Look for my books, sharply discounted. A few are even offered for free.
Tag: Subways
The doors on this train are about to close
The clock’s winding down on my offer of a free ride on my novel, Subway Visions. Who knows when, if ever, you’ll have another opportunity on such a deal.
The surrealistic story presents an adventurous ride in its flashes through underground culture. Some of it even erupts into verbal graffiti.
It’s one of five novels I’m making to you for free during Smashword’s annual end-of-the-year sale, which ends just a few hours from now on January First. Remember, the ebook comes in the digital platform of your choice.
Step aboard promptly, then, before the door closes. There are good reasons I see these mass transit rails as an urban amusement park. Check out the ebook and you’ll discover why.
For details, go to the book at Smashwords.com.
Accept my free token for an eye-opening ride
Some things are timeless, and subway trains and their tunnels and elevated lines are that for me. They do get my imagination rolling.
That’s how I came to write Subway Visions, my surrealistic novel of adventurous rides through underground culture. Some of it even erupts into verbal graffiti.
The ebook is one of five novels I’m making available for FREE during Smashword’s annual end-of-the-year sale. You can obtain yours in the digital platform of your choice.
Think of this as my Christmas present to you. Now, get rolling and enjoy the trip!
For details, go to the book at Smashwords.com.
Taking the subway to now
Damn Cassia! She even tore apart my first published novel, Subway Hitchhikers.
A lot had happened in the nearly three decades since the book was first published – and even more since it was first conceived in 1973. Gee, that’s more than a half a century.
As I came back to the story after the release of What’s Left, my first task was to bring the tale more in line with the rest of the series, starting with the name of the lead character. Kenzie was an advance over the hippie-era Duma Luma, which rather echoed Wavy Gravy of Woodstock renown. His earlier legacy of being a lama reincarnated in Iowa was also downplayed if not entirely erased. Besides, there had been reports of such things actually happening since my book was first published. I have no idea how they turned out, either.
Another big job involved changing the original structure of short present-tense chapters flashing against past-tense ones, like subway trains passing in opposite directions. It was a creative touch but quickly confused the reader. A more conventional chronological-order storyline took its place.
That was accompanied by a new plot based on Kenzie’s monthly trips down to Manhattan to study with his Tibetan Buddhist guru in a tenement on the Lower East Side. That development added a handful of other devotees to the characters and realigned any who had previously existed.
Some of the Tibetan details now reflected tales I had heard from a more recent friend who was studying to become a Buddhist nun. Never mind that her experiences came decades after his or that there might not have been a Rinpoche residing anywhere near the Big Apple. Rival yogis, however, were plentiful.
Tibetans by the early 21st century? Our favorite dining option in Manchester, New Hampshire, was a Nepali restaurant that featured momos, a steamed dumpling staple in Tibet, too. The owners and staff were quite honored when an authentic Buddhist Rinpoche dropped in and approved of their dishes.
My, I have lived in a changing world. When’s the last time you even saw a subway token, by the way?
The freewheeling hippie-era fantasies of my book were soon followed by some creepy downsides. Hitchhiking out on the open road had turned sinister. Subway surfers, seeking the thrill of riding atop the cars in the tunnels and on the elevated lines above the street, were being decapitated and worse or worse by immovable objects in their trajectory. And the onset of homelessness during the Reagan years created whole villages surviving underground, as Jennifer Toth reported in her book The Mole People: Life in the tunnels under New York City, which was published just four years after my novel.
In addition, Long Island Newsday had assigned a columnist, Jim Dwyer, to its new subways beat, leading to a nonfiction book, Subway Lives: 24 Hours in the Life of the New York Subways, which came out only a year after mine. Now that’s some tough competition. No wonder I didn’t hear from him after sending him a comp copy for review when my book came off the press.
By that time, though, I was living an hour-plus north of Boston and entering a time of my life when I’d be riding its MBTA trains about once a week – perhaps a thousand fares one way and back with girlfriends and later family on my visits. Familiarity with underground mass transit hasn’t lessened my fascination.
Still, since Subway Hitchhikers had been about hippies, I had to admit they had largely fallen into disrepute or self-denial. But that’s not how the book stands now, something that’s reflected in its current title, Subway Visions; Along the tubes to nirvana.
As for today? Here I was, with my fascination with subway systems, asking my favorite lifeguard about her experiences in Boston during her freshman year of college. She must have been taking the cute little cars of the Green Line, right?
Instead, she emphatically told me how disgusting they are, miserable on hot days and packed at peak hours – and, especially, the fellow passenger, an utter stranger, who puked on her feet in sandals.
I didn’t dare show her my book after that.
