THIS SUMMER I STAYED INDOORS Friday, August 19, 2011
This summer, for the first time since I was a kid, I have had time to lean and loaf and reflect. I have banged together a pretty good poetry manuscript, and though most of the work is older, I have finished a monumental central text (and, I hope, a good central text) to act as a centerpiece. I've written about a hundred pages of new science fiction, none of it quite ready to be sent. I've traveled to Boston and New York a handful of times. Not great productivity, about average, considering I had four whole months to myself to do with as I please.
I have been playing board games this summer. I'll play them with other humans if I can, but if I can't, I'll lay out the board and the little bits and play them on my own. I go to the game store in the mall every Wednesday and play with a small coterie there, and I do not leave until after midnight, after the walkway lights have all gone out and all the Sbarros and Subways there have shut their anti-theft cages.
Over the last year I have collected thirty board games--some I've sold on a tiny little grey board game market to exchange for new board games. There are game stores everywhere in the Pioneer Valley--the place is truly paradisaical. There are now two game stores in the mall, one in a shopping center off of Route 9 near the Hadley Nissan, one in Northampton which also sells comic books, and a worker-run cooperative game store in downtown Amherst where the volunteers and patrons all dress in black and audibly hiss at you when you walk through the door.
When I'm not playing them, or mustering up the energy to write, I am scouring the internet for information on new board games. The language of these sites is not elevating. It's common to find self-identified ex-marines and/or chemical engineers on Board Game Geek who dot their posts with animated-gif emoticons. I was taken aback at how many people in the community identify boldly as Christian. I guess I can't blame them; the principle theme to these games is control; they are also refreshingly sex-free. Never mind that they are also the purest expression of hedonism the western world has yet produced, outside of Nero's caged wonders.
I was once--that is to say, only a year ago, before I moved into paradise--only vaguely aware that these games existed. Back in the eighties, my friend had an older uncle who lived at home and set up Avalon Hill wargames in his mother's basement. We thought he was cool. I understood, too, that the D and D and GURPS games I played when I was a teenager were a type of gaming, but nothing I would have ever associated with debased, aleatory garbage like Monopoly. As I made my first forays into the science fiction world, I'd run into gamers who shared a language about games I did not understand at all, and tried consciously to avoid.
Yet somehow, over the past decade, the hobby has become a laboratory, a weird little para-cultural phenomenon to which the application of the word experimental is not entirely empty. There are games which display perfect information systems; these are paper software programs whose hardware is the player's fingers. There are games that do not succumb to the luck of card draws and dice rolls, but which actively subsume that luck in an economic model. The language of graphic arts for these games does not obscure through yuppie simplicity, but is instead brightly and inorganically explicit in every way. These games rhyme, then escalate, then recombine to rhyme in new ways. They work at a level of poetry language should not attempt to achieve.
Now, it's almost over. In a couple of weeks I'll take on a full teaching load and I'll coordinate efforts for the University's Visiting Writers Series. I will have to ask significant poets whether or not they need this or that. I will have to deal with the fact that I have asked all of my colleagues over to my house to play these games, practuically begged them, and that they are now afraid of me. I'll have to talk like an ordinary person; discuss sports, the weather, Kent Johnson's latest outrage. I will soon have to take a merely ordinary interest in things.
Before that happens, I think I will spend the next week doing something I've never done before: painting miniatures. Specifically, the miniatures to my copy of Shadows Over Camelot. Let me know if you'd like to come over to help.
