Thinking about things a little too much I'm sure.

A Long Sentence

2011-12-01T09:26:00.000-08:00

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.

For a while now, I've been considering how best to present my comparison of the long, creeping, vertiginous sentences in Joan Didion's Miami (meanings shuffled, objects and subjects interrupted--she appears to have waged a war on her grammar, not breaking rules but skirting their goal of clarity, beautifully showing a violent, tense feeling of rewrite within her very diction) with the equally lengthy and vertiginous-at-times but much more trivial and mundane (meant in the best way possible) sentences of Nicholson Baker in Room Temperature; for Baker this fit very much with his character--someone who writes a novel about twenty minutes in a narrator's life might be expected to use long sentences--but for Didion this was not something I had at least knowingly experienced before, it appears to me as if she picked this rhetorical device simply to portray how clumsy and complicated the reality she described truly is; reflected in the very title itself, Miami is a book, and a city, that is largely about Cuba and Washington, or perhaps Havana and Washington if we want to have a city and a city, with the specter of Moscow, for example, as the main issue is Havana's communist status, Miami Cubans extreme disapproval of such, and Washington's inability to really thrust its way into this debate without drawing international attention--all of that beautifully and more smartly written in a 230-odd-page study that I might term journalistic were I not consider it oddly in direct opposition to parts of journalism, for example, the temporality: Miami is considering years where I feel the word journalism dictates an assumption of timeliness, taking about days and weeks and yet the book is not best referred to as non-fiction, if only because Didion will come to write her novels in very much the same way, so noting a difference between her fiction and non-fiction would be counter-intuitive, just like writing about sentences is, since you can't call them anything but sentences, especially if you are writing about long sentences, since you wouldn't want to call them terms or phrases since you are noting their length, so your description of long sentences can turn into a long, repetitive description in its own way (of "sentences" and "sentences" and "sentences"); I am saying, then, that the topic of the long sentence is an indefinite aid in the creation of a long sentence, another being the inclusion perhaps as an ending to said sentence of a quote that is in itself a long sentence and perhaps even on the relevant subject of anything relating to the long sentence, like this example--which is actually not overly long on average for Baker in the novel--from Room Temperature: "In our desire for provincial correctness and holy-sounding simplicity and the rapid teachability of intern copy editors we had illegalized all variant forms--and, as with the loss of subvarieties of corn or apples, this homogenization of product was accomplished at a major unforeseen cost: our stiff-jointed prose was less able, so I now huffily thought, full of vengeance against the wrong I had done my mother, to adapt itself to those very novelties of social and technological life whose careful interpretation and weighing was the principle reason for the continued indispensability of the longer sentence" (71).

The Bearded God Speaks

2011-11-23T17:21:00.000-08:00

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.

"The Bearded God Speaks" is, of course, my personal title for "30 Ghosts IV". With the album Ghosts I-IV, Reznor truly appears to have taken a step directly away from language. This could be interpreted in any number of ways: Nine Inch Nails's frequently political (or at least underground) and often suicidal lyrics could simply have seemed to him too derivative. Considering Reznor's drug addictions as well, one might consider the usual subject matter hard to go back to, although NIN's next (and currently last) album, The Slip, would return in that direction. Over all, Ghosts I-IV looks like a sneak peek of Reznor's future, currently occupied at least partially by his position as soundtrack co-maker (with frequent NIN producer and collaborator Atticus Ross) for director David Fincher and looking perhaps to do more in the scoring biz.

But this post is not so much about speculation as to what caused Reznor's choice of titling on Ghosts I-IV, but rather an analysis of his course of action. Let us consider Reznor's own words on the project (from the album's Wikipedia article as per usual):

When we started working with the music, we would generally start with a sort of visual reference that we had imagined: a place, or a setting, or a situation. And then attempt to describe that with sound and texture and melody. And treat it, in a sense, as if it were a soundtrack.

Now this is not where my view of Ghosts as the precursor of The Social Network OST comes from (just listen to the albums and then try to disagree with me), but it does mesh well, now doesn't it? Reznor's lack of titles is then simply the ultimate expression of the "show, don't tell" sort of advice you get from really bad books on writing (or making art for that matter if you want to broaden it since Reznor is a musician). In any case, the titling process of any piece of art has always connected, for me, back to writing, and has, for me, often been a difficult process. The beginning of a piece is something I have always had trouble with, being able to know where to begin--I've never been able to write out of sequence, although I do think this would be something I'd be capable of--and titles have the same issue, you simply don't know what to do with them. Like introductory paragraphs, they're perhaps best written last, and yet I've never succeeded in doing so with the either of those.

Consider a sentence from an unintelligible story I've written and quoted from on this blog before (here; where my quote actually concludes with the following sentence):

You see, what drew me to Dali was that, in my medium, to create his greatest pieces of work, all I would need to do was string together the perfect string of words, my specialty, and yet...yet he had beaten me at that as well.

What is perfect about this sentence for my current example is simply all that is not strongly communicated in the words and yet is very much what I meant when I wrote it. As a writer, I see my art-form as the least skillful; we all deal with language every day of our lives, we construct it to communicate and deconstruct it to comprehend. In the quote our narrator is speaking (and in this sentence I, myself, am also strongly identifiable with the narrator) of La persistencia de la memoria, Dali's most well known work, and one that I find beautifully titled. In conversation recently I discovered that, for me, the title is referring to the death of time and that the ants and melting clocks show how no matter how far you might get away from your past, memory can persist. To create that thought as a writer, I simply use words. If we accept an idea of the title as a capitulation of the work, the "set of terms or articles constituting an agreement between [the] governments" in conflict within the art to quote from Merriam-Webster's (and save my ass by turning the simple misuse of a word due to lack of knowledge of its definition into a metaphor), then the title can largely stand in for the work itself. Perhaps my roommate would agree with me here, but it isn't exactly a point I'm arguing, so I'll say with the point I'm describing here, rather than espousing. (I will admit to taking some pride at times in writing sentences that really read horribly.)

This would largely be true in the case of a book or movie like Fight Club where the title itself is what becomes the cultural icon: people still talk about supposed underground fight clubs or refer to such, while they aren't often saying "You wake up at Seatac, SFO, LAX," and the homoeroticism of the film appears to have largely been lost on the culture, but the title has firmly found its niche. Rather, then, than picking a title that would speak for the work in a more mundane way, through language, Reznor chose to, as I've noted, "show not tell," or in this case perhaps "play rather than speak."

The most interesting part of all this, for me, is the way that Ghosts is, in fact, a very visual album. In place of the titles, where we only have numbers and the word "ghosts," you can define the music as different based on both the unique songs and their album covers. Reznor's brilliant decision to create a different cover for each song as well as release the album with a forty page pdf of images that correspond to the tracks largely takes the entire album outside of the medium of language and puts it firmly in a different place. One that I am uncomfortable in, as critic or reviewer, defining, myself. A label, if one were needed, should come from Reznor. Of course we can quote him and say "visual," but that is a cop-out.

Perhaps the coolest thing about this entire thought that has been forming in my head has been the way that this break on titles for Reznor's instrumental tracks really paved the way for the exact opposite: The Social Network OST has some great titles. The best perhaps being a reference to Ghosts, as a remix of "35 Ghosts IV" is brilliantly named "A Familiar Taste," both fulfilling a title-lover like my roommate and an adding a neat little Easter egg to fans of Reznor and his work. Later titles such as "Eventually We Find Our Way," "Complication with Optimistic Outcome," and "The Gentle Hum of Anxiety," really do add an element of understanding to this record that is much appreciated. Perhaps it is a stupid suggestion, but I do feel that we cannot discount Reznor's break from titles on Ghosts when evaluating the eventual greatness of titling that we find on his Oscar winning The Social Network soundtrack. This perhaps being the best ending of the thought, which I had considered even before truly listening to the soundtrack, that I might find.

NOTE: The renaming of fifteen of the tracks of the soundtrack in the sampler submitted for awards nominating and the resulting weaker titles (such as "Cocksucker," "Bathroom Sex," and "Does She Have a Boyfriend") has more to say about Hollywood than Reznor's own ability to create titles in the current writer's opinion.

Family Puzzles

2011-10-07T12:14:00.000-07:00

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?

My mother was working on a puzzle when I got home. It seemed an apt metaphor for the season. Thanksgiving, for each of us, triggers an aberration. We try to create a unique list consisting of what we think we should be thankful for. And that is not to say we are not, but rather that thankfulness is not a traditional state. Which is why Thanksgiving exists, isn’t it? Because we don’t wish to be held back by the moments of each day at which we should feel grateful for our lives.

I wonder now if I am being religious; these thoughts sparking in my head like streetlights, leading me down the usual road that I walk while writing. Religion in the sense that I am happy to exist and whether it was maker or molecule I am indebted. Chaos theory or god. These are the sorts of thoughts that take away hours. We attempt to consolidate them. Or perhaps that is just me. My own personal vision of Thanksgiving as a time of reflection, because nothing would get done if I was reflecting constantly.

And I had never been a man for puzzles. Well, I guess you could say I’ve never been a man. But my mind’s never been one for puzzles. But at one point I was able to stare at the image on the top of the box and put down a few pieces in the right places. “Everything in its Right Place” now comes into my head, but namely just the title. Am I thankful for Radiohead? I am thankful for the arts I have enjoyed…

But let’s take a step back now, because perhaps I have misled you. I am simply, in my train of thought, skipping the easy steps to this equation. Imagine my list of Thanksgiving thoughts: they do not truly ever land on family or friendship or life itself, unless I am addressing another. Because these are not questions, they are obvious facts. The inter-commentary of my own thankful list does not dwell on these lines anymore. Is this abnormal? I wonder at times.

When I became an Eagle Scout, at my board of review, I was asked what I would say to the president, if I could speak to him. This was the last year of Bush. I said that I would want to talk about why we were at war. I got told that I needed to get my priorities straight. I don’t bring this up in a negative sense. I wasn’t insulted or taken aback. Because I feel like society has created for itself the idea of the consistent shuffling of priorities. When we are asked about Thanksgiving days and what we are thankful for, we say family, as I believe I’ve noted. And we are. But these are not things we are thankful for solely on Thanksgiving. It simply rises to the surface of the lake of the mind at this point, like some creature of the black lagoon.