Back to the underground inspiration
As you’ve probably noticed in other posts here this year, I’ve been trying to recall some of the authors and books having an influence on the earliest drafts and later revisions of my novels. As I’m writing this, most of my personal library is still in storage – or other volumes, purged long ago to make room on my shelves for more – and my journals under wraps during the house renovations. I’m having to rely on memory, faulty though it may be.
Look, I don’t want these posts to be about some poor neglected novelist blah-blah-blah, but rather as one account of surviving in a writer’s life, maybe as a bit of advice or even encouragement for the next generation or two.
That said, I can state that my subway project sprang from Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America as its model. Think short, playful, imaginative with an image slash idea as its central character, like a children’s story for Woodstock reaching young adulthood. William R. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch also cast a spell as a free-floating state of mind.
For me, hitchhiking in subway tunnels was a fantasy symbolizing the hippie experience as I encountered it during my time living in upstate New York. You know, underground with urban roots yet flourishing out in the countryside where you could stick out your thumb and go about anywhere. Yes, though I didn’t fully comprehend it then, that Woodstock crowd was mostly from New York City and its suburbs.
The symbol even implied a degree of freeloading rather than responsibility.
While awaiting publication, the manuscript kept growing from its 1973 first draft, typed while sitting cross-legged at my beloved Olivetti 32 typewriter, through a revision shortly after that and probably another in 1976 before I packed up for the Pacific Northwest, where yet more would be added to the text with quite a backstory in addition to a superstructure out in the foothills somewhere north of Gotham.
This was well beyond the initial Brautigan flash. What I had was, in fact, unwieldy, and nodding toward Brautigan’s other fiction and a lot more. Unlike me, he kept most of his volumes short.
And then, somewhere before reaching my sabbatical in the Baltimore suburb of Owings Mills in 1986, the manuscript was greatly slimmed down, leaving many pages of outtakes I couldn’t trash outright. There was enough to create more novels, or so my inner trash picker insisted.
We’ll look at those as they took shape during my furious year of keyboarding on my new personal computer, however primitive the machine and process appear now.
In that sabbatical, I must say I was highly disciplined, keyboarding for four hours or so before taking a break, eating, even napping, and then returning to the work until two or so in the early morning. I had lived my adult life up to this point awaiting this moment, if it was far from what I had envisioned. Suburbs? Without a wife or soulmate? Heartbroken, in fact?
What drives an artist, anyway?
Beyond the yellow BMW 1600 oil-burning coup I was bopping around in – the one that was older than any of the women I was seeing.
A great deal of material and energy was there to be released, and I sensed this was my make-it-or-lose-it moment. As you’ll see.
Baltimore even had its own subway line under construction, reaching all the way out to where I was encamped.
Not that I would be there when it opened.
~*~
My first hick outpost, the one upstate, wasn’t as small as it seemed. Yes, it was a backwater, but the core was more populous than six of the places I would subsequently live in, if you didn’t count the university students in what I would dub Daffodil.
What my first actual job in journalism did have, though, was proximity to New York City, a mere 3½- to four-hour drive away. Despite the distance, the connection was vital, even vibrant. All of my new friends were from the Big Apple, and many of them were Jewish, as my college girlfriend was, even though she had by now oozed away from my presence, off on what I saw as troubling new places. At least none of them were Jonestown.
Starting with a summer internship before my senior year of college and picking up again after my graduation, a time of great emotional upheaval, exploration, and redirection. As I said, this was in the high hippie outbreak.
I presented the image that flashed before me, the gandy dancer who could have been a hitchhiker, but I should also acknowledge a freaky cartoon a housemate had created and handed me, with a face at a sewer grate mumbling “Duma luma, duma luma.” Those were the two prompts for the manuscript, seriously.
~*~
The inspiration also came from my first jaunts into New York City while living upstate, and later to the west in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania. Most of my buds and girlfriends had been from the City, as they called it. My early experiences turned into fascination during a period of great personal upheaval and growth for me.
Hippies seemed to be trying to go in two directions at once: back to the big city while hitchhiking out in the sticks. The original version was, in fact, published as Subway Hitchhikers in 1990 – the worst bookselling season in the memory of many publishers, thanks to the first Iraq war.
As I’ve ready described, in the 17 years between the first draft and the story’s first publication, the manuscript underwent a considerable metamorphosis as I moved across the continent in my day job. While living in the desert of Washington state, I even picked up a 1915 engineering book on the building of the New York subway system while browsing in a very small, small-town bookstore. (How did it ever land there?) Much of my expanding text was backstory on the central character, while the urban transit episodes shifted into something akin to an appendix. The result was an unwieldy epic. But I kept the outtakes, which took on their own life later.
Big city, big dreams
Who was I to think I could say something fresh about underground public transit? Well, the outsider has long had a place in the arts … and in comedy.
