A Long Sentence

In Ron Silliman's Ketjak, there is at least one reference that I understood to mean: can this work and be important as art while being tedious and very needless and unnecessary to read? The poem's construction largely growing from repetition perhaps causes the reader to have such a thought while reading it--and this was the brilliance of much of it, the way the poem might predict your mind thinking, while reading it--and so Silliman doubles down on this opportunity to admit a self-criticism in the work--by golly y'all are going to be bored somewhere in this deriving poem going on for a hundred pages--while also perhaps creating a very interesting connection between the reader and writer. All analysis aside, I have grown to return to Silliman's assertion--truthfully asked as a question if I remember correctly, so perhaps I should say my assertion, which is an answer of "yes" to that question--that we can view what is essentially too long to be interesting or what is mundane for aesthetic or other reasons to be considered important or noteworthy art. While reading a collection Harvey Pekar's American Splendor comic books I returned to this mindset as I have several times with Nicholson Baker's contemplation of the trivial. As one might consider from both the URL and title of this blog, I would consider much of my own thought in this category as well; for the purposes of this post, however, I considered it important to note all this. To establish a mood before sending you into one long sentence that, while perhaps too long to be interesting, derives its very importance from its length.

The Bearded God Speaks

My roommate is fond of writing titles. His personal talent for it shows through in his views on the title in literature: for example, he takes issue with books that don't title their chapters. I inevitably forget chapter titles by the time I'm on page two, so I think I take a different view, but that's hardly evidence against his reasoning. This is a piece on the recent song titling of Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails, simply a small thought I've been thinking for much to long to write down all that well.

Family Puzzles

Searching my computer I found a story/nonfiction piece from my fiction writing class that I had actually saved. My brain was apparently working to some extent that semester. I'm not sure I even turned this one in or if I wrote another one. I haven't reread it yet, which is why I don't know if it's fiction--the first paragraph is all real. I might edit in an affirmation after I publish the post. Not sure my opinion on the piece as a whole: as I mentioned, I haven't read it all the way through. Just found it and decided that I should just throw it up here since I've been somewhat absent lately. No worse than usual I guess, but change always has to start somewhere, am I right?

A Light Matter

One of something like three letters I wrote in class on the theme of converting an Amish family to at least a slightly more electric life. No intentions to offend and no actual views on religion expressed, but my professor appeared to like the original and I've briefly touched it up here. This time I'll hide my changes. I'm not really sure how interesting this particular letter is, but there's some solace in the fact that when you make your URL an apology you can get away with quite a lot.

It's only a game, but it's the only game.

Warren Ellis's attempts to keep his blog lively while writing a novel have been amazing to watch. Really a case of an artist truly viewing the blog as an art object (or at least an "important" object) because of its near simultaneity. Someone out there in a high place truly caring about all the little people who support him (don't like the change to the specific pronoun there myself but I am speaking about Mr. Ellis. Right? Do you ever get that feeling where you realize that you probably actually know a small, small percentage of English grammar? Like the one that gets me sometimes, including this one, is sentences, complete sentences, in parentheses, that follow the original opening clause...If I made a mistake, where? Is it the period at the end of the original clause? The lowercase letter to begin it? All these unnecessary and not even very effective syntactical questions I'm writing here? I just like it aesthetically. I didn't used to but it grew on me. How should I have written that sentence? That's another trouble: the whole preposition at the end of a clause schtick. But I just checked Wiki and that seems to be even in itself hogwash. Probably needed a comma in the last sentence. Probably should admit I'm not quite sure what that whole bit was about in that link. Probably need to end this parenthetical musing). Anyway, short post. I'm reading Don DeLillo's End Zone. If you can brave the jump, click over and see what I think of it and a large chunk of awesome block quote.