I’m not sure what we really want to talk about when we talk about Thanksgiving. But I know it can’t be what we actually do say. Because that never-ending banter comes across as politically correct and heartfelt, but boring. Or perhaps I need to get my priorities straightened. Do they make hair straighteners that have a connector for your priorities?

It was only for about an hour or so. And I’m not even sure if I found that many. Four, five, maybe fifteen pieces for the puzzle. I talked to my mother on the phone the other day and she said she had finished it. And now, looking back on these useless epistemological questions about a holiday that is descended from the myth that we didn’t just kill off the Native Americans, that image is what I guess I am thankful for. The puzzle. We spend our life creating it, and then when it's done, someone comes and breaks it apart, shuffles the pieces together and puts the box back on the shelf. To be reused.

NOTES
Yeah, it's all pretty much true. "I’m not sure what we really want to talk about when we talk about Thanksgiving" is a joke on Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, itself referenced in Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Some odd sentence constructions here, but the feeling flowing under it and the picture of me it sketches, I like that very much.

A Light Matter

2011-09-27T20:11:00.000-07:00

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.

Dearest Gladys,

I'm going to convince you that light bulbs are okay! Plato saw the sun as the good that we run into when we escape the cave and more contemporaneously that good has become God these days so, you know, let there be light, darling!
Because candles are just dangerous; have you seen the way Uncle Jimmy handles his in the night? I don't wanna pick fights but you are in my house and my insurance will not cover fire damages caused when that man inevitably falls down the stairs. Plus, I, myself, even though I said as an anthropologist that I'd like to learn your culture, I miss light... It's neither here nor there, but I've always been afraid of matches, and Gladys I don't want you to get the idea that I've only been using you, because I've been waking you up to spend time together and flirt in the middle of the night, but one reason has been, often times, so that you might light a flame for me.
I really just want you to try it out--could you God send you to Hell for that? Trying something on like so many sweaters that my sister has to check out to see if in them she's going to look hip this summer. And don't think this is a slight, dear Gladys, I admire your ability to resist slot machines and Facebook, but really, the light bulb? I think we both know God & Thomas Alva Edison are palling around in Heaven right this freaking second, as I write this, and what are you going to do?
So take it or leave it, but I--I'm not as strong as you and the light bulb is a necessity of mine, so we may come to our parting of ways, which is a shame, because you really are quite beautiful and unique and although it's a bad persuasive tactic, I'm willing to admit that this is all my fault anyway.
Perhaps I could point you to Billy who can't pay his electric bill anyway? Or maybe perhaps, you'll stay... Give it a week and let's hold a seance so that if God doesn't strike me dead for making you lighten up then we can say "well at least we asked your permission." Or maybe now you're angry cause I just said--accidentally--that God was dead. Let us pray.

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

2011-09-20T17:35:00.000-07:00

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.

I've been reading End Zone for about a week now and it's gone quite quickly. The more you read DeLillo, the easier I would hazard to say it becomes to read DeLillo. He's always trudging through the same pathways, albeit with a new plot--something you don't get (or want) from Joan Didion, as I've written about before, while they both could be called "repetitive," they somehow make it work extraordinarily well, and I somehow enjoy reading the novels--but End Zone for him seems to have been off the beaten path a ways. First of all, it's not at all directly "political." It's political only in the sense that the narrator is a college football player obsessed with nuclear war. I'm through the first two parts so far and unlike a book like The Names, there hasn't been any outright politics, but a lot of talking about politics. Perhaps this isn't unusual. But DeLillo's other narrator's professions at least seem more political: TV man in Americana, college professor in White Noise, would-be political documentary maker in Point Omega...We might argue that none of these have the same status of risk analyst in The Names, but I do think it is more fitting to imagine any of these characters thinking similarly. A football player? Maybe not.

And that's a great thing. I still strive for an essence of modesty in literary criticism. Rather than call a narrative voice to scholarly, too political, too smart for a narrator, I enjoy considering the alternative: that people are just not all that different from writers. That we're not a different species with different intelligence levels, different strengths or focuses. I'm sure people--important people, mind you--would yell at me for such a thought process, but it just seems right to me. There's no reason to think that a certain kind of person could not speak a certain way unless it says it right there for you in the book.

What the football aspect of the book gives us is--and I will temper this comparison, because I've been watching a lot of this duo's movies lately, so it could just be bleedthrough, but I do think I have a point--DeLillo writing books in sequence the way the Coen brothers make movies. Namely, End Zone is what you could look at as a farce. Perhaps Don doesn't even want us to take seriously the idea that a football player would be associating his sport with war and be afraid of his strong interest in studying what nuclear casualty numbers could end up being. Although I'd argue against this, DeLillo himself even pokes fun at the football setting, as we shall see in the block quote below. I would say that there is a joke here, either on the narrator or on the sport of football itself--as being shown in writing especially--that I really would not have expected from DeLillo. (Back when I first read about this novel when I'd only read, I think, White Noise, I thought similarly; not just about the tone, but about the subject matter itself, but DeLillo handles it brilliantly.)

To put a bit of a cork in this long disheveled praise to an author who need no more praise, let me fill you in on a piece of personal amazement. At times Douglas Coupland has been able to write sentences into his books that, for me, are personal truths, some I knew and had considered and others that stun with their oddity and paradoxical veracity. DeLillo blew me away with the beginning to his long chapter 19 that makes up the entire second section of the novel (a trick he will repeat in at least White Noise, with the ever present "airborne toxic event"), fittingly, now that I think about it, considering my own opening paragraph, a long parenthetical. Enjoy! (and meet me after for a few words of personal revelation.)

[this quote follows the beginning of an account of a football game that will take up the entire nineteenth chapter and, as stated above, the second section of the novel; I will also apologize here for my own coloring of the text, but I feel it allows one to connect with two different thoughts I had while reading it]

(The spectator, at this point, is certain to wonder whether he must now endure a football game in print--the author's way of adding his own neat quarter-notch to the scarred bluesteel of combat writing. The game, after all, is known for its assault-technology motif, and numerous commentators have been willing to risk death by analogy in their public discussions of the resemblance between football and war. But this is of little interest to the exemplary spectator. As Alan Zapalac says later on: "I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing." The exemplary spectator is the person who understands that sport is a benign illusion, the illusion that order is possible. It's a form of society that is rat-free and without harm to the unborn; that is organized so that everyone follows precisely the same rules; that is electronically controlled, thus reducing human error and benefiting industry; that roots out the inefficient and penalizes the guilty; that tends always to move toward perfection. The exemplary spectator has his occasional lusts, but not for warfare, hardly at all for that. No, it's details he needs--impressions, colors, statistics, patterns, mysteries, numbers, idioms, symbols. Football, more than other sports, fulfills this need. It is the one sport guided by language by the word signal, the snap number, the color code, the play name. The spectator's pleasure, when not derived from the action itself, evolves from a notion of the game's unique organic nature. Here is not just order but civilization. And part of the spectator's need is to sort the many levels of material: to allot, to compress, to catalogue. This need leaps from season to season, devouring much of what is passionate and serene in the spectator. He tries not to panic at the final game's final gun. He knows he must retain something, squirrel some food for summer's winter. He feels the tender need to survive the termination of the replay. So maybe what follows is a form of sustenance, a game on paper to be scanned when there are stale days between events; to be propped up and looked at--the book as television set--for whatever is in here of terminology, pattern, numbering. But maybe not. It's possible there are deeper reasons to attempt a play-by-play. The best course is for the spectator to continue forward, reading himself into the very middle of that benign illusion. The author, always somewhat corrupt in his inventions and vanities, has tried to reduce the contest to basic units of language and action. Every beginning, it is assumed, must have a neon twinkle of danger about it, and so grandmothers, sissies, lepidopterists and others are warned that the nomenclature that follows is often indecipherable. This is not the pity it may seem. Much of the appeal of sport derives from its dependence on elegant gibberish. And of course it remains the author's permanent duty to unbox the lexicon for all eyes to see--a cryptic ticking mechanism is search of a revolution.)

I absolutely love this quote. Rereading it, it felt as if I had only skimmed it, perhaps an unconscious action knowing I wanted to type it up here. I love the fact that you don't know if Gary Harkness is talking or Don DeLillo. I love that it is multiple pages in parentheses. I love the placement of it--midway in the novel--while it might serve perfectly as an introduction piece for the book itself, slightly tuned up, there it would seem apologia, where here it stands arrogantly within the novel's bounds. To return to my color coding: I was first struck by what I have colored red. DeLillo, in 1972 (and just a year after his first book was published, oh my fucking god), was already doing the most profound thinking that I've done on sports. And I write this not to devalue myself, but rather to rejoice in the feeling that I had gone through the same thought processes, independent of this work. "Everything has been thought before, it's all been written. I know this much to be true." How often has that statement been said? No, what DeLillo writes here not only describes my own thoughts, but myself: I am his exemplary spectator. I think. I'm not trying to be vain, but the sport as a lessening of war--as something apart from it that we can see as structured, as ordered and yet as broad as "civilization"--there's something truly beautiful here. If I had read DeLillo's words echoing my thoughts (echoing them in my head--not echoing them in the past when they were written, obviously) perhaps a year ago, I feel I would have earmarked them to bring up to a strong-minded girl I'll probably never see again (brief autobiographical bit over), because these are the sorts of thoughts you can't get back. Baker talks about it in U & I, how can I now write about the idea of sport as the diminishing of war, of nationalism and patriotism, creating a world where we can have this purging of internal angers of unnecessary tensions "without harm to the unborn." If I ever bring it up to someone, I'll have to now relate to DeLillo, although I came across these feelings largely on my own. Sport has a purpose: it is the "benign illusion" that counteract the "imagined communities" of Benedict Anderson, that is nations. (I'll admit to reading Anderson in class, but it really does fit here perfectly--life as bricolage and the connection of all the fragments I always find myself falling into, like classes or books or films, makes my head spin.) And to conclude, a final thought: The elegant gibberish transcends just the language, lying in the sport itself. Consider how this isn't a touchdown catch. Consider how a baseball replay works. You look at the glove and see the ball. When is the ball caught? When it first reaches the glove? When the umpire hears it slap in? What if it's a snowconed grab? When is the runner just getting to the base out? It's all arbitrary when it comes down to it.

