The Sparrow of Beijing

A Novel With a Higher Calling

 One of the pinnacles is to hold the world in a single word: Dante’s Commedia For example.  The Genesis is that all that is can be explained in a single work.  The epic poem is of course the original milieu this kind of tale,  but other forms have been tried such as the novel or the film.  This includes  War and Peace (Война и мир), Les Misérables, Infinite Jest, House of Leaves, in film, The Human Condition (人間の條件)  and in the album, The Wall.

When viewed broadly this is a subgenre.

But it should be remembered that failure is the common price for attempting,  which gives us awe at the successes.

This is the subgenre of 北京麻雀 or the Sparrow of Beijing,  and when viewed objectively the probable result is a failure, but we do not know perhaps for thousands of years whether this is the case as Gilgamesh (Shūtur eli sharrī  Surpassing all other kings) will attest to.

I have been working on this for about 10 years,  give or take,  and it is layered as any hypertext version wants to do.  It began as for sections:  London, Shanghai,  Beijing, and New York,  and added to others The Accident (5 June 1989)  and Void.  It is the story at its base between a boy and a girl who are unable to join together in some state of matrimony, the boy dies, and all that is left is the boy’s writings which the girl edits.  Of course, the main moments are other events in the world story,  but that should be obvious to anyone who has read Dante’s Commedia.

 Now I am finishing the last step,  which is to embroider Chinese characters written as English words throughout the story.  I may get someone to publish it,  but it is not likely.  But then,  for a great deal of the time of this subgenre, there were no printing presses,  so even obscurity is an honored place in the works.

 I am taking a month to do this out of the time where a space exists for Modernism, Postmodernism, and Digitality,  which will take at least four years because the moment that it describes is still in the future.  At least somewhat.

“Polytropic oceans - a mystery of face, plied so softly. Conveyed by a boat through the sky’s across the seas of time zones.”