Testing, testing

Hello. Here's a little piece of anger and good thinking (for myself...) I wrote for a GRE Practice Exam question asking whether it would be a good idea to create a national curriculum for the schools of a nation. I'm somewhat fond of it, but I'm telling you what it is because, well, because it's schoolwork, about as unrelated to this blog as anything I've posted here before. Enter after the jump at your own risk. Before I cut off on the homepage, I'll say this: we are experiencing regimen change (like the pun?); ideas for "etymology," and pieces for "autopsy" are still very much at hand, as well as others. The new type of "regular" posting may or may not begin soon. You will not see since you aren't here but were that not true you might. Diving board, you've climbed thus far with me, would you care to jump?

All good days come to a close.

Reading Transmet and hating all the people around me, makes me get to thinking of myself as Spider Jerusalem. This is it! You've reached the end of "blogaday." Hopefully my classes will be able to take up the necessary time consumption that this did for the last month. But I should still be back here occasionally. So I'll see you around.

The Way of the Game

If you had to tell me that as far as scheduling and "when are you going to sleep?" questions come in that today would be the closest I would get to not getting a blog entry in back a month ago when I started this new "blogaday" I wouldn't have called you crazy, because that's a cliché, but I would have been surprised. If you told me when I finally got up around noon this fact, I would still have been taken aback. I blame the little leaguers! I was waiting to watch Around the Horn and Pardon the Interruption to spark some sort of topic for the "anthropology of sports." In the end, because the Little League World Series is still cluttering up ESPN at that time, I had to wait until the end of the Rays' game. Look at me, grumpy old man at 20, putting down twelve-year-olds.

Autopsy, the offseason

Don't worry, we're not giving you repeats for several months. Autopsy has actually gone over splendidly, with no readers, and not many posts or thoughts on the stories. I couldn't be more proud [half-sarcastic]. I'm very happy to have started something and actually seen it through to the finish, although while writing I also uncovered a whole packet's worth of more stories, so we can have season two of more of the same, and perhaps more after that.

From my abandoned NaNoWriMo

Autopsy is over for the first season. You'll hear more about that in the next day's post, methinks, but for this post I'm going to put up a few cuts out from the novel I wrote back, I don't even know anymore, two, three years ago? Many different narrators, so not all the sections are in the same voice or at least spoken by the same character. I'm not sure I can handle writing in multiple voices; I'm not sure I'm that talented. These are mostly from towards the end of the book. For the first time, I think, I'm simply going to be cutting and pasting for this post, but I think it's worth it. As opposed to what else I could put up here, I think this is a good, solid offering.

A Box of Blogposts

Finished this book a while back. Debriefing posts would be a lot more common if I weren't trying to maintain a structure at the moment. Eventually I'd love to push these out there for every book I've read, but perhaps they'd be better suited to be passed out through my tumblr, being only simple thoughts rather than these long unnecessary pages I write here. Then I guess I would be doing the same thing, setting aside a few books to write about here.

Chronological Hyperawareness

My apologies, but I'm still reading comics. Skreemer, a somewhat science fiction Peter Milligan comic really stunned me. Absolutely amazing in places. Here in "design and style" we'll take you through some of the interesting loops of the Milligan comic. In a way, Peter is able to show how comics can do certain things to perhaps their best success, places where other mediums cannot quite reach.

It's not just me.

Economics and politics are very much a part of international sports. Or it isn't. But it is a part of international sports reporting, since stories are always multilayered. What better way to expand on the game than by informing on the international background.

Where I'm From

Let's pause for station identification. This may or may not turn into a new occasional feature. "Where I'm From" was a blog post that never got finished, itself an idea to change the way I was using sorryforboringyou dot blogspot dot com. The title was the echo in my head of reading the title of Joan Didion's Where I Was From on Wikipedia. Now, writing this, I'm perhaps (hopefully) at the most likely place for this blogaday to fall apart. Sensical, isn't it? Once I began mentioning "blogaday" here and once I started creating blank posts to run out the end of this little tear, I would be stressed. Hmm... I'm just paranoid, I know. Somehow I did something seriously to my ankle today. It hurts but is maybe getting better. "Where I'm From" is an amalgam-style-post. After the jump, I will quote my original concept from the drafts page of this blog.