Testing, testing

2011-09-17T22:14:00.000-07:00

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?
(time constraint of a half hour--978 words, you are fucking kidding me!)

What is a nation? It is a poor world we live in where definitions have become so muddied and unclear: a nation is a group of people who may or may not live in one recognized state. If they do so then the result may be termed a "nation-state." What then could be a national curriculum? The implementation of a set of schooling parameters for an entire nation is an abhorrent suggestion for a number of reasons, among them the fact that nations are not cut and dry distinctions in today's modern world, the limitations forced upon teachers by such action, and the resultant lackluster benefits inability to outweigh much, if any, of the flaws such a system would cause.

What is America? That is perhaps the hardest question to any student of modern nations. The American people do not tend to be historically American--only an extremely small minority are called "Native Americans"--and, because of this, one is left with a very hard question indeed. It does not at all seem inaccurate to the present writer to refer to the "nonexistence" of an American nation--rather there is a strong American state that has often been misinterpreted through the flaws of language to also be a so-called "nation." What would a American national curriculum look like, one could ask. Although not necessarily, it does not seem too unlikely that an American curriculum would focus to a large extent on America itself--namely the sort of propaganda that is already very present in our world today: the sort of positioning of the founding fathers in such a godly position as to look down on us from Mt. Rushmore, the glorification of the Fourth of July, the date marking the start of a war and the inevitable deaths of many people, as just as much a part of the national religion as Thanksgiving or, unfortunately enough, Christmas. But let's move on from the flaws that might result from implementation in America and consider the question more broadly: national curriculums in China, the various countries that once made up Yugoslavia, in Morocco, in Sudan until the recent creation of South Sudan. Historically and in some cases contemporary implementation of such a concept would ultimately result in the actions of the dominating nation in the various states to destroy or eliminate the importance of learning of the minority or unempowered nation's own potential curriculum. Aime Cesaire once remarked about growing up as a black man in Martinique and being told in history books that his people were descended from Gauls. Ultimately, for education to be engaging it has to be just that: engaging, inclusive, and involving of the student. To create a national curriculum then creates for a select group an education that does as it should and excludes the rest. The reversal of "No Child Left Behind" this policy would state "As Long As You Aren't One of Us, Then Sure We'll Leave You Behind."

Teachers are of various strengths, weaknesses, and levels of proformance. With the low salaries already paid to those controlling the minds of our youth, must we impose upon them unfair, unnecessary, unproductive, and ultimately damaging systems? As far as any sort of national or even regional restriction on teaching goes, there is damage done to the work and learning in the classroom. Consider in Florida the near continuous criticism for the regional test, the FCAT. While testing itself is a necessary evil and regional and national testing, while less necessary, could still be argued to do more good than bad, the same simply cannot be said for a national curriculum. Elementary schooling and, to a lesser extent, all non-collegiate schooling is more about learning how to learn than the actual information bestowed upon the student. A show like Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? makes it apparent what all sorts of pieces of information are taught to kids in elementary schools on the national level. Rather than criticizing this abundance of data that we will all grow to likely forget by our thirties when we might actually find ourselves on the program (hence its point), this diversity should be savored and supported. Certain teachers are good at teaching specific topics and specialization is an action that follows us through schooling, as what might be seen as a day care in kindergarten becomes a near college-setting for many in AP classes in their junior or senior years. To prevent teachers from teaching what they can teach best will be detrimental, preventing them from teaching students how to learn: the more important knowledge than any specific curriculum.

Why even would one wish to create a national curriculum? Is there belief in the fairness of such a field? The creation of a even level of understanding amongst all people in local schools nationwide? One of the horrible truths that America has consistently attempted to forget for its whole history has been the knowledge that inequalities exist. Even with a national curriculum, bad teachers will still plague students with a lack of knowledge and bad grades to boot and there will still be those among us who cannot make the best use of their academic potential. It is a normal and expected thought that questions about a national curriculum might be asked because America as a state has always been overly in love with patriotism and seen national plans as the answer to all its issues--simply consider the diminishment of states' rights over the country's two hundred and forty years. However, while the problems with a national curriculum are very real and challenging, the benefits are illusory, simply bad assumptions that implementation would show to fall through. For this reason, perhaps more than any other, the same national curriculum should not be considered for a nation. In fact there are little if any real reasons to support such a consideration.

All good days come to a close.

2011-08-26T12:00:00.000-07:00

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.

I feel like I'm dreaming. I think two pages are missing from my notebook; one has on it a very important poem to me. One of my mother's cats has flown the coop; I wonder if I'll ever see any of them again. I'm not eating much; not hungry much. Everything just feels shimmery around the edges like this laptop screen. I feel like I'm dreaming. I'm not sure I like the way my life has turned. I want this to be a dream. You're dreaming, this is just as real as any other part of existence. Phantom pains still reappear in my right middle finger and foot; what an odd combination. That poem was very important to me. It was a breakthrough piece. I'm maybe not eating enough...but I'm not hungry... Will Snowball ever come back to play with the girl cat Marble? Why does life feel all odd and out of whack? What is this.

I have a lot on my mind. It's sitting there, like the earth on Atlas's shoulders, and bits and pieces of it are really starting to bother me. The overwhelming feeling of uselessness. Why did I have to get so dark? I'm here in a room with all the lights out writing out my individual depressions. That fucking poem! If only I had forgotten it, not noticing when it went missing, not having to put myself through counting all 58 pages of what is supposed to be a sixty page notebook. It was a poem referencing, in my memory, a "locked door mystery" and not I can't seem to figure out how the pages came off without leaving at scraps of paper in the spiral and without taking off the cover or back cover (the latter of which did just come off and set off a chain reaction that led me to start freaking out about this damn poem).

I've just finished the third volume of Transmetropolitan and R.O. Blechman's Dear James. I'm reading The Mayor's Tongue, the next volume of Transmet, The Gum Thief, and Nicholson Baker's U and I and Checkpoint. This is a way to pass the time. It perhaps gets one's mind off of the poem that is gone. For class, I've read the first chapter of Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism, and loved it, truly surprised to find that literary focus I did not know the man had. I'm putting on preseason football or other sports for the same reason...To make the world spin. This is coming out much more pessimistic than I had hoped. And yet the time must get away somehow--I feel rudderless, unsure of what I am trying to accomplish at any given moment. On campus or the town with a plan, I'm fine, it's now, nights in front of my keyboard or behind a book or not being able to sleep that it gets to me. I termed it to my mum "homesickness," but it's not that so much as unfamiliarity, as if I've been dropped into a world that I don't understand the inner workings of. I feel like I'm dreaming.

In creeps perhaps too much repetition. To think that a few hours ago I was in a very strong feeling of happiness. It's these sorts of days that make you realize there is something in your head that's you and it's not anyone else but it is similar to some people and of course if you didn't have it you wouldn't be you, but you're crazy. Insanity runs among artists, Mark Vonnegut surmised, because the other crazies don't get laid. It's the ones who can make things that reproduce and so it's those that continue to flourish. I'm sure that's bad evolution and it also implies that reproduction has to do with artistic talent, which I might question. Maybe the world has changed since Mark's time. The world has changed since the time of Said's Culture and Imperialism, where a book like Kim or Robinson Crusoe helped in fact shape the world or at least the worldview. Said's arguments for the impact of culture on empire are not only interesting because of their reference to the specific word "empire" which Bret Easton Ellis's online presence (95% twitter?) is making use of in his own way, but because it shows to some extent that art really does do something. The age old Auden quote "poetry makes nothing happen" glimmers in the mind and you realize he's wrong, it once did and still can, but the rules of the game have changed. When you were reading novels maybe in your life but that was probably it, they impacted you. When you listen to the 24 hour news channels like one might today you are less bound to see your world as wrapped up in whatever art you are studying is.

I don't know if I'm scared or stupid. That could be a poem or a novel or a concept album. It could be a poster that was also a comic book. In U and I Nicholson Baker recounts a dream of looking at a popup book of criticism on Melville in a bookstore. A white whale of "Kleenex" lies jumping out of the page at you. Said refers to the "whale" as society and getting inside or out of it. He's actually referring to Salman Rushdie referring to George Orwell. It's a long rabbit hole, it's a hall of mirrors. I feel like I'm dreaming perhaps in Baker's dream and I will walk into a bookstore and see him with his book there and wake up at the bottom of this hole where the hare has brought down one of the my favorites of my new poems scrunched up between his teeth. Writing and losing that writing is like leaving behind a part of yourself, not something even as "significant" as even your spleen, but perhaps the part of you that suddenly realizes that you are dreaming and finally pulls you out. This is coming across all ripoff Inception-like but what the fuck are you going to do. I don't know if I'm scared or stupid but I feel like I'm dreaming.

Perhaps, someone is calling on the phone line to my brain, you can quit this odd pity parade. It's not nearly as artistic as you feel it seems. These are simply new images from that feeling of your entire life, which you localized as being how you felt in a foreign language: treading water and you don't know how long you can keep it up. Or worse. Drowning.

We now interrupt this uninteresting narrative, this terrifyingly dull bookend where the artist as much as told you he phoned it in, referring at one to a phone line and writing this into the text like some sort of mad man which was relevant because he had already called himself crazy, to bring you a few ideas of the future. We control the narrative, do not adjust your eye glasses, the past, present, and future are ours to behold and betake and beget. To such an extent that we can say words that are inaccurately placed for meaning but correctly for order, in come all the bees and we take their honey. We betake ourselves to the hive once they're gone.