I had expected to wind up living in a big city, where I’d have access to frequent symphony concerts and perhaps opera as well. Foreign films, well-stocked bookstores, kindred souls. All the rest. My life journey and my career went another way, but I still wound up as a subway rider, of sorts. I was far from a private jet or even taxi kind of existence.
My introduction to underground transit probably came in a series of big, cartoonish, wildly rendered Subway Riders canvases that received a special exhibit at the Dayton Art Institute sometime in my high school years. I think they were by a hot New York rising star who was visiting Ohio as an artist-in-residence or an arts school guest instructor, though his identity eludes me now. Flash in the pan? Rubes in the sticks?
I wasn’t exactly wowed, but I was intrigued. He wasn’t Rembrandt.
The furthest east I’d been was Pittsburgh. Perhaps the next year my family got to Toronto and Montreal, though I didn’t venture on the subway in either of those cities.
Do families even take such vacations on the road nowadays? We did have our camping gear in the trunk of our red Buick Roadmaster.
~*~
Writing about subways – becoming fascinated by them, their offensive grit, stench, and loud noises included – was about the last thing I would have expected when I graduated from college or even high school. I was a Midwesterner through and through. The closest I had come to what I saw in those Subway Rider paintings was on the City Transit trolleys at rush hour. We definitely weren’t flashing along a dark tunnel or loading by hoards or packed together like sardines.
But people kept telling me I wasn’t destined for my hometown, no matter how loyal I felt. Or was that defensive? The message they conveyed was that I should look to Manhattan or some equivalent opportunity. Even Cincinnati, an hour away, looked sophisticated.
The hippie outbreak, or Revolution of Peace & Love, was still somewhere in the future, though the Beatles were shaking the status quo and skipping around Elvis in what we’d now call the pop culture scene. Culture was, let me emphasize, concerned with things that would raise our vision and intelligence rather than merely mark social norms as in averages, either mainstream or ethnic.
By the time I actually rode a subway train, I was nine months away from earning an urban studies certificate, thanks to my multi-disciplinary college studies. The journalism career that embraced me would instead lead out in the boonies or an equivalent emotional wilderness.
~*~
My book that sprang from those encounters started out short and flashy as its first draft in ’73. Inspired, in part, by Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, I typed away sitting cross-legged before a converted coffee table and my beloved Olivetti Lettra 22 blue typewriter. The very portable one.
Graffiti, wild splashes. This was going to be my wild hippie book, the essence of it all. It had the Midwest – what would emerge as Daffodil – and it had the Big Apple, where so many of the freaks I knew after graduation had grown up. The movement was a confusing clash of youthful excess.
It was too much – way too much, actually.
By the time I distilled it down into what was published as Subway Hitchhikers, it was more of a lacy collage presented in a strobe-light kind of then/now alternation that I came to see was overly ambitious to be effective rather than confusing.
What I did sense was the way big cities draw on the interior landscape, almost like vampires on the innocent. Not that I ever expressed it that openly, but I am now thinking it fit Gotham if only I were usually trying to look at the bright side of life.
Was it even a novel? Short, and perhaps meta-fiction?
Unlike any other.
Whoosh into the urban void
Decades have passed since I’ve been in any part of New York City. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, though, most of my buds were from there or nearby, so I wound up staying in all five boroughs. And I was reintroduced in the mid-80s as well.
I became fascinated with the transit rails and even imagined what I cast as Subway Hitchhikers, their psychedelic underground adventures now available in my novel Subway Visions.
Oh, the history! The city has certainly undergone a wild ride in the years since, some of them admittedly terrifying.
As improbable as my hitchhikers seemed at the time, reality has since produced several parallel developments.
The first was the Mole People, the homeless who created villages in the tunnels starting in the Reagan era.
The second was the Subway Surfers, daredevil youths who would ride the tops of the trains or more recently, hang from the sides.
I thought they had faded from the scene, but a spate of recent fatalities is proving otherwise.
As for the adrenaline rush? Or is it testosterone?
Maybe someone will be able to describe it to the rest of us. I’m not sure I’d want to see the movie version, sedate as I’ve become now.
Why I love tracking the hip groove of the underground
My subways novel started out to be my big hippie tome, building on a metaphor of hitchhiking, which was ubiquitous for us, but the extended concept ultimately got to be too unwieldy for one book. The supportive details were stripped away for what’s become Daffodil Uprising and Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, leaving the metropolis altogether.
Spurred on by Richard Brautigan’s “Trout Fishing in America” with a dash of William Burroughs, the initial drafts played surrealistically in a tension between the wide-open roads of the countryside and the underground realms of the biggest cities.
Then, four or five years after taking up the project, I was pawing through a used books bin in the desert of Washington state and came across a 1915 engineering volume, “Building Subways in New York,” which included “Elevated Railway Steelworks.” I still have it. How on earth had it ever landed out there amid the sagebrush?