"Originally written as a horror story..."

I ordered Pictures That Tick for mad cheap thru someone on Amazon a few days back and am still wondering why there's such a discretion there, but I'm happy to have paid what I did. In looking at the book now for the link there seems to be none available new/used anymore which I find odd. But Amazon also appears to have dropped their price so you wouldn't be getting it for much more than I did if you get the free shipping on plus $25. But enough advertising. Sigh. I might write something about comix and poetry later on tumblr and link it here. It came in the mail today and I've read thru the first few shorts. I have all of the normal "autopsy" posts stapled together into two "season" packets. The next story is originally called "Lumberjack Reincarnated in Form of Tree." Ash, a story in the McKean book, also investigates the idea of becoming a tree, but in a very different way. The synchronicity of the tales caught me though making me write of it here. The title of this post is the beginning of Dave's own words on Ash in the book.

The Frog Hospital

Both Tao Lin and Bret Easton Ellis read Lorrie Moore books. I was at a book sale where these huge bags full were a dollar. I saw a Lorrie Moore book. I've read it since. It was, as expected, an experience. I'm not sure how to keep writing in this sort of concise, lame, entirely uninteresting tone. I'm afraid it's my normal voice.

Don't get any big ideas; they're not gonna happen.

A few different tie-ups here. Welcome to "design and style," where we discuss everything about books but their plots. Haha. But seriously...that's a pretty good description. The title of this post is the main line from Radiohead's "Nude." It relates. You'll see for yourself if you're willing to make the jump...

Behind the anthropology of sports

Warren Ellis wrote about FreakAngels in two tones. One was the open voice of uncertainty, he noted the story as an almost eternal ongoing. The second was his knowledge of the ending. In the next few days I'm hoping to have written enough to say the same for "blogaday." This is the real "anthropology of sports" and I'm actually writing on posting day. Hello, Mondays! But I'm sure you aren't reading this today. Now...now to decide what to write about.

The Future of Publishing

A bit of random musing. It's all inconsequential. I'm bloody useless.

We're back to football.

Sort of a choppy one. I'm not at all happy with what it ultimately says about well, first women, second relationships, and third the way we interact with sports. So...to avoid the problems I see happening from reading for these things, I will point them out to you and then say "don't read for these things." Especially anything it says about women. It's not trying to, it's just like the good-natured grandfather who says the wrong things, or should I say believes the wrong things. Anyway hopefully no one actually does read it that way, but I am saying that you can get the wrong impression of me if you read it without the disclaimer. This was straight writing in class, not a finished product, and I wouldn't write like this any other way. But besides, I think it's fun. Perhaps the worst of it is the original title, the terrible "Getting her way." The new title is a riff on the fact that we actually have football, and that I watched parts of the nationally televised season opener a few hours back. Typing it, I realized that I knew the characters and they were one of two couples I've written before, so the plan now would be to figure out which one. Well, if my story-voice is somehow different than my non-story-voice, than the latter one will stop blabbering for now...

Peter's Mulligan or On Milligan

This will be a bit of an odd one for "debriefing" (have I always put them in quotes? I don't remember...I might have to go and check someday when I care). We are at the end of comix week. Applause from the nonexistent masses who think this whole week has been a waste and nothing from the nonexistent masses who didn't care; it's kind of a you take two halves of infinity and they're both infinity sort of thing only with zeros. This is a reflection on the Peter Milligan issues that my dad had and that I've read. I'm through most of them now but I've got a few set out for the weekend. But if you want to hear more you'll have to follow me after the jump...