The plan, as of now, is to do some "rare books" reports, recounting my days in Smathers Library in the rare manuscripts area going through stuff I can't simply check out. These days have not yet begun. Dialogue will likely return, hopefully with more edge, more swagger, and perhaps the least likely of them all (and I'd still give it over a fifty percent shot) are some visual ideas I've been considering. However, if any of these end up coming out small and minor in my creating them, they could of course end up on the tumblr. I'm closing the gate now, to be opened soon perhaps but not left open as it has been, it's been fun, innovative, interesting and something I truly enjoyed doing, but my life is moving on (I feel like I'm dreaming, I might be scared or stupid) and so I will with it. Run away from all these missing objects and perhaps you find them. And to leave with the sort of feeling I'd rather this whole post had had I will say "one can at least hope."

STATS
nearly 43,400 words. 31 days with a post going live at 3:00 PM EST. a start. definitely that. it's a finish as well, but i can't help now but look to november. something may be brewing.

The Way of the Game

2011-08-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Think about the different ways a sport impacts a person. In basketball a dunk is an impacting play to watch, but actually has very little influence on a game. In football, a great play can be made defensively that ends up mattering very little, but often times the "ohhs" and "ahs" for offensive greatness results in at least the field position for a field goal. In baseball, home runs are great but the "hardest" play that is still regularly turned is the triple--I put "hardest" in scare quotes because when it comes down to it, most every triple can be linked at least partially to bad fielding, if the outfielder was on the ball, maybe he doesn't get to it, but he keeps you on second--and yet you can get stranded there on third base.

While I will mention as an apology the "anthropology of sports" should be and will be in the future about my own investigations into international sport as well as a heightened interest in something like hockey (and basketball too, but that I have been watching more than usual which has allowed me to think about it more, which is why I've already dropped in a none too original idea about the sport that I've gathered), but I can't give you that right now and since the college semester is starting up I won't be able to give you that any time soon. I'm just going to be able to burn off the last past tomorrow night and maybe Friday morning, hopefully making it nice and long and beautiful close to this self-indulgent activity of making too long blog posts on a blog no one reads for not even a calendar month but at least 31 consecutive days.

Tonight, or rather the night that officially ended three minutes ago, as it went on midnight in the eastern states, I watched the Rays win a game in the bottom of the tenth inning against the Tigers on a beaten out fielder's choice play, where Sean Rodriguez was lucky enough to have the play for the out come to second, where he could get to the base first. If Brandon Inge had run to third or made the throw to first, chances are the game would have gone on into the eleventh inning, and chances are, in my opinion, the Rays would have eventually lost, what with having just lost two close until the end games to the Tigers. So I got to thinking about the way that individual plays can impact games. In baseball, as I've illustrated, a play that turns out to really just be bad luck on the third baseman, who doesn't exactly do anything wrong (although I would claim the throw to second was a bad decision, there was no error or bad hop or something that literally happened to bring the game to this end), can end a game and elicit the team's celebration.

In football, of course, you can have the equivalent of the walk-off, with the last play of the game scoring or the sudden death overtime and in basketball you do have the buzzer beater, but nothing quite corresponds to baseball, where if you are going to win, in extra innings, you are going to do it in style. Because a win in extra innings in baseball does not compare to football's field goals to win the overtime (a rule that the NFL is considering changing and has changed for post-season, but hasn't been tested yet, since no playoff games have gone into overtime since the rule change). It's always great. No matter how you do it. A buzzer beater at the end of a basketball game is, in my opinion, one of the hardest plays in that sport: at the most tense point in the game you have to accomplish what virtually any sport is ultimately about, scoring! Whereas the baseball play can be anything, even something as simple as a mistake by an infielder or a ball through the legs and you have something that'll make the papers and probably Baseball Tonight.

For me, this goes along with what baseball really is. Because it's about getting screwed over by the human element just as much as it is about getting the human flaw in your favor. No one is going to say that they react the same way to a blown call that benefits them as they do to one that hurts their team unless they are going to lie. And baseball is the land of blown calls, where even the balls and strikes are variant from game to game and everyone looks for an umpire who simply calls them "consistently" rather than correctly because no one gets it right. I've said before (maybe even here!) that baseball umpires are the worst in major sports in the US and they are, but ironically that's exactly what you would expect from the game. It fits perfectly with the fact that a simple bad choice of where to throw the ball can lose you the game as well. Not a bad throw...a bad throw can lose the game in pretty much any sport that involves throwing, but a bad choice. Inge fires the ball down to second base without much difficulty, it just so happens that Sean Rodriguez has gotten a better than average jump on the play and has hustled his way into victory.

It's a quirk. The kind of thing that someone who writes a frequent feature on his or her blog like this is going to be inclined to liken to life itself, where you can feel like you're tied but playing well one minute and without making any mistakes you can have lost the next, but I'm not going to do that because it's a cliché, I'm simply going to mention it as a cliché and leave it be. ;) What this really has to do with is baseball. Not life. Being the oldest of the major American sports, baseball finds itself as the most conservative, which gives it that feel of old time humanity, working with your hands in your blue collar. It shows, it actually does, even today when replay makes its occasional appearance in the game so terribly dominated by the men in blue (not the Cubs!), the pure age of it, the way that when something doesn't go your way you simply have to smile, shake it off, or not, but that's all you can do. Shake it off. Keep playing or get off the field. All the while thinking, "That's baseball."

Autopsy, the offseason

2011-08-24T12:00:00.000-07:00

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.

This is "Where I'm From" where I just sort of talk about stuff for a thousand odd words. We're getting to the nitty-gritty end of "blogaday," I imagine it is my own version of "Brand New Day" which restructured Spider-Man and his comics for forty odd issues. "Blogaday" was here daily for a month. Or at least will have been. That is something to be proud of, I feel.

Autopsy Presents wasn't a one-off situation either. I thought of it like Marvel Comics Presents or some sort of anthology comic, the sort of concept I'd like to gamble on. Consider getting a big name to produce a comic, presenting new writers and artists out into the world. I'm sure it's been done and failed and maybe succeeded for some people, but I dream about that sort of thing.

A note from my little pink pocket spiral I wrote today: "imitator in prose now as well as poetry; let's hope, like we do with them all, that this is some self-realization, a greater understanding of my work, than the more likely scene of regression." Meaning, of course, that I would like to think that my recent obsession with structures of novels and how I might use them is not a recent occurrence but rather something of which until now I have not been aware.

I'm reading U and I: a true story and Dear James which oddly echo. As both are about writing or at least art-making, I see no better space to discuss them while reading than in Autopsy's little bookend. (It's also mainly the former book that inspired the previous quote.) Nicholson Baker's nonfiction is not all that much different but it's perhaps less fluffy. Reading it now, after A Box of Matches and Vox (my last two by Baker), it's more difficult to get through, but that's my problem. This could be simply early Baker, because when I think back to reading The Mezzanine, I do remember the same sort of complexity of language.

Dear James is also a good match for Pictures that Tick; I read and linked an Ian Gibson interview in a post about The Ballad of Halo Jones and I've become interested in reading the words of artists, as I feel my poetry is more akin to something visual or illustrative than what I get from actual writers' interviews. Pictures that Tick has these cool, little almost poems written before the various comic pieces, and it was really a stroke of luck to find Dear James in a dollar store no less. Dear James is even more relevant to me and my art, as it is modeled after Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, only written for a young illustrator instead. I was attracted by the John Ashbery quote on the back cover that said exactly what I've been thinking: that this type of book was larger than the immediate purpose. And R.O. Blechman, who wrote it, and I probably should have mentioned him before now, would ultimately agree with me, I believe. He's talking about all this stuff in the book, just like you would expect from an artist who is writing a book. Referring specifically to multiple focuses for an artist.

Multiple focuses can mean any number of things, both structural and content-wise. A book like The Gum Thief might look like every other novel on the bookshelf, but reading it you realize its epistolary form is quite odd, consisting of almost a scrapbook potentially made by one of the characters and a journal, various correspondences, and parts of a novel. Compare this with Douglas Coupland's more outlandish projects, such as chewing up his novels to make his personal version of wasp nests from them. These two projects show the great difference in range that an artist can create, by innovating both in how one writes and how one views the paper being written. Another comparison can be made of earlier Coupland, with a book like Girlfriend in a Coma being called "when Douglas Coupland got metaphysical," content changes also reflect an artist either shift or broadening in over all scope.

Having written a book and then evolved artistically quite a bit (or so I believe), these sorts of concepts interest me. Baker talks about in U and I, the feeling that, having written something, you cannot return to it unless you wish to lessen it, but for me this is not always true. Returning to a concept shows a preoccupation that interests me as a writer for I have preoccupations of my own which I often revisit, as loyal readers of this blog might know. The important part is to find the unique preoccupation: for Milligan in a couple of comics' series his preoccupation is with a monster that sucks out the brain of its victims. For me, this passes the lit-mus test for originality with preoccupation. I think you find the idea of something sucking out our brains throughout weird fiction, so you can see you walk quite the fine line.

When I consider my second book or perhaps second "work," I begin to think a lot about this progression. One can show stasis through a preoccupation, while moving out into completely new directions. But while I do have ideas that recur to me, a good many of them are not in the book anyway, so I am not dealing with any "written preoccupations" at least in my books. I foresee them, as another badge to earn as a writer, and can already predict their existence, but they are somehow too personal, for to write about my preoccupations in my own work is to write about myself in ways that I am unnecessarily overly-attached to, hence preoccupied. Ultimately, I feel these images are rarely happy (unless brain suckers make you crack a smile), so to write these preoccupations or rather to create the preoccupations through writing would be to hold up a dark mirror, so an externalized existence of some of my worst fears.

In closing, I recall the subtitle to my most recent "long" unfinished work of fiction. Smitten is or at least was also known as "my worst nightmare."

From my abandoned NaNoWriMo

2011-08-23T19:25:00.000-07:00

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.

We've got nearly 2500 words coming at you in this post. First some notes: Mr. Ian Woon is an anagram of NaNoWriMo and was a character name I read about while writing my book and decided I would go ahead and throw my own body to the name. Victor is essentially Victor Ward, although I am interested in perhaps refining the concept of this for Chasing Victor, where the character would be more inspired by than pilfered from Bret Easton Ellis's Glamorama. The brief cameo appearance of "Amanda" is a reference to Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, in a similar fashion. I intended to steal her outright, but due to the nature of the scene, I feel like there's not all that much I've literally pilfered except for the name. So while I think you are able to read the book and this section and consider the two the same character, I'm not sure I feel bad about ripping off McInerney, because I would claim I haven't Now, onward and wayward into the story. Not going to write anything after these, but I'd be happy to interview in the comments section.

