More to come.
I’ve been meaning to keep up with the posting on a more regular basis, if only for myself (it’s good to maintain a regular writing outlet). The problem is that my various interests over the years are too varied and inconsistent. I’m just not capable of being witty on a daily basis (like dooce or gizmodo) or of staying committed to one topic (like racialicious or Cute Overload).
Recently, I’ve been working on something that could be a novel. It’s about four Midwest transplants living in Philadelphia whose lives intersect just prior to a mysterious bomb threat in the subways under Philly’s City Hall. The media, reporting on the “terrorist threat,” reveal that a manifesto left in the subway points to a potential Chinese suspect; a small-scale backlash against the Asian community ensues. Working for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Sarah, a 25 year-old junior staff writer, gets recruited to help investigate the threat. It’s the chance of a lifetime, but Sarah slowly becomes disillusioned with the career she thought she wanted. Meanwhile, Alex, Sarah’s Chinese-American boyfriend, has trouble taking the threat/news story seriously. He concerns himself with regaining Sarah’s waning affections while also lusting after Kim, an old high school acquaintance. However, when he decides to mock the city’s anti-Asian sentiments by creating a blog (Chinesesupremacy.org), he gets into a little trouble. It’s the sort of trouble Kim is looking for; she works for a public radio program and takes it upon herself to expose the racism that the terrorist threat has unearthed. But she is also very intrigued by the manifesto, which by now has surfaced on the internet. Kim takes it upon herself to find the manifesto’s writer. Which brings us to Jeff, the quirky phone line installer/street performer, whose knowledge of the tunnels and subways of Philly enable the four to go snooping underground.
The problem with the novel is that it’s going to take a lot of time, and it’s been kinda all-consuming for the past few months. And now the summer’s over, and so I’m thinking about Beowulf and Jungian archetypes and the Apollonian/Dionysian dynamics in English Literature.
On my way home from the grocery store, I was listening to the radio, and I got to thinking that producing shows for some weekly NPR program would be a lot of fun. Of course, I have no idea if it would really be fun, but I love the varied list of topics that come up. Stuff like this: the philosophy of boredom, yodeling around the world, enthusiasts of raw milk, seeing with sound, and high-priced summer camps. Cool stuff, eh?