The Anti-Comic

Welcome to the second Design and Style of comix week. We're almost done for everyone I'm boring especially badly with this run of drivel. I'm currently in a post-Morrison burnout, nearly crying about the fact that I've just finished reading through Grant's entire Doom Patrol run and rereading his Animal Man. Morrison himself forecasts this emotion, when he talks about what I see as a sort of theme of both series, "Yeah. Well, that's the trouble with my stories--they always seem to build up to something that never actually happens. That's the trouble with my life, too." I won't tell you where that's from for fear of revealing too much, but I do think you can feel Morrison's early work here, like say Radiohead's "Creep," plunging into emotions that you want to exorcise from yourself, depressions you want to leave behind. The same sort of emotion that I read in a Tao Lin interview I can't be bothered to dig up at the moment where he talks about writing with the viewpoint that he was not happy at the present, but could foresee a future pleasantness. Blah, pity parade and all that, need to get to the technical stuff now before I turn the angst knob up past 11. Neo looking across the rooftops, eventually he has to make the jump...

Leadership

This is comix week and also "anthropology of sports" so I'm giving you a piece about the various ways that sport or art by committee can be done. We'll see if it works out. Catch you after the jump.

Funny Book

"Etymology" is a new occasional segment on this blog where I will investigate word and phrase origins. Somewhat art over science, or rather opinion over fact but hopefully if you want to be you will be educated. Occasional as in this might be the only one but I have a few ideas for more... Have to get this one written before my mind moves on, though.

Autopsy Presents: CHASING VICTOR

Autopsy Presents is a new feature which brings new stories to light, rather than investigating the inner workings of old stories. The following is in honor of comics week.

Where did she go? Out. What did she do? Everything...

(title is a slogan on the back of The Ballad of Halo Jones)

What my family vacation going on a month back now turned out to be besides its eponymous description was a good deal of both book gathering and reading. I finished The Ballad of Halo Jones, Pale Fire, The Storyteller, and Maps & Legends, all books I had started reading at one point and eventually put down. I don't think I read books the same way very many people do. Anyways, this is debriefing, and this is comics week, so here's a bit on Alan Moore and Ian Gibson's Halo Jones.

Self Vigilant Kitsch

In honor of what is my biggest distraction as of late, I'm going to write a week's worth of posts about comic books. Apologies to everyone who is put off by that (read "everyone"). This is design and style, a beat for sorryforboringyou dot blogspot dot com. Here we go...

Living Fossils of the Soccer World

Welcome back to the anthropology of sports the new segment of sorryforboringyou dot blogspot dot com we are presenting this introduction on a limited amount of punctuation so will throw you to the jump fairly quickly like just after the first period.

"The pot is full; let me take control."

These introductions are influenced both by the sort of "I'm still here" posts from Warren Ellis where he often announces the name of the location you've found on the web. I'm really into that. And also the bumps that Aqua Unit Patrol Squad 1 gets on [adult swim]. The sort of inside view given to this season with little snippets from the creators before every new episode. Huh, using this intro as a reflection on my attempts to change my own intro writing ways, it seems I've mucked up the chances to actually introduce this piece. Oh pooh! I will only just add that this post is helluva long one, quite the doozy, do not start it if you're off to bed in five minutes or suchlike.

June

This story isn't about much of anything. It has a sort of thought process slowing it down so that the whole thing takes place in about five minutes that one might find reminiscent of Nicholson Baker, but not as inventive and often true as Baker. This is sorryforboringyou dot blogspot dot com. (That line is just another ripoff of Warren Ellis...) It's Wednesday afternoon in Seattle if you had any rush to read this (which you didn't). The following is another autopsy.

Praying in Common

Joan Didion is my favorite female author. While reading a Didion book I often think she's the best writer in English that I've read. When reading a DeLillo book she can fall back to second. Bret Easton Ellis is my favorite, but he's influenced by both DeLillo and Didion and you can feel a sort of authenticity to their work that I think makes their writing stronger, if not for me more personally enjoyable. This is the debriefing of A Book of Common Prayer, Didion's third, but it also acts as a commentary on all the Didion I've read (Play It as It Lays,  Democracy, and The Year of Magical Thinking). After the jump, I plan to consider what a bibliography is supposed to look like, what we want from novels, and what writing novels is like.