(narrated by the inimitable actor Mr. Ian Woon)

This is how you make someone fall in love with you.

At first meeting you must say that you are so honored to be in their presence, to be working with them, to be a subject of them; be as aggrandizing as you possibly can. No matter what people say, they all react the same way to grandiose remarks in their direction. The more you learn about this person, the more you pick and choose on your compliments. It is only a comment on something dear that will be remembered, so knowing what someone wants, what someone loves, what someone strives to accomplish does wonders for his or her feelings towards you.

It is always easier to make someone fall for you if they don’t know who you are, but that doesn’t make it all that simple. One still has to form the perfect blend of the person they are, the person they want, and the person that they’ve always wanted to be. But be cautious, do not just decide you want someone to love you as if it were a quick, meaningless decision to make. The fact of the matter is, it is quite possible that this person will never stop loving you, and it is much harder to brainwash yourself in much the same fashion.

There are steps to be followed, perhaps, but they vary drastically. What is always first is establishing their identity. For simplicity’s sake a large amount of personalities can be classified as male or female, no matter the gender of the person, and utilizing the most sexist of steriotypes. When you are trying to sketch a person, it is a lot easier to take the ethical fall and profile as much as possible. In this way, you have a quick checklist to run through, because the hardest part of defining someone is knowing where to begin. Of course it is almost always best to keep this list secret, so subtlety is a necessity.

Once you’ve roughly painted the borders of a person and once you’ve gotten to know them on a somewhat personal level, the movement to detail is a rough one. A sure fire way to help establish yourself in their mind is to share fantasies of any sort, but this also runs the risk of making yourself known. When people know that you want them, it becomes a lot harder for you to create anything on their end, unless it is already there, and also creates a sort of shield, since you will most likely get some sort of stalker treatment.

But other than all that, the number one rule is not to change the subject if the subject is your prospective lover. People love to speak about themselves, because people love to lie about themselves. Ultimately and perhaps ironically, a lack of memorable prior contact becomes all the more useful in baiting the hook. If you know this person more well than he or she thinks and you can catch this person in a lie, you are at an advantage. However, just let it go, because making any comment will definitely move the spotlight onto you, which makes it hard to stay as molding clay and basically makes who you are a statue.

“You’re very good at acting as an actor.” Victor said to me one night after we’d eaten out somewhere expensive and picked up a couple of girls. That was hours ago then, so I guess it was a morning. Victor’s one night bride had all of about three roles to her name, but had the figure of Helen of fucking Troy and a face that it wouldn’t be hard to project someone else on.

My woman, I’d met her before, at a modeling show in Manhattan, where she turned me down for drinks after, and I can’t help but think that she only said yes now so that she could get to Victor, but I can’t blame her, since we’re playing the same game, and the sex was fine enough. Her name was Amanda and she said that I reminded her of her husband, who she might or might not have been divorced from, and the only answer she had for me, when I asked why she was so far from home, was that Paris was her only home these days, and New York was just as different from France as anywhere else. Debating whether or not to tear that statement apart, I let her get me up again, and we passed more time that way, but my mind wasn’t really in it. Then I drove her to some street from which she could safely whore her way into a hotel for the night and made a call back on Victor and he told me I was good at acting like I was acting, which I couldn’t quite decipher as either a compliment or an insult.

“Yeah, I guess I am,” I said, looking for something to give him away. “Have you worked with the director before?” but of course I know he hasn’t, I know every damn thing about the man, so it’s a good thing he doesn’t have the memory to notice.

“No, hadn’t even heard of him until I got a call about this script, read it, loved it.” He’s so full of shit, the lines he’s flubbed, sometimes I have to question whether or not he could read. Victor is the prime example of someone who would already have died if he wasn’t so drop dead gorgeous.

“I was a cashier in one of his short films. I can’t think of the name, but it’s the one that put him on the map at that film festival.” This is only mostly a lie, so I just keep digging the hole. “Do you know the one I’m talking about? Story had to do with a penny I think. I had like two and a half lines.” A contradiction dawns on me, him saying he’d never heard of the director and me asking whether he knows this film, but I seriously doubt he’ll pick up on it, when he does.

“No, no, Ian, like I said, I’d never heard of the man, haven’t seen a single bit of film from the man. But interesting,” he pauses and I can’t help but look at his face, “you were playing a cashier then, nameless I’d assume, and now you’re Mr. Ian Woon.” And then something I never expected to hear from someone like him. “Do you ever get your people mixed up? Acting full-time in roles you never really leave, have you ever forgotten who you actually are?”

(narrated by the great detective Jack Kraloni)

I don’t think there was anything womblike about that whole setting, but it made me think about my parents, being so close to death there. Obviously they’d been gone for less time back then. I remembered a moment, an argument, where I had run out of the room and my father had looked at my mother and just stopped. A few seconds later he said he was sorry for everything he had ever done, would ever do, and he went out for a walk.

Course that time he came back, but the way memories fuse together, gets so they’re about as reputable as poems. With a son of my own, I try to remember the things my father did that I enjoyed, that I would like to pass on. It is a hard thing, since we are so alike, for me to push past all it is that I want to change, but sometimes you just have to remember the dead the best way you can.

I wrote him a letter and left it on his grave. I wonder if someone might come up upon it one day and read it. There is a certain feeling here, not unlike sending out a message in a bottle from somewhere other than a near inescapable desert island where your ship has wrecked. It took me a while to come up with the words and I put them down on a Vegas postcard after writing them on paper a few times. My father once told me that he’d rather write than speak, because he was never good thinking on his feet. This was, of course, a lie; you would notice if you ever saw him see a criminal in the middle of the road, whether it be a crime in front of him or a recognizable face, he would take off in spite of whatever age he might have been.

What I remember I try not to let bother me, because my memory has never been overly sound. There’s this image I see of a book somewhere open, empty pages, and someone takes a quill, and fills it with what looks like blood, and this person begins to write in a cursive scrawl much too complex for my decipherment, what this feels like is me walking in on my parents during one of their soft periods, and I feel like I need to just turn around and let things go their way, but this person beckons me forward. There’s a cloak, I think, that’s why I can’t tell the gender. I walk up to the book and notice how big it really is, so much so that it was farther away than I thought to make it the size it appeared.

That’s about where I realize this is a dream and I can imagine this kid I met out there, name of Paul, typing away at a computer in much the same way this guy is writing. Stroke by stroke, the words, sentences, paragraphs; slowly whole stories appear. At times like these, you can’t help but think back on the whole creative process. The ability to just talk so much about other people, it seems to be caused by some kind of hole in the person, something that’s missing, its absence causing a searching of terrains, of possibilities, to find a cap to that hole, although nothing will ever fit.

When my father died, I kept looking for a killer that now I can’t believe was ever there, but I also went out in search of someone else to model myself on, someone else who I could strive to be. Shamefully I’ll tell you I met O’Connell about this time and he’s got at least five years on me, which possibly means I just latched onto him because he was there, and I guess for that I should probably feel sorry. But when you look back from the edge, when you’ve been holding onto the cliff face, you lose a little of the feeling in your hands and arms and you start to care less about who you owe apologies to.

In that dream, this person starts writing things I can’t read on the paper, it feels almost as if I’m bleeding out slowly, with the ink that makes it onto the paper, I’m losing something here, but I hope there’s something to be gained, a benefit to the whole experience. That’s the way it’s all supposed to go down, you get something in the end. And I’m looking up to the sky which is reddening with a setting sun and as I look down I notice that I’m in a desert and this person keeps writing, but the words are disappearing as more are written, as if they are wiping themselves away.

And I wonder, in those words being written, the stories being told, what all there is said. What all has been done.

(narrated by the estimable gentleman Pasha Constantine)

Back, when I was very young, when I first learned how to write, I used to copy out words from the dictionary. The words I actually knew, because I still couldn’t read. I would ask my mother if she was home and she would say, “This one right here,” point to the book, “you know this one,” and she’d have me sound it out for her. But when she wasn’t around, I would go to my father. He would often give me one of various four letter words I didn’t know, but more commonly he’d just point somewhere in the book and say the word. Even if I didn’t know it, it felt better when he would just tell me how it sounded.

And maybe none of that happened, because I’m some sort of wandering Jew and when I was a lad we had no dictionaries, but believe what you will, I have so many memories these days, I have no way of telling you what’s true, what’s false. Your guess is as good as mine and perhaps better since I’m biased to see myself favorably. My point being then, that that’s what this feels like. Writing without knowing what the words actually mean.

I must admit, I liked my father’s minimalism for little reason other than it was less work on me, but there was a reason I truly hated pronouncing words I didn’t know. Even then I was predicting class period readings and all the snickers when you said something wrong; being a reader now for most all of my life, I still have a fear of not knowing how to pronounce something that has jumped from the reading to the verbal vocabulary.

Or, when I first learned who I was, I picked up my makeshift chisel and I cut into the stone of my cave a symbol. And looking up to that wall, night after night, my wife with me, or whatever you might call her in a time before marriage, I would think about my existence. And now, still here, perhaps I go back there every now and then. Possibly it is that I look up at that cave ceiling and I think about the thrill of the moment. The thought rushing through my head that this was somehow something else, something new.

Writing. It makes up me no matter which way you look at it, whether here or there, when I fill my quill, and I set it down, I begin to spill myself on the page. So far I show no sign of running dry.

A Box of Blogposts

2011-08-22T12:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Nicholson Baker's A Box of Matches has all the tracings of an actual blogging event. A man gets up early each morning, lights a fire in the fireplace with a match from a certain box and types off his thoughts' morning meanderings while it's still dark outside. Like many of Baker's books, it encounters the divide of fiction and fact, as the book is essentially a novel, but isn't really written like any novel ever is. Nothing could be said to "happen" in A Box of Matches, but we are treated to what we can only take to be Baker's wit, just as we've seen in books like The Mezzanine and Room Temperature (of which I've only read the former), showing through characters like a bad disguise.

