Tag: Meet Me at the RASCAL

If You Don’t Want to Read My Books, Just Tell Me

No one is dying to read my books, though a few have died to avoid reading them. I sent Jonathan Spence an advance copy of my first novel, in the hope that he would contribute a cover blurb, but I didn’t hear back from him, and I learned later that he was ill. Soon he died. 

I asked John Barth to blurb my second novel, so he died.

My high school English teacher was someone who I was sure would devour what his star pupil had written, but he put off reading Southern Rain, due to its foreign setting. I assured him of the Americanness of its theme, yet he too breathed his last, before I could bring him around.

Meet Me at the RASCAL I dedicated to my father, but (in a new twist) he went blind around the time it was published. My mother promised to read it to him, at which he passed.

What I’m Working On

My current book project is a little hard to explain, but I’ll try:

  1. I translated a seventeenth-century Chinese text, a detailed account of a tedious political imbroglio, into English.
  2. I extracted an intriguing subplot concerning a despicable family, resulting in a snappy 6000-word text.
  3. I transplanted the setting to contemporary Baltimore. My impulse was threefold:
    • Chinese settings seem to discourage would-be readers, and Baltimore may prove more accessible;
    • Chinese names are especially off-putting to would-be readers, so  rendering Zhang Qi as Tinus Juckman, Gu Xiangtai as Morgan Schwartzenberg, and Chen Luqian as Ruckleshaus Schumacher will hopefully yield more memorable characters;
    • Transplanting Chinese institutions such as eunuchs and public floggings to Baltimore produces a keen jarring effect.
  4. For fuller length and depth (and for the challenge) I am now employing an Oulipo method called larding, which means inserting one new sentence between every two sentences of a given text. The baseline translated/edited/transplanted 6000-word text has, as of this posting, been subjected to almost two full rounds of larding and currently stands at 22,000 words. I plan to lard it a total of three times.

I call it Meet Me at the RASCAL. Here is a choice sentence: “Tinka Klein and an oud player named Ashurbanipal, both naked and dreadlocked to the pubes, leapt back and forth between the modules of Goldie’s Italian leather sofa, trying to avoid collateral damage.”