| The First law of Thermodynamics |
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“The First Law of Thermodynamics” is a story I knew I wanted to write ever since college, but which eluded me for more than two decades. Even after I began work on it, the damn thing squirmed and wriggled out from beneath my fingers and almost escaped. Originally I chose the first person “I” point of view, but revisiting this all-too-familiar material in first person tempted me to impose Jim Kelly on Space, my (anti)hero, instead of treating him as a character. You see, this piece is somewhat autobiographical, although I was neither as boneheaded nor as alienated nor as brave as Space, when I was at Notre Dame. It was only when I went back and changed everything that I had written into third person that the story took off.
This is a story about the end of the sixties – it actually takes place over a couple of hours on May, 2, 1970. You view its action through the distorted lens of a nineteen year old hippie wannabe on acid. In order to recreate the swirling mindblown diction of the time, I went to my bookshelf and pulled down Tom Wolfe’s THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST and Hunter S. Thompson’s FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, personal faves which I think of as the literary equivalents of Woodstock and Altamont.
“The First Law of Thermodynamics” was first published in INTERSECTIONS, edited by my pal, John Kessel. I’m something of a workshop junkie; I’ve submitted at least half of my stories to critique by other writers. INTERSECTIONS was an original anthology of all the stories brought to the 1994 Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop. Each of the stories is accompanied by an introduction and a summary of comments from the workshop; the book is intended as a kind of record of what Sycamore Hill is about and a primer on workshopping. It’s still in print as of early 2001 and well worth checking out |