The first sighting in the wild

Thanks to William Ryan Collins, a copy was sighted at Mr.K's in Oak Ridge, TN:

Ch1: Passageways

All right, three points first:

1. The date, June 1882, belies many intentional anachronisms to come, though it has a significance which will become apparent later.
2. The name Ragnar Maria Eisenwod with its odd, archaic surname suggests the poet Rilke (seven years old in 1882) and Ragnarök.
3. The motif of lying on one's right side will be explained later.

The most interesting thing, at the beginning, are the passageways---covered corridors that can stretch for miles, perhaps many miles, allowing indoor travel, from building to building, across continents. Inside, the passageways are like any furnished room.  

I think they are pure invention (unlike most of the strange things encountered in the book), but this blog has made me wonder whether I could have been influenced by any antecedents.  First, there are the historical ones:  The Maginot Line:

and two others due to Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China (3rd C. B.C.):  The Great Wall:

and the network of secret passages and tunnels said to interconnect his many palaces in Xianyang:

These first two aren't really like the passages in Remittance Man, but the third, the Qin emperor's, come closest---whatever they were really like.

Then there are the personal ones, though real passages in the world today are rarely longer than what is needed to cross a street.  The Winnipeg Walkway, 2 km of passages that interconnect downtown buildings are famous, but I've never been there.  On the other hand, I grew up looking at the BFGoodrich headquarters on Main Street in Akron, Ohio:

The yellow oval is the approximate position of my father's office.  Then there is one I used to use every day, the one connecting Cardiff University's department of Physics and Astronomy (left) with its library and Trevithick Refectory (right):

The yellow arrow points to my office, room 13 in the basement.  I don't think any of these are really the origin of my fictional passageways (in which more novels should be set).  Before you go off to imagine backpacking across Eurasia indoors, here is one last aside.  Turn to the left in the last picture and you will see a stairway that appeared for a few seconds in an episode of Doctor Who:

Dedication: Time and Space Coördinates

I claim an auspicious date for making the dedication, the birthday of Confucius.

Also, it's a special date for me: the day I arrived in Cardiff, and three years later, when I, unfortunately, left.

As for the spatial coördinate, if you are in Chicago, you might try giving it to a cab driver, but the fare for 1250 miles will be a steep one. Chicago is laid out on a wonderfully regular Cartesian grid of furlong-sized blocks, with its origin at the intersection of State and Madison. This, mercifully, gives every point on the globe a Chicago coördinate. I listed my current location in these terms because the place where I am is completely unimportant, 10,000 blocks from home. Do come and visit, though.

The vector: 10,000 furlongs South by Southwest, as well as Confucius, his birthday, and the original grove of Academe will all appear much later in the story.

It remains to ask, where does 孔子 intersect with Chicago? Princeton and 22nd Place, six blocks north of my old apartment:

Dedication: The Platonic Academy

One of the themes begins with the dedication wishing Plato a happy 2400th anniversary. Anniversary of what? The founding of his Academy at Athens in 387 BC, the root, or, at least, the eldest root, of the modern, international, academic tradition. It will become apparent that the book is, among other things, a love letter to that spirit. So, in the fall of 2013, I thought back to that very first semester and realized that this was the best offering I could make. As far as I know, no one else celebrated, except for this one commemoration, a 2 euro coin:

The site is now a public park:

Take a moment to reflect, this is where it all began, in a grove sacred to Athena, dedicated to Ἀκάδημος, the savior of the city:

Pull up a rock. Make yourself comfortable. Tell me what you're thinking.

The paperback is available

The paperback is available at Amazon (and soon, through all other channels, including local bookstores), as is the Kindle edition. You can read the first chapter of the Kindle edition by clicking on the "Look Inside" icon. Here's a picture of the Kindle cover:

In the next post, the commentary will begin!

A commentary track and the paperback cover

I have puzzled over what this blog should be about. Remittance Man isn't Ulysses---its symbolism, self-allusion, and literary apparatus are fairly straightforward---but it does contain lots of little things---objects, references, and hidden messages---that could be fleshed out and commented upon. That is what most of the blog will be, at least for now---a sort of commentary track pointing out the many interesting things encountered by the hero of our poem. First though, a production note: the proof of the cover came out looking just like I thought it would:

It's a shame I lost the summit of the mountain, but it had to be this way. The paperback should be in some of the usual places online already, and available to stores and distributors in about a week.

The book has been written, edited, typeset, transformed into .epubs and .mobis, put up for sale on amazon: Remittance Man, and the first copy has been sold. Now you can buy your copy and dream, dream, dream.