Perhaps no fiction writer could lay claim to the idea that, rather than telling stories, one finds the truth in the lie in this medium more than Baker, who presents all kinds of essentially factual thoughts within his novels, yet placing them often in relatively mundane trappings. There is another Baker who writes "erotic" novels, if they can be called that, which showcase a different piece of clothing, if you will, for his style of writing. Sharing thoughts, opinions, realizations, in the way that I pick up from certain translations of Murakami Haruki. One of my stories in my book, called "Tigger" which I think I've mentioned before, is Bakeresque in that I'm writing a lot about what I know. The mechanization of an individual life can be noted and recorded. This is how Nicholson Baker writes, although there are distinctions to be made. It's not how most people do or rather it's not how I tend to write what I think of as books and how I would imagine the majority of other people don't. I actually don't know how Nicholson Baker writes. Perhaps I should say "Nicholson Baker's books appear to be written in a way that most books aren't." But I would have to specify his novels; I haven't read any of his non-fiction.

In Good Ole Jack, my first ever long piece of fiction, or at least long piece I finished (I think it came to maybe sixty pages), I was at my most Baker when Jack had a thought that was perfectly mine. Considering the last thing we remember when we sleep, I often find myself asking this self-referencing question in bed "Will I remember asking this question in the morning?" Of course, I've become aware of this tactic of mine, but I never think about it in the morning waking up, and I can never remember if I've done it just the night before or a week or a year ago, and it has become a personal talking point, the kind of obsession that I could always revisit in my art (although I haven't).

Baker might make up the world he tells us, but the ideas of A Box of Matches ring as true as fiction ever can. The narrator of the novel has a relatively new pet duck who he begins to learn how to treat during the depths of winter. No, the duck doesn't get sick, it doesn't give birth to ducklings or run away--these are the bits and pieces we expect from narrative. What truly stuns me is simply the relative absence of conflict from Baker's novels, how they form from bits and pieces of thought and yet do not become large tomes of boredom, at least for a reader like me. Wikipedia used to have a quote from Stephen King, famously comparing Baker's Vox, a book that functions as a transcript of two people who've met by way of a sex phone line to a fingernail paring. So there are the detractors. Which is a good thing, to be beloved by all is often to be unimportant to the masses: Baker's style of writing is not only unique, but in my opinion, groundbreaking.

The Mezzanine, written in 1988, comes as close to what an instantaneous twitter or blogfeed going off in someone's head would be like. I feel as if his first books were written without precedent, the world had yet to come up with a comparison for them, and still hasn't--I have to imagine a potential corollary, because one is forced to ask a question of an entire novel that merely consists of a character's thoughts over the span of maybe twenty minutes, "How is this being written down?" That is the one question we do not ask when it comes to A Box of Matches.

Perhaps that's the oddest bit, because in explaining how the book is being written, Baker creates perhaps the oddest divide of fact and fiction. For if fiction is actually true, it's fact, ain't it? Consider the frame, as stated earlier, of a man waking up early in the morning to light a fire in the fireplace with a match from a match box and then type up his thoughts. I'm not sure a computer is ever particularly mentioned, but one imagines a laptop and the narrator sitting on the couch typing just as I am now. What we don't know is precisely how Baker actually wrote the book. It would be ironic if he did it longhand, but that's not likely; still if he wrote it on a computer in the wee hours of the morning, would it make that part of the book true? Would Baker himself, as well as his character, be narrating?

For a person who writes his blog under the banner of apologizing for your boredom, it is perhaps not surprising that I am interested in Baker's new style of almost non-narrative. I have often been upset with the idea that conflict is a necessary part of fiction. Sure, I am willing to write stories with conflict, but often I am drawn to somehow write a novel that avoids it. To write, you might say, a Nicholson Baker novel. The only fault being that the only person who can write books like Nicholson Baker is Nicholson Baker.

Chronological Hyperawareness

2011-08-21T12:00:00.000-07:00

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.

I think we can begin with a Warren Ellis quote from here:

My name's Warren Ellis. I'm mostly a science fiction writer. I'm sometimes also a crime writer. These are essentially the same thing.

Skreemer is a science fiction crime limited series comic book. What this means is that it is a preordained six issues long, creating similarities with both the graphic novel and the ongoing series. The length is set and it is unlikely that the comic will get cancelled in just the six issues it will have published, so there is little reason to pander for sales (if Skreemer were a Marvel comic I could say "there is little reason for an appearance by Wolverine" rather than "pander for sales), but even six-months serialization changes the work somehow. I think I've already made the comparison, but Skreemer is like The Green Mile while the normal graphic novel would be like Insomnia. It's like reading a book where every chapter shows some sort of knowledge of the cliffhanger. Not that every chapter ends on a cliffhanger, but that the cliffhanger would have a purpose--whereas in a novel the cliffhanger can only cause you to turn the page.

But this is not the only way Skreemer can be defined. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book for me is the narrative form. In Skreemer, a technique that was perhaps first used by Alan Moore in, I believe, the fourth issue of Watchmen, which is effectively the idea of forming a comic story somewhat regardless of chronology, regardless of time. In Milligan's book, this is framed by a narrator named (aptly) Peter Finnegan, who tells us how if we can foresee the future then it must remain static, and belief in both an omnipotent god and free will causes one to think that that god gave up the chance to know the future, so that we might write it. History and the writing of the past, then, as Milligan would have it, can almost be seen as putting ourselves in near godly status. This is an inversion of a the god-view of the writer. While we might argue that the writer who can say have there be light in a story by writing "God said let there be light" or even simply "there was light" is very god-like, Milligan says that the story teller who is recounting a past that has already happened is in fact more like a god. This person must temporarily forget the future if you will so that they might tell the story thus far, mirroring what a god must do to create free will.

As far as design goes, this set up allows for the classic style of compounded narrative. Many pieces of narrative art have used this idea without necessarily being connected to breaking up time itself in the narrative (in contrast to a book like Slaughterhouse-Five which does use the same sort of lack of chronological awareness...or perhaps a hyper-awareness of time...). Both a film like Inception and a literary work like the third chapter of Brave New World create tensions between multiple narratives in a shifting formation. For Brave New World this descends into chaos, which very much may have been Aldous Huxley's point in the chapter but does not help someone reading the book because it was assigned by their eighth grade teacher. In contrast, Inception falls into a parody of complete understanding: one can't help but laugh when seeing the van falling towards the water for the one hundred and fiftieth time. Ultimately both Brave New World and Inception are great works in their respective mediums, but one can't help but find their sort of story switching as somewhat ill-fitting.

For me, at least, Skreemer sealed the deal for comics when it comes to blowing up a time narrative. A picture may be worth a thousand words and if so then it must have memory power. It's a lot easier to know what story is being told when you can recognize distinct characters even if the characters are simply aged versions of themselves. This deals with the difficulty of understanding with a book like Brave New World, while always introducing new story in contrast to the largely stagnant parts of Inception. The concept of a comic book could also solve the minor flaw in Inception, as a relatively boring storyline, such as a van falling into a body of water in super slow motion, can be delegated to a minor position in the book. Consider a revolving panel as you turn through the pages showing this van moving ever so slowly closer to the water. Because a comic can, in a way, show more than one narrative at once, it places itself in a stronger position than a film, which could perhaps use a split screen set up, but as a terminating medium (in comparison to a book or comic which you can go back and reread something, in film, I think most people would agree that needing to rewind the movie to catch something would be a flaw in the narrative--speaking of something necessary to enjoy the film, rather than the sort of stuff that foreshadows a twist, surprise, or just normal ending only after you've seen the film) movies do not allow the eye to move all around and pick up on all the different stories being told while attaching no certain piece of hierarchy to the narrative.

It's fitting that I've already quoted Warren Ellis, because this is what he's written about comics--the way panels can show time in completely different ways. Turning the page can push us forward a few minutes or back centuries. I could imagine a comic that is built on no clear-cut narrative, no direct way to follow the panels, no order. Made out of colliding stories, it would simply show them revolving around the page, a few panels devoted to each story, somehow themselves scattered and hard to understand. Skreemer is strongly influenced by Finnegans Wake and one can't help but imagine a comic book written and illustrated with the sole purpose of being just as difficult as Joyce, just as full of possibility for discussion and understanding.

For me, the interest in all this is not purely as an art consumer or, if you will, connoisseur but rather also as an artist. Because one area of my poetry that I've truly become interested in is not so much in how it is placed on the page but in how it progresses page to page. I think I've spoken here about a poem in comic book form, not illustrated but somehow paneled. I'm still not sure how this would turn out, but I have ideas. And Skreemer was another way to meditate on the future of my art.

It's not just me.

2011-08-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Back in the days of the late thirties, this was important, what with however many stories we have of Hitler and the Olympics, but even today there are interesting combinations to consider. With the world potentially on its way to a new bipolarity, China rising, and the US (mainly due to the hard work of congress) falling, one can't help but feel the tension of something more than the game when talking about Chinese-American sporting events.

And why not? It's not like we have little to talk about. With the NBA lock-out, there's a huge continuing story about every NBA player who wants to get paid to play next year looking to Europe. The place to go would be potentially China (if it were not for a repressive government and pollution you could almost cut out the "potentially"), a beneficial act for all involved, what with Chinese basketball perhaps gaining some international popularity as well as skill set from the best in the world and the Americans increasing a new national brand. Jersey sales always go threw the roof when you play somewhere new, don't you know? And consider if you play somewhere with one billion people?