"Books" of "Poetry"

"it depends on your definition of 'of'" (intentional misquote, everybody)

Welcome back to design and style. This is the new sorryforboringyou dot blogspot dot com. It's gone by noon in California on the first day of the month if you're reading this. I'm writing it a few days back in Florida (still don't know why the time's set to Pacific). Stephen King calls writing "telepathy," I call it "time travel." See you after the jump.

The Streets

"The Anthropology of Sports" is another beat or serial I've been tossing around in my head for a while now. (See here.) "Anthropology" here as akin to how Anne Carson uses it in "The Anthropology of Water" (which I wrote about here) or Joan Didion does in A Book of Common Prayer (where she talks about the uselessness of it...in a very loving way), rather than any serious place for academic writing. If we are able to view anthropology as a style of art as well as an academic profession (and a hands-on-in-the-field backlash towards that very academic backdrop called "applied anthropology," which I think of as really just a natural result of any research to be done in the discipline), then I would place myself firmly in the former position. Interested in it in so much as it provides for my art (and I guess in the way that it is different than my art, for my life). Now I'll get on with the piece...

When at last you give in...

I think the ultimate test of understanding an idea is being able to recognize it elsewhere. Anyone can string useless words together as some sort of definition, anyone can write, but it is actually seeing this concept outside of its initial context that allows you to truly claim understanding. It's like waiting on a girl to grow her hair out just to see if you're only attracted to the current boyish cut. Because you'd never know. I would say that being unable to recognize ideas that connect across different contexts is one of the major faults in ideology. Let's have ourselves a little experiment, then, in locating the concept outside of its context.

What Follows a Long Day at the Office

Autopsy isn't dead. The body still isn't buried. A word I've taken to pronouncing with the "u." "Burr," like I'm cold, "eed." It's interesting to say the least. This story, however, isn't, so much. It's a sequel of sorts to our first cadaver in this morgue, Tempest. It's... I don't know how else to explain it. There's an odd feel about it. I guess it's about the self-awareness in a marriage. Trying to get what you want, but still make it easy on those you care about who are involved. That of course makes it sound better than it is. Typing it up, I considered not throwing it up online, but since I have it stapled into my pamphlet, I felt I didn't have an awful lot of choice.

That, anyway, is what I have learned.

This is another new idea for the blog. I'm calling it "debriefing." I've written stuff to comment on, explain to myself, write about, toy with, and explore the stuff I've been reading for quite a long time. This is the latest installment. But the good thing is that I've always written with the nonexistent audience motif, so at least this time there is the possibility that someone might read this. That seems more sane than talking to your imaginary friends about how they are imaginary. So the book I'm going to write about here is... Not Pale Fire. I bet you were expecting that one. Actually, I think that will come later. I might even write another style and design post about the book first. No, this one is about the Mario Vargas Llosa novel The Storyteller. (Which is quoted in the title if you don't believe me.)

This Good Ink

                                                      this good ink, this rhyme,
This index card, this slender rubber band
Which always form, when dropped, an ampersand

"Pale Fire" (532-534)

During my two week self-imposed exile from the internet (with some cheating) that I spent with my family on vacation in the Michigan/Ohio area, I got a few ideas about how I would like this blog to be run. ("Run," I should say, with Tao Lin's scare quotes, as it isn't really a working machine most of the time.) Since then I've done a whole lot of nothing in the past few weeks, speaking of more than just the blog. Now I've finally gotten myself to start these changes to some extent. Mainly, I would like to add a sort of magazine-feel to the blog. The creation of serials or beats to allow me to work in specific fields without coming back to the blog every once in a while for one month's failed attempt at daily posting. To do this, I've attached the "blogaday" tab loosely, to force a bit of deadline on. Have new semester and GRE coming up in next months so "deadline" itself is a loose title, but this is all part of the struggle. One idea from my exile was remarks on "design and style," the misremembered title of an earlier post (called Art & Design) starting with the book I was reading, Nabokov's Pale Fire.

Scott van Pelt recalls the Tonight Show fiasco.

