Tag: helping out a friend

A Great Book You Cannot Read

On By Jennifer Mugrage7 Comments

The book is called Everything Has a Shape. This particular book is book-shaped. It is a proof copy of a draft written by my brother-in-law, Andrew McKeeth. It’s nicely formatted and readable, but still needs an editor. The main remaining issue is malapropisms and homophones.

Everything Has a Shape is similar to Alice in Wonderland, except that it makes a lot more sense. Alice falls into a world of nonsense, whereas the protagonist of this book, Prism, the daughter of a geometer, is invited into a world where everything makes its own kind of sense.

Everything Has a Shape also reminded me of The Phantom Tollbooth. If you were a kid who loved to read, you probably stumbled across The Phantom Tollbooth and loved it. In that book, Milo travels through a world where everything is a physical manifestation of language. For example, you can see a huge crowd of adjectives thundering over a hill.

Everything Has a Shape is sort of the mirror image of The Phantom Tollbooth, because in the world Prism must navigate, the primary mental unit is not words, but shapes. In fact, the denizens of this new place tell Prism that they did not have language at all until humans started coming into their world.

And what is it called, this strange place that Prism visits? It’s called Place.

“We come from Place. Oh, sorry. Of course this probably doesn’t make any sense either. The place where I live is called Place. It really is a terrible name, I know, but it fit so well that nobody had the heart to change it. It used to be all Space before we called it Place. Anyway, we want to ask you about Nothing. You see in Place, where I come from, there is always something. You humans, however, do believe in Nothing. You think that there is such a thing as void and vacuum. In Place everything has a shape. Even Space, which might seem empty, is really just an undefined shape.”

“If there isn’t Nothing in Place,” [asked Prism], “why are you coming to ask about it?”

“Well, as far as we know there has never been Nothing in Place, but we are beginning to think that there might be a little bit of Nothing now. What is Nothing? Can you measure Nothing? I mean, if there is Nothing, how could you know it?”

Everything Has a Shape, p. 15

The book is full of conversations like this, and they only get worse, which is to say, more confusing but ultimately more insightful as well. I will post quotes from this book in a few weeks, because they are so thought-provoking.

Place, once Prism gets there, is understandably hard to describe, but the author does a fair job of it. It is a world folded over on itself, with a parallel ground above it, called Oversky. Think of it as looking like the center of the earth. Place is populated with strange creatures and paradoxical landscapes that look like an M.C. Escher drawing. There is also a population of humans whose ancestors got into Place years ago and have been living there ever since. Prism’s journey will, of course, take her all throughout this world. She often has to use mental tricks in order to be able to navigate Place’s physical reality. These are similar to the mental tricks we might have to use here on earth, such as occupying ourselves to make time go faster, or closing our eyes to navigate an illusion room, but Prism’s experience in Place is more intense.

Prism ultimately has to face The Twister, an entity that is introducing chaos into Place by convincing the creatures to deform their own shapes. The Twister makes a strong argument that nobody has an inherent shape of their own, that having an unchangeable shape is a kind of prison, and that by helping creatures to destroy their shapes, he is setting them free. Creatures who have encountered the Twister leave broken.

Prism’s time in the Twister’s tower is confusing and poignant, especially when she encounters the Likeness, a girl who looks exactly like Prism but claims to be a better version.

“Did you used to have a shape of your own?” Prism asked.

“You mean before I became a Likeness? Yes, I used to believe that lie, but then I realized the truth that there is no shape. It is better this way. I can be whatever I like. You can only be you.”

“As I said before,” Prism said, “if I could be everything, I would stop being anything. It’s true that I am stuck with my shape, but I’m the only one who can be me.”

“You’re wrong. I am you right now.”

“You’re a copy. You are ‘like’ me, true. You can be like anything you want but you can never be yourself.”

“You don’t know what you’re passing up.”

“I would rather be me than be nobody.”

The Likeness grew angry and the real Prism wondered if she really looked that way when she got mad.

ibid, p. 166

As you can see, Everything Has a Shape is an insightful and compelling read. I hope it can be published someday so it can be enjoyed by more people. Furthermore, I would love to see an illustrated version. The scenes in this book would lend themselves to some amazing surrealist art. At the very least, it needs a beautifully done cover.

What do you think? Would you read Everything Has a Shape if it were available?

The Trove, American Falls, Idaho

On By Jennifer Mugrage2 Comments

American Falls, Idaho, is the ultimate American Small Town.

What do I mean by Small Town?: a brief parenthesis

For those who are not American–by which I mean the United States–“small town” doesn’t have quite the same connotations as “village.” A “village” sounds older, like it might have been there for a thousand years, whereas a small town, because it’s in America, is no more than 300 and often only 100 years old. “Village” also sounds more homogenous (is everyone related?), and more rural. A village might have feuds and unspoken rules in it that go back a millennium. A small town, while it is getting a start on these things, is basically a recent, frontier development. Though there are founding families, there’s also a lot more movement. City folk come in, start businesses, or get jobs as teachers. Newcomers arrive from other small towns. Children grow up and leave. Americans are very mobile, and the composition and atmosphere of a small town reflects that. There isn’t as rigid a class system as in most other places. And, though American Falls, for example, is the county seat, there’s also a lot less bureaucracy and fewer government jobs than in a town of comparable size in Asia.

On the other hand, a “small town” is definitely not the same as “hood” (short for neighborhood), which is a village-like section of a large city. Small towns are typically located in farmland.

Anyway. American Falls has the following: a river. A hydroelectric dam. A railroad to take farm produce away to be sold. A lot with silos, trucks, and piles of produce near where this railroad passes through town. Lots of churches. Post office, barber shop, mom & pop shops on Main Street (tree-lined), one of which is of course a bar. A hometown football team. Gracious parks, a golf course, and a nearby cattle lot that you can smell most days. Pizza, Chinese, and Mexican restaurants, because this is America after all. It also has a small hospital, though like most people I prefer to take emergencies to the city hospital 25 minutes down the road. Oh, and a community theater!

You can walk around American Falls during the day without fear. Law and order is maintained. The town is hilly enough that, on these walks, you can catch glimpses of all these small-town features and feel as if you just stepped into a slightly more modern, drastically less New England Norman Rockwell painting. Rising above the town, on the southwest side, is the Big State Highway, and, beyond that, the rolling foothills.

I felt I had to burst into this paean to American Falls in order to set the scene for the main point of this post, which is that a delightfully hippie shop has come to our small town.

An Art Shop comes to our Small Town

This is the interior of The Trove, which opened in American Falls in May.

Here we are looking towards the back of the shop. Notice that it features jewelry, leather goods, and paintings involving UFOs. And that the owners are fond of 78 records.

I first heard about The Trove from a person I met at the town festival this summer. This person, who was buying one of my son’s paintings, suggested that The Trove might be happy to carry our work, since its stated mission is to showcase local artists. Although we don’t live actually in American Falls, we figured we might be local enough to count. We headed straight from the town festival to The Trove, with the trunk of our car still full of paintings. Long story short, the owners of The Trove were amenable to this idea, and that’s why some of the paintings pictured above are by my son Andrew.

The mountain and the storm are my paintings, hung under the owner’s paintings of space and a (manatee?), over some quilts, and beside dish towels.

The Trove was even happy to carry a copy of my trilogy! So, if you ever find yourself in southeast Idaho, and want a touristy, artsy shop with lots of cool stuff, know that American Falls has one.