I had already lived in Upstate New York four hours from Manhattan, and nearly all of my friends, housemates, and lovers were from The City. That was followed by my residency in a yoga ashram two hours away in the Poconos, so yes, I had learned to ride the trains. (Nowadays, it’s mostly Boston’s a little over an hour south of me.)
The original “Subway Hitchhikers” had a structure that ran like trains passing in opposite directions, which readers could find confusing rather than energizing. It also had a lacy air that reminded me of Robert Rauschenberg’s pop art “combines.” Gone, too, in the revisions is the protagonist’s hippie handle, substituting a more conventional nickname that better links this story to the others.
In the revised version, Subway Visions, there’s more focus on characters, plus new sections on Kenzie’s encounters of Tibetan Buddhism in a tenement near Greenwich Village as well as a graffiti artist known as T-Rex.
What’s evolved has a much straighter narrative and more arresting development, now linked to Kenzie’s ongoing life in the hills to the north. And elements of fantasy and heightened playfulness now augment the earlier surrealism.
I suspect I still have some classic coin tokens in my possession, somewhere.
I’m still fascinated by the potential of stories that come out of subways
Millions of people ride the subways each day, and many of them read English. In fact, you’ll see many of them are deep into books as they’re transported. Yet I’m surprised how little writing reflects this experience. Where else can you see so much humanity sitting right in front of you or dashing past?
Well, my Subway Visions tries to convey my experiences, real and imagined.
Two significant nonfiction books are Jennifer Toth’s 1993 The Mole People, based on her year of reporting on the plight of the homeless people who took to living in the tunnels under Manhattan in the Reagan years, and Jacqueline Cangro’s The Subway Chronicles, a collection of essays by the likes of Jonathan Lethem, Francine Prose, Calvin Trillin, and Lawrence Block. By the way, Block admits a fondness for including subway scenes in his prolific output of novels.
My survey of ebooks at Smashwords has added others to the list, not all of them in New York City. One tells of a year playing music in New York’s stations. Another of collecting umbrellas in Tokyo. There is a fondness for seeing the underground as the gates of hell, with one volume in particular standing out as a masterful fantasy that’s meticulously researched.
To see what I’ve found and my reactions, go to the reviews at my Jnana Hodson at Smashwords page.
Got any related transportation books to recommend? Trains, buses, airplanes? Other?
My big city love-hate relationship
Considering all the places I’ve lived over the years, my fascination with big cities would seem an anomaly.
I mean, I grew up in what’s considered a medium-sized city but at the fringe of the city limits. We actually had a working dairy farm less than a block away from our house. As a teen I could ride my bicycle to the public library downtown or my grandparents beyond, though it was in heavy traffic. But that was before the suburban bloat that now engulfs its blot on the map.
I also lived on three farms, which make appearances in Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, Yoga Bootcamp, and the upcoming Nearly Canaan.
Most of the cities were in the 30,000 to 40,000 population range, with Baltimore being the metropolitan exception and Binghamton, New York, and Manchester, New Hampshire, each around 100,000 in the metropolitan area, coming in much smaller than my hometown.
These days I live an hour north of Boston – or more, depending on traffic.
Yes, I do have a certificate in urban studies as part of my college diploma, and cities are the home to high culture I find essential – symphony orchestras, opera companies, art museums and galleries, live theater, art movie houses.
Yet I rarely venture forth to these, in part because of the expense and in part because I find myself being nurtured by them in other ways. For instance, I habitually listen to live broadcasts of Boston Symphony concerts and Metropolitan Opera performances. And I do sing in a choir in a Boston suburb and have wonderful memories of the city’s skyline after some of our concerts. That part’s magical. But all in all, it’s kind of like listening to the Sox games rather than actually going to Fenway … just part of life around here.
Each week, as I go to rehearsals, I’m always astonished at the lines of cars waiting ten or twenty minutes just to get off an expressway in afternoon rush hour traffic. Just think of the stress and precious time that’s expended daily. I’m so glad I’ve been spared that.
As for the packed subway trains at that hour? It’s a fascinating study in humanity, but for me it borders on claustrophobia plus. Somehow, I’ve survived those, uh, assaults of moving from one station to another. Nowadays I can walk to downtown.
My novel Subway Visions stands as an emblem of my relationship to a big city. Like Kenzie, I once thought I’d be living and working in cosmopolitan circles. I came close once, in Detroit – hardly my ideal, then or now. As for Baltimore, I was largely out on the road during the week and, when that ceased, I hunkered down in a self-awarded sabbatical. So events ultimately led me in other directions.
I do enjoy our trips into Boston and, these days, other New England cities. But candidly, I also relish returning home to our small historic mill town of 30,000, free of so much kinetic energy in the air. How else do you think I find time to write?
Jnana's Red Barn 