SportsCenter does these dj mixes of the month that play around with a lot of soundbites. They also did a recent "things they should trademark" segment. I was thinking about the NBC craziness with Leno and Conan and thought I would write a little remembrance up using quotes. Then I realized this was the perfect time to have an extended use of hyperlinks--it's a new type of reading really. So I hope this isn't too unbearable to get through. It's not very good, but it's the thought that counts, right? (Wrong.)

Ghosts in their early twenties

Yes, "autopsy" was not a one-off crapshoot. Name is an added bonus--I've been trying to come up with something to title with this. Reference to both age (either of the person who died or the ghost...making sense?) and the middle bit of Ghosts I-IV. I'll edit in an afterward with a few keys bits of contention and editing. One of my better efforts for this class, this story came effortlessly, but unfortunately I think it shows; it's all froth and little beverage. Story starts just after the jump...

Spectrum

Anthropology is a discipline that relies a lot on redefining terminology with more streamlined meanings. Retooled, recycled words become jargon. Which is probably a complaint for a lot of people, but is something I truly enjoy about the field. Language is important, but communication is more important, so doing a little dirty work and blowing up quite a few connotatively bloated phrases and words seems useful, pertinent, and fun. Either I enjoy defining terms myself, and this is one of the similarities that I found with anthropology upon choosing it as my major or I am simply influenced by my enthusiasm for the field--whatever the initiating factor, I have found myself time and time again lately creating personal definitions for terms. Ultimately, one might feel this useful for poetry, adding a personal bit to the poem that stands in front of the reader as an enigma that can only be solved by something outside of the poem. It's obviously a ton of fun to be reading a poem and realize the poet is talking about some biographical fact that you actually know, but the mystery that not knowing causes leaves the writer with what is not always a net positive. But moving back from that side-note...

Sporty Spice

Melanie Chisholm got herself the moniker of Sporty Spice because of the big As, apparel and attitude. Her athletic wear and tomboyish ways were thought to be embodied perfectly in the name she took. [I might as well come out now and mention the fact that I am not a Spice Girl aficionado and I'm simply wiki-ing to make a point here. As some readers of this blog might (and likely are) more knowledgeable in this pop music field, I must ask that any perceived inaccuracies be sacrificed to the point.] This is something you have to deal with as a blogger, if you are going to go through the motions of naming your posts, picking a name that matches important concepts you are trying to get across. You can then choose to develop that name in a sort of introductory piece created to be put before the jump. At least...this is something I have to deal with as a blogger (and have dealt with just as described).

texts near and around the timing of the ghost town of Midnight

6/03-04/11
under the influence of the dark side of the moon

Conclusions

--final section from my paper on the Afro-Cuban identity; don't get lost--I'm hoping my professor doesn't as well--

The Splintering of the Left

Testing, testing

Tempest

In the fall semester, I took a fiction writing workshop. In the next few weeks (days, months, years?), I am going to retype a few of the stories written for this class. I was in the habit of printing them off without saving them, so this is my punishment. But retyping has always been a bit of an editing/reevaluating process for moi so it's excusable. I've stapled together a little selection & after the jump is the first. They won't appear particularly chronologically probably just as much because I can't remember when I wrote all of them as that I wanted to somewhat switch them up for this process. I'm calling it an "autopsy." Which makes this a tab grouping--I might add more to this in the future, digging through old work and throwing it up on the web. This story I've titled here "Tempest," and a few extremely minor edits are noted after with a touch of afterward. The assignment was to write a story to describe this photo or one very much like it, if I have not found the exact one our professor provided us with.

THE NAMES

Don DeLillo always makes me want to forget language. Just go back to simple thoughts that aren't thoughts because they don't know the word 'thoughts.' If DeLillo were writing this it would make sense, too much sense, and there would be ongoing little jitters and cringes between characters that you recognize between books. I can't help but associate him with Dylan on the Never Ending Tour, because the books run together. Maybe this is what Li-Young Lee was talking about book with 'poetry' in Faulkner, Melville novels. Anyway, what seems the least important of all in DeLillo's books is what's going on. You try to attach yourself to what's being said and what's being thought and who's lying to you. But you forget. It's like life in that respect. You forget and then there's this undercurrent running under the words for the next few hundred pages.

