’s gear ring. This is where the earth connects with its orbital track. At certain times of the year, from certain places on the planet, you can see the orbital track in the sky.

This is probably ingenious and clever. My problem is that I can’t picture it. And when I think I am picturing it, I start asking myself all kinds of picky, stupid questions, like, how do they know the celestial orbital track is brass? Brass is an alloy; why did God have to invent an alloy? Why didn’t God just invent some celestial metal? And how does the thing actually work, anyway? The mainspring is at the south pole—how does the energy pushed by the spring get to the gear-ring?

Then I started thinking: They’ve had clockwork since the early Roman times, with no explanation of how they developed the metals or the tools. Did they have an industrial revolution? What did it look like? When was it? What did the Enlightenment look like? What did other cultures, such as the ancient Greeks or the Egyptians, make of the orbital tracks?

The part of my mind that was nagging me with these kinds of questions was taking energy away from reading the words on the page, something a novelist never wants to happen.

And by the way, none of that matters. This is a quest. Hethor has to go somewhere he’s never been, find something he’s never seen, and use it when he doesn’t know how to. Like most good quests, the thing he needs to find is closer than he expects, and the use is simpler, though more emotionally difficult, than he expects.

That’s a decent quest. Saving the world is always a good thing too. Why, then, was I never able to convince myself to just let the details go, and enjoy the story?

This is an important question. Some fantasy/horror/thriller stories grab us and hang onto us until the end. We say later, “I knew that part didn’t work, but I didn’t care. I was so caught up.” This never happened in Mainspring.

One reason might be Lake’s prose. Generally speaking, it’s good, but the false notes jarred me out of the story. “Brass” is a false note. He probably doesn’t mean the orbital track is made of brass. He wants the reader to think of a brass track when she visualizes it. He wants to evoke brass. Is there another way to do this? Yes—something like, “the orbital track gleamed like polished brass in the bright blue sky.”

Another problem could be characterization. Hethor does not become a character, for me, until about page 200 of a 324 page book. Up until then the story has been travelogue about this strange world. And maybe that’s the other problem. People have been able to see the track in the sky since before recorded history in Hethor’s world, yet religion and science developed pretty much as it did here. There is a Christ (the “Brass Christ”), a Protestant-based Christianity, and a Christian bible, although some of the words are different. The Lord’s Prayer is slightly different. The Chinese empire has developed pretty much as our Chinese empire did. This different universe, clearly visible overhead, did not create any different human response, not in philosophy, art, religion or mythology. The two warring Christian parties are Spiritualists and Rational Humanists, not even as disparate as Catholicism and Protestantism.

Believe it or not, this is not meant as a critique of Mainspring. These are writer questions. How much detail of a fantasy world is enough to make it believable without making it boring? What makes a reader do what I did while watching District 9, to say, “I’m invested for the duration and I can accept a glitch or two,” instead of throwing the book across the room, or just putting it down and moving on to something else?

Where is that threshold? How do you keep your reader feeling like a partner, and not like the rube at the carnival?

I still don’t know the answer.