To me, this sort of “wainscoting” can be boiled down to it’s utmost purity in the Mary Poppins scene where they’re looking out over the rooftops of London, at all the chimneys and their streams of smoke. Doesn’t get grimier, marginal, or phantasmagorial than that.

You’ve managed, by the way, in Tribes and MU, not only to capture two of my favorite, rare flavors of theme, you’re writing at this amazing level of talent, creativity, and wisdom. Doesn’t cost me a dime, and I’ve paid a lot for authors I *knew* were mediochre.

So thank you.

There’s a whole literary body of work from the ’50s and ’60s, the big beat generation writers from William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, Jack Kerouac, through Hunter Thompson, John Crowley, and Neil Gaiman that deals with existentialism, zen, vision-quests, including but sortof wandering trippingly off from, but not entirely out of, the hardcore world we (collectively, who wish to stay outside the funny-house) recognise, into this surreality, and to me they seem so completely personal. Writers trying their hardest to do the one thing that’s so hard for writers to do-to write for themselves and just for themselves. And in the doing, not only do they set out to build their own realities, but they seem to somehow create their own audiences.

Mentioned ofcourse, because it’s this kind of work that-if anything-taps into “modern” magic, lays the groundwork for myths that can happen right here and now, in your life, without the portals and parlour tricks.

I love this kind of writing, because it’s phantasmagoria laid on concrete, economics, and radio. It’s fantasy with an internal combustion engine. Discordant, even to use words like “magic, fantasy, myth” because we’re not talking unreal wholecloth makebelieve. Things happen. Sometimes just because they do. Ascending, perhaps, out of a deeper reality. There should be a solid term for it, beyond constructs like “modern fantasy” or “urban myth”. It’s fantasy-next-door.

For some reason this makes me think of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Oh how very, very true.