Zanzibar, Zanzibar,
Zanzibar is very far.
You can't get there in a car;
It's too far to Zanzibar.
Writing, the witticism would have it, is easy: simply stare at the page until drops of blood appear on your forehead. That's a lovely thought; it reminds us what a grand and noble thing writing - even writer's block - can be. This is a terrible labor. Why, my very life's blood is being spent for my art, but I spend it proudly, knowing mighty things are trying to force their way out of me.
That's harder to believe when all that's really coming out of me is whimsical doggerel about Zanzibar, a tiny island off of Tanzania. And it's not even my own doggerel; I'm merely repeating the highlight of a radio program I listened to the day before yesterday.
Were the song my own, I could enjoy some pride in it; the tune is catchy, and silly little ditties hold a small but respectable place in art. Ogden Nash and A. A. Milne built careers out of them. Sadly, it is not mine, but belongs to Bill Harley instead, related in a story about his failure to do a sixth-grade geography report. Procrastination and petty obstacles get in his way, and every time he thinks about the assignment, instead of a paragraph, his brain bubbles up something like
In Zanzibar, they grow cloves.
What're they for? I don't know.
Maybe they put 'em between their toes.
In Zanzibar they grow cloves.
It's a cute story, and did I mention the tune is catchy? NPR often replays portions of their broadcast, and I hoped to tape it on the second time around for a friend, but it never came around again, so I had to memorize it as best I could. Fortunately, I have an excellent memory for the spoken word and was able to retain most of it.
No, scratch that. Catastrophically, I have an excellent memory for the spoken word and was able to retain most of it. Because now, as I stare at the screen waiting for the drops of blood to surface, all I'm getting is
In Zanzibar, they grow tea
Far away across the sea,
Off the coast of Afrikee.
In Zanzibar, they grow tea.
There is a maddening irony here. After all, Mr. Harley's story is about the inability to get to work, sabotaged by procrastination and the song in his head. Indeed, he wraps up the story with an explicit moral that he has taken from the experience: that the hardest part of any activity, even one you really want to do, is to get started when there's nobody breathing down your neck to make you start. Surely that's true for me. Once I've gotten past the first few paragraphs, an essay picks up momentum, and I can press on to the end, but teasing out those first threads of thought, and making them appealing enough to myself to want to pursue them is a chore. Those first twenty minutes are the ones where I get another cookie, or check the weather, or sing
In Zanzibar, they grow ground nuts.
The people who grow 'em live in huts.
When I pause to look over my first few sentences and see whether I like the direction they're headed, I generally don't. Most days, that's the signal to grind them through over and over until I do like the direction. On poor days, I admit defeat after a few tries and cast about for a new subject. That leads to free association, and that to woolgathering, and that to
Men and women smoke cigars.
There's no tar in Zanzibar.
Enough. This essay was supposed to discuss the complexities of geography and urban growth, and how genre writers, the ones who provide maps of their fantastic worlds, often disappoint by turning out something painfully simple, like entire planets with one biome, or natural resources that inexplicably appear in one spot on earth.
In Zanzibar, they got sugar cane.
To grow it, they need lots of rain.
Okay, okay. There's good workable material in intelligent fictional geography, enough for novels, I suppose, though I'd rather aim for a series of brief speculations akin to Larry Niven's Theory and Practice of Teleportation. What if Europe shared the extensive plains of Asia (Rise and Fall of the Great Powers)? What if traveling north-south were ten times as difficult as traveling east-west (Guns, Germs, and Steel; Dragon's Egg)? What if nothing grew inland (Bordered in Black)? What if roads were prohibitively expensive?
In Zanzibar, they got no tar
To put on the roads to drive their cars.
Stop it. Just stop it. Eileene will be home soon, eager to slap this up on the web for friends to see, and I'm still on the first draft. First drafts stink, and if I don't want this to embarrass me, I need time to redraft, to comb over the phrases, pick out excess words, refine the rhythm of
Zanzabar, Zanzabar,
Zanzibar is very fa.r.
You can't get there in a car?
No! Bad Mike! No biscuit! There's a deadline to meet, here. Just stop singing and do something else. Something like?oh, hey, I still need to look up the singer's proper name to replace those temporary rows of asterisks. That's good; take a break, tear my eyes off the screen, hunt for
Zanzibar, Zanzibar?