So international play on its own can be looked at from both political and economic aspects. First of all, professional sports is about money second only to the love of the game and what is a player's popularity but his (or her) own personal play of politics? In Slowness, Milan Kundera talks about "the dancer," the politician who acts only as if in response to the song of the nation, making no actions of his own, other than the ones that the public's eye dictates. Kundera presents the view or at least his character presents the view as a negative, akin to Salinger's phonies. The way athletes must always come up and explain away their controversial opinions mirrors best perhaps that of the politician. Even at the place where politics and sports collide, there is a somber "way of doing things." This is why President Obama can make a joke about his home team the Chicago Bears acquiring the Super Bowl defending and highly approved quarterback of the Green Bay Packers, Aaron Rodgers, only if he follows up with an amendment stating that he wanted Rodgers to back-up the Bears' current QB, the much maligned but overwhelmingly talented Jake Cutler. It's obvious that Barack was making a joke wanting Rodgers to be the starter for his team, but even in sports, he was forced to play the Bernie Goldberg who I think I'm not misquoting when I say "I don't believe that, but that's what I'm going to tell you."

When it comes to China and the United States (mustn't say America, if I can remember, that's the name of a pair of continents) there's a little bit of back story that I'm sure you know better than I do. Namely, China owns a whole buttload of the US debt and that debt just recently got downgraded by a bigwig agency that does that sort of thing. So I guess the issue is that it appears less likely, perhaps a thousandth of a percentile less likely, that China is getting their money. How does this boil into the sports scene? Multiple ways. Both in literal stands framed on sports and in the media's framing of sports actions.

Consider the following: China is, in fact, regardless of the US's debt, somewhat in competition with the United States for the biggest economy in the world. China, of course, has maybe four times as many people as the USA, so I tend to think, you know, go for it, it won't matter if each of your people averages more than 25% of what the American citizen does. The important word, however, being "competition." Sports is not any different. From a national level, there are a lot of local economics tied up in sports. You have money for televising events, for people going to the games, and potentially the importation of rich individuals to play for your teams (consider the US's ability to draw in Pelé or David Beckham). China is trying to make rules now that will lock in any international players who come to the country to playing the whole season there. This is in reference to my above mention of NBA lockout and is somewhat crafty and somewhat stupid on China's part. Just as it would be a major slight towards the credibility of a franchise like the Yankees or the Red Sox to see Jorge Posada or David Ortiz in another team's (especially the other named team's) uniform, Kobe Bryant playing in China would be a big hit to the NBA if a half-season deal was reached to end this lockout.

This is both shrewd and dumb because China hasn't locked up any big names. While I would say it was mildly likely to see LeBron or Kobe in China to build their brand in the highest populated country in the world, I don't think there's any way they're going to go there if they know they're stuck. I termed it to a friend that this should have been a "fine print" deal. It would have been a killer play to find all these NBA players stuck in contract disputes trying to get back to a season that's already lost a lot of steam on account of it started five months late. It's like springing the trap before the mouse has been caught, you know, the cartoon move where the cheese ends up getting tossed up and into the rodent's hand by way of the the air rush from the flipping switch on the trap.

The media can color sports with politics as well. While I think we might seriously consider China's way of dealing with the lockout as a political story, the sports media cannot help but have it that every Chinese and American athletic controversy is due to the shaky relations between the countries. Perhaps they're right. I may be crazy. (But it just might be a lunatic...) Here's a story I'm not going to read that should tell you what I'm talking about. Fighting in sports can't be politics, to me. Unless you just go out there and fight... You can't play a game and keep a political agenda, because there is so much going on. Sports are, ultimately, based in part on violence. Losing your temper is normal. It might be frowned upon, but I just can't see storming the court as a type of protest. You're upset about the basketball game, not the global game of politics.

Where I'm From

2011-08-19T12:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Thomas Jefferson is the perfect representation of America: beautiful ideas colored by distasteful actions.

This is going to be an alternating assortment of thoughts presented artistically (not to say "well") and annotated link dumping, occasionally perhaps a blending of both. You have been warned.

I think the Jefferson bit ends up here. It's a little less developed there than above. I'm sure everyone is saying stuff like this. But then again, I love Jefferson. He's the one to which you can relate, rather than Washington, the statue, and Adams, the...I think I'll cut it there. Let's take a step back; I didn't mean the "statue" as a slight. I just mean, like, he pulled the Tom Brady, getting unanimously voted into office (USACiC or NFLMVP can both be put into six letter abbreviations that really don't make any sense, right? They're basically the same thing).

Pff. The sound of breathing out after holding a breath for a while, not very long, but a little while. Let's imagine that this post just did that. The idea being that, at least in the world as I see it, this sort of action is one of the ways we concentrate on the matter at hand, or change the subject of our minds. I'm just going to throw this out there: what is the poetry equivalent of the victorious tennis player signing the camera? That's the kind of swagger I want to capture in a segment of a future book called The State in Which I Hate You which is a parody title of Li-Young Lee's The City in Which I Love You, but playing it a bit different of the complete ripoff I did for the title of my first book. Which doesn't need another link here. It could be any of the segments, really, I think I wrote them out as "Man, by nature," "The Dust Bowl," Chasing Victor, "Iconoclasm," and "shoegaze." Obviously Chasing Victor has sort of evolved on its own, the Justin Timberlake of this group, but this book'll get written, and in all seriousness, with the sort of concision obsession I'm starting to get, cutting a whole chapter out of the book sounds like a real good idea. Sometimes. Writing sounds fun, easy, and enjoyable. Sometimes.

Sometimes. I once became very interested in the words created from "some." Somewhere, somehow, someday, sometime(s), something, someone, somebody, someplace. You start trying to list all of them and don't want to forget some and all of a sudden you realize you are listing all kinds of fake words. Somewhen, somedays, someother, somelover, somecarcus, somewritercan'thelpbutmakeajoke. Somedays is always the one that gets me because it's a Regina Spektor song. As you would know if you clicked. Or, you know, if you knew. I'm not saying I'm the only one holding this info before making clicking on a link.

It's getting much too late for this. I'm not sure if this is readable but at least it's not scrawled on a cocktail napkin and will probably be legible. Whose number is it that is formed by all the numbers rubbed off of napkins from bars? Grant Morrison could tell me. That seems like something I would think was cool in Doom Patrol. Sometimes, that is, it would be interesting. It would be "innovative." It would be that feeling I get where I think to myself, "just fucking wow. someone did that. wow." And yes--well, I'll admit I don't really know, but it just seems to fit--I think this in lowercase.

My interest in the words deriving from "some" had to do with a sentence. It was the final sentence of a book that was never written. Let me tell you, my mind is cluttered with a lot similar. "And somewhere, somewhen, somehow, someone was typing..." This was to be written over the dying corpse of Pandrio Androtti. I had forgotten about that. Not lying. I can't even remember how, can I say "I"?, I got shot in my office and bled out on the carpet. I mean. I'm not sure if that's what happened anyway, but I don't know what it was that took place to put me there. Maybe I never did. Hence "never written." I think I just realized I was imagining, even then, writing a comic book. Because you can't help but see that quote in a caption at the bottom of a panel pasted over a leg lying awkwardly and above the rest of a body bleeding out. Am I repeating myself?

When I read ketjak and then followed it up with The Names, following Silliman with DeLillo, I literally felt myself losing language. It was an interesting phenomenon. I ended up writing a few what I think of as really good poems in those few days where I relearned how to read a book. Because this is what the type of poetry I like to write sometimes. Sometimes not. Sometimes I think my best poems were written before I got into the whole abstract/nonsense jig. Someone is calling out Radiohead for the same thing and I'm saying I love it. Because this is what the poetry I like to write sometimes does. It's a collection of ideas that link perhaps only in the mind of the writer. It could even be this blog post, now that I've written that.

I somewhat like the idea of art as discussion, discussion as art. The interesting part of the work I described above could potentially be what you think of as the final product. It could be the poems but it could also be what is under the poems. A description I have stolen. Ron Silliman has a book called Under Albany, which does just that, walks in under the poem and shows you the roots. It in fact puts you into the mind of writing the poem. Or not. Sometimes I'm right when talking about books I've not read. Sometimes not. Albany is the first part of Silliman's The Alphabet. My first book begins with a section called, if my mind holds, An Alphabet. (Just checked and I'm right.) The second word in the titles of these two works are not the only things they have in common but they probably might as well be. I haven't read The Alphabet.

Let's close on some Pasha Constantine, just another stage name. "All writing is coxicombical."

"Originally written as a horror story..."

2011-08-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Spending night at the bar. At this point it wasn't even part of the plot, something to be noted, it was the routine, the sort of stuff that goes on behind the scenes in series work. But I was no PI with a drinking problem, I was no James Bond with commitment issues. I was simply just another guy spending another night getting drunk so I could sleep better. And it didn't bother me that I was slowly leaving the house for the bar a little earlier each day, because it just seemed like the right thing to do. No longer arriving for a nightcap at 11, no longer ogling the last of the women as they cleared out at 9, in fact in this way this day was special, because I had come straight from work to here, since I saw no point in staring at the television not really caring whether it was off or on for an hour and a half.

My problem, of course, was that the regular bartender's an old bud from college who'll generally take me home or at least call me a cab, so I don't have to drunkenly think of my address. Tonight he appears to have forgotten me. Must be his night off because the girl who hands me my first drink with a smile is definitely not him. No offense to Larry, but he was never this much to look at. Which is really where my attention goes, throughout the night--I mean, I'm trying to be subtle about it, face facing the television, eyes turned back to the bar, and, if I got my angles right, she can't tell I'm watching her pour another round for the regulars but I was never much good at trigonometry, so she probably knows I'm looking. Which is fine, I guess, since I'm tipping--I must remember the tipping, I think to myself as another drink brings me past tipsy. Tipsy tipping, I think, and then turn back to the television.

There's a man sitting two stools down who I didn't see come in. "Harold," he calls over, so I get up and see what he wants. "You know me?" I don't. "I'm a friend of Larry's. He sent me to drive you out of here. I think maybe we've been at the same parties before. You know, here, in the bar, back in the day." This man looks homeless, smells worse, I'm surprised he even knows Larry's name, much less mine. "Anyway, you remember that cruse Larry didn't want to go on?" I shake my head. "Well, he was thinking he could weasel out until the last minute when the wife put 'er foot down. Hard. In a sensitive place, if you know what I mean. So's anyway, he calls up me, Bobby McGoo, and sends me down to pick you up from the bar. Just remembered actually. Had to find a phone that worked out in those waters. They're already far, far away from here by this time." This man is confusing me, but I don't really dislike that. What has liquor been, other than a means to confuse myself.