The Kind of Irony You Can't Write

One of the brilliant things about academia is how stupid it really is.

Because consumption is not enough.

dialogue [Anne Carson writes them better; my apologies]

PLAINWATER

"Bohemian Rhapsody," "Happiness is a Warm Gun," "Band on the Run," and "Paranoid Android" are all songs that are known for their diversity--the way that they slip around on you--and are commonly thought of as more than one song somewhat cut and pasted together. But done so very well, of course. Which gets me to thinking--why do we like this idea? I mean, the concept of a mini-album contained in one song falls completely flat on its face so hard it doesn't even have a nose anymore. So why do we like the idea of a song containing the diversity of an album? I would postulated this is an interest in disparate connections: we enjoy being stunned by two ideas the fit together so well that we can't even see the seams where they logically attach. It's like CatDog: at what point is one the other? And yet they are completely different! And that's, as they say, poetry.

Layering

One of the perhaps subtle bits behind the genius that is Douglas Coupland's Miss Wyoming is a theme that we can track back to Rousseau. It's basically the Doomsday Device from Dr. Strangelove and it's an idea of which any archaeologist is familiar.

MEN IN THE OFF HOURS

Thoughtful if a little unnaturally negative review of the Anne Carson book I just finished. Good closing bit I've blockquoted, so read the review here if you've got a mind to or just skip to after the jump. I have a few words to add, but really Carson's work leaves me somewhat...thoughtless (a pun on speechless, I hope you understand), and Steve Harris seems to have gotten down points a lot better than I might.

Immateria

Reading Promethea, still immersed in Li-Young Lee, but I'm about finished with him now (few more interviews in Breaking the Alabaster Jar), listening to a mix of Say Hi and Nine Inch Nails, and just now I was electronically flipping through an ebook of James Tate's Selected. Guess that's as much a lead-in as any.

The Common Misconception

There are no rules. The only advice is that breaking any perceptions of rules, breaking these views successfully, shattering them like a mirror and gathering around the seven years' worth of bad luck to bask in the glory of, is always  beneficial. It's always a great thing to behold.

Art & Design

Packaging is an interesting concept in our world today. As artists, we can control more than ever before, considering the fact that the internet allows us to avoid dependence on studio execs who can "get your name out there." This creates a whole new relationship between the artist and the commercial art--a more personal connection.

Sentences in Sociology

From TEXTBOOK

THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING (Didion, 2005)

There are times of realization. They can be recorded and tracked. In these days it is often not the question of "Can we?" but "Should we?" Every second we are pushing the realms of the possible further apart.

"Slippery," my father corrects, "just slippery. That was the nickname."

My spirituality is rooted in coincidences.

It's all a problem in mindset.

Just another rant about hierarchies.

It's just that easy.

When Andrew Hurley had some difficulty in titling his translation of Borges's El hacedor, he ran into the good luck of hearing that JLB had originally named the book in English, The Maker, and simply translated it into the Spanish. With ease, then, he could bring back the original title, rather than attempt to identify which specific definition Borges's had had in mind when he chose the word hacedor.

From CHASING VICTOR

Or rather not really. This is a very rough description of a few lines I would like to include in Chasing Victor, the current verse novella of my dreams. In other news, I'm reading Sharp Teeth, itself a verse novel, the first book by Toby Barlow about werewolves. (Imagine I could add a semicolon into the last sentence so that you would know this is Barlow's first novel and is about werewolves and not his first about werewolves.) Consuming art is becoming more and more a way of realizing all my ideas are taken. A Seamus Heaney poem or a random blog post from someone I'm never going to meet will strike me oddly and I'll realize that what some original (or what I thought was original) thought, poem, story was trying to say has been better stated here. Maybe that's one of the jobs of the writer. Realizing that everyone's better than you are. Maybe not. I mean, probably not, but I'm not going for pity so I tried to add an optimistic edge to that statement. And anyway that's enough here...