The little pink house with the limestone wraparound porch has a wreath of fake flowers that’s been lolling around by the front door for months. There’s also a wooden cutout of a Canada goose with the words, “Welcome to our Home” scrawled on its belly, and a metal star made in China leaning against the…
The Half-Life of a Revolt
The uprising that inspired Hyperadamantine, though only a passing note in many Western histories of Russia, has had a remarkably long half-life for a so-called “failure.” The uprising led to something of a lost generation among Russian nobility: Some of the boldest and most liberal-minded aristocrats were exiled. They weren’t silenced, though: When the wave of…
A Novel History
“You’re a historian. Why write a novel?” a dear friend and early reader of Hyperadamantine wanted to know. Why indeed? Like many academics, in the course of looking for something else, I stumbled across the name Nikolai Bestuzhev a lot, as I researched culture and society in 19th– and 20th-century Buryatia for a dissertation. Just…
The Painful Victory
Several years ago, before the birth of my first son, I had a dream. I was working on my dissertation. I had just watched the Manchurian Candidate, a great source of nightmares. In the dream, I fought off a fearsome dragon in front of a committee, which was apparently there to evaluate my performance. They…
Americana
The chickens stare in clueless apathy at the SUV they’ve stopped. They strut back off to the ditch that runs beside the main road through our town, a place time forgot. Almost literally: It has the same population now as in the 1890s. Its grid of “streets” has shrunk and faded: C Street and B…
A Portrait of the Artist as a Commercial Product
The Artist had run aground. His creativity was sandbarred. He stared glumly at his tablet. He drank a machiato. Then a mojito. Nothing helped. Not even the serious consideration of a return to smoking. Flash forward a week. He has abandoned the creativity-prison of his home office! He has flown around the world, emptying his…
May we come to understand
Experience is a great teacher of “feels,” of the difficult-to-describe, nebulous emotional states that often define our day-to-day existence. The feel, when you are an obvious, unwanted outsider. The feel of the police as menace, not potential ally. These were feels I only encountered outside of my homeland. They are, however, constant companions of far,…
Forgiveness
I am struggling at the moment with a project that’s been affectionately dubbed “Dragonlande” around here, a fantasy series that involves many themes. One of them is forgiveness. (So many novels focus on martial themes, and the glories of hierarchy and war. I’m trying to do something a bit closer to my heart. But that’s…
The Khan and You
I really don’t need much encouragement to rant and rave and gush about Mongolian history. Of course, everyone’s favorite period is The Conquest, the many decades that dominate the popular world imagination. People write historical quasi-fantasies about them, reenact them, and compose disco anthems to them. Sigh. The funny thing: If you’re not talking payback…
Nature’s Despised Vacuum, or why we need to forget about marketing
Death to the marketing mind. I encounter it, every day (well, I do work in marketing): artists who have been devoured by marketing. Their work languishes, they feel hopeless and resentful. Or they are so caught up in a flustered maelstrom of plotting and networking and platforms and messaging and so on, they have forgotten…
A Simple Point: People need money to purchase music
Hey, why aren’t people buying music anymore? The question begs another question. One few observers of the music industry/scene seem to stumble on: Why don’t people have money to spend on music? Two words: Income inequality. How can an unpaid intern, a struggling grad student, an unemployed recent college grad be expected to spend money…
t.newyear, novelist 