"Well, they surely could have hired in worse to pick up the shifts," I say just loudly enough so that she can hear me but can't know that I wanted her to hear me. Bobby, whoever the hell he is, agrees with me. And we drink, oh yes, do we drink.

It's three hours later when he tells it, the story I've been trying to relate. "There's this guy Lumber who jacks...wait...I'm telling it wrong," he says, "there's this guy Jack who's a lumberjack and he cuts down trees because of passion not pension. And one day he kills a gecko or a lizard of some kind and karma's out to get him..."

"A karma chameleon?" I ask, dumbfounded. Bobby either doesn't get it, doesn't hear me, or is playing drunk.

"So's yeah, he kills the lizard and he ends up dying in a tragic mudslide or something. Maybe a hear attack. Or an ax murderer..." he pauses and I think about the irony. "And you know what? He wakes up as a tree in a forest, forever afraid of being cut down!" Bobby explodes. I don't see this cliché as being overly funny, but the night wears on.

Eventually I lose him. He seems to vanish. I ask the girl for another drink for my friend and she says, "You mean the ficus? You've been talking to that tree all night." And sure enough there's a ficus in the corner. I tell her I've never seen that before. Ask what the hell a tree is doing in a bar. "It's decoration," she says, "my name's Karma, by the way, it's on the name tag. You don't have to keep screaming out 'lady' when you need a new drink." I look around the bar. This doesn't surprise me. It's just my luck...looks like I'm going to need to figure out where I'm getting my ride home from.

"But karma's a bitch," I say, "it brings back lumberjacks as..." I point to the corner, "as ficus, I guess."

"What are you talking about, old man?" I'm not that old and she's not that young so I can't tell if she's flirting. The fact that anything a woman does when I'm drunk appears to be flirting complicates the issue. "Are you telling tales?"

And it's not until I'm up and pissing in the urinal, reading the tabloid cut-outs taped up above, or at least checking the headlines--time traveler runs for governor, cereal killer drowns victims in milk, internet virus kills husband, time traveler begins campaign for 2050 election, lumberjack finds trees that bleed, washed-up writer drinks his life away--that I finally understand what I meant when I replied, "Aren't we all?"

under the hood
Not much. Very trivial really. First paragraph initially ended as the following (I've struck through what I've eliminated or changed):

because I had come straight from work ~~until 6:30~~ to here, ~~because I thought I might as well not stare~~ at the television not really caring whether it was off or on for an hour and a half.

"must be his night off" in the second paragraph was originally tacked into the sentence before it, which ended there, causing the next sentence to start "Because" which is ew, I think you'll agree. Closer to the end of this paragraph I added a comma to "and if I've got my angles right" after the "and." My professor suggested the change of "geometry" to "trigonometry" in the same sentence. Some formatting changes end this paragraph, "I must remember the tipping" was not at first italicized and I had placed a comma after "myself" in the same sentence. Later on "a way of confusing myself" was changed to "a means to confuse myself." Bobby was in the original "playing dumb," whereas now he's "playing drunk." And closing it out, I had written "nametag" as one word.

behind the scenes
This is one of my favorite of all the stories written for this class. The assignment was to write around a tabloid headline. We came up with a list in class, some of which appear at the end of the story here. I don't remember which ones I used and which I made up, but I'll take credit for the last two which are parts of my story and give the rest to the class. I had fun with it. The idea of a lumberjack coming back as a tree is written in a very old (four-seven years?) notebook of ideas and is actually a lot older than that. Or I should specify, my version of it is a lot older than that (a few months...probably not "a lot older"), because the idea itself is not horribly original, which my dad would agree to (back when I first came up with it, I was sweet on it; he wasn't), something I parodied in the story itself, take a look-see and try to figure out where. There's an actual story to be written. The actual lumberjack as a tree. I'm not joking. I do want to write that someday. Not sure if the narrator is the same as a few other things I've written (some for the class, some not), but I am sure I could write more in that voice, and the story isn't a shut door. I dunno. Retyping this story I realize it's pretty guilty of everything I dislike about the story of Black Swan in that it's all cool David Lynch-like uncertainty but it doesn't go anywhere. But neither does Eraserhead. I like to think of this as an uncanny valley of sorts, where my story, I like to think, as well as a Lynch film like Eraserhead (which is a million times better and something I'm by no ways comparing to my story) is dependent on mystery, does not tell you anything with certainty (and if you don't believe me I could list a good many questions on my story to get you thinking about what you've actually been told that isn't an enigma), while a movie like Black Swan falls into the Fight Club world until it never reveals, explicates, it's like a truncated film. And now after that unnecessary swipe at a film that is no worse for the wear because I didn't think it was perfect, I'll stop.

The Frog Hospital

2011-08-17T12:00:00.000-07:00

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.

"Scotch Mist" is on. I'm much too tired to be writing this, but I guess maybe a little depressed and want to be distracted by my keyboard. Maybe more nervous than depressed. I get so nervous at times for specific non-nerve inducing reasons and I think to myself this can't be normal. By means of transition from the last post, we might speak of how Lorrie Moore is referenced in the Tao Lin poetry collection I own. Of course I've lent it out, but because of the good graces of the internet, let us hope I can find a quote for you, rather than being reduced to sending angry text messages to the person who has not finished the book yet. This is taking longer than I had hoped. Let's hope I can find something, because, as Beyoncé would have it, blowing up someone's phone won't make matters worse. Actually um bear with me I am going to put a real lame summing up of the quote in a block box and edit it later hopefully.

presumed female tells Tao the only reason he reads Lorrie Moore is to steal from her

The Lorrie Moore of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? at least exists as a sort of anti-Bret Easton Ellis. Her narrator is overly aware, the sort that tends to fall into the category of the novelist character, the kind of person that you just can't see having these thoughts unless she was writing a book. The phrase occurs to me now to call the novel an "autopsy of childhood." What it really is a description defier. Probably a fairly lame thing to note, but it really is difficult think about how one could actually go about describing the book. You have the fairly traditional concept of a narrator looking back, but Moore provides us with a quandary, not so much an unreliable narrator as an untelling one. It becomes difficult to truly understand how every event has been felt and what the characters truly think about each other. Perhaps we could call this a lie of omission, but it never quite reaches there. The book is more felt than understood. Sure, the plot is simple, but for me the effect was often more poetic. The type of language carved from stone, where you sit back and reflect on specific sentences.

Is my sleep deprivation showing? My lack of writing ability? Like I've stated above, I really don't know if I'm aware enough to be writing this to any degree of dignity, but I wanted to get my mind off things and feel like I had accomplished something. Line that stuck with me: "But even the italics, it seems, are losing their italics." Just looked that up as page 72 in the book according to Amazon. There was a lot of French in the book that was occasionally lost on me but that was presented perfectly, allowing for belief in the reader's ability to understand, investigate, or move around. It is perhaps in the best interests of the reader that this post is temporarily suspended until I have slept and thought more.

Okay back now. I could say the Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? is a book about identity. It's about attempting to construct who we are through investigating our past, a double-ended murder mystery, because the mystery itself is a mystery. Trying to understand how we get to the places we are in our lives. While it's a very good book, it feels disjointed. I don't think this a bad thing for the book, but it makes it less easy to review, to talk about. The future narrator reflects on a past that feels somehow disconnected. Which is perhaps the point... The sheer difference of our lives, or the lack thereof. The creation of differences in history among people we always thought would be like us. There's a bit in the book (I think...not gonna lie, I could be thinking of another book, most likely Glove Pond, but it seems to fit perfectly with this one so I really think it is in it) where there's a discussion of the people we leave behind and the choices we make to do so. It's probably a question that becomes even more pertinent now, seventeen years after the book was published, with the whole Facebook thing. (Stated like Bret Easton Ellis does "the whole gay thing." Figure that one out.)

I myself would be such a part of this. All those people you lost touch with...there was a time when they became simply ghosts on your life. Or at least, I don't know, if you were an antisocial person they became ghosts on your life. Maybe they still do if you're antisocial. I hate the phone so social networking changes the way my life would have been lived twenty years ago. I think the most interesting part of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? is just how odd it is, how difficult to define or understand completely. The title itself comes from a painting used as a frontispiece and while it comes into the narrative of the book in a way, it's still as odd as you think of it when you first read the book. Perhaps that's why the attempt to write about the book begins with a mad sleep-deprived ramble and then becomes a sort of personal rumination.

One wonders if that's what "reviews" or "debriefings" should be. I surely did not want to write literally "I enjoyed this book and you might too" posts, but I'm still not sure how to go about writing this beat. It's the most traditional of them all and I'm not sure how to do it; odd, I know. But there's plenty to be questioned about how to write "about" a book. I think the best sort of piece is one that is both a bit of a companion to the book as well as a step up into it, like the door jamb to a house you have to raise your foot over. Of course this is a spectrum that has no wrong end. If one or the other is accomplished, I'll probably enjoy myself reading it. I'm not good enough to really do either one so I have to apologize for boring people, but I don't think anything is more boring than the way reviews are often written. The put down or thumbs up reviewing doesn't interest me. (The put down reviewing is essentially useless in my opinion.) And I'm done here. Follow me through some links starting with this one if you want to read the opinion of one of my favorite poets on reviewing practices in American poetry.

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

2011-08-16T12:00:00.000-07:00

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...

I don't get so much cocky as hopeful. Writing is an odd thing because, well just look at the word, it's writing. I guess you can "sketch" before you actually draw something, but you don't really have the sort of purely mental activity that I associate with us language workers. There's a lot of idea gathering, a lot of stop and go, it's like the interstate on rush hour. So you can talk about "what you're working on" when you physically haven't put any work in. Or maybe that's just me. You get all these crazy ideas and well you don't pick and choose. Eventually you either write stuff down or memory picks and chooses what it wants to remember, but you still end up with this huge list of stuff you've never even really started, although it's been there in your head for years. The bigger the idea the less chance you ever are going to dig into it. Or rather I'm going to dig into it. I'd like to imagine a point in my life where this weren't true. Or rather I like imagining a point in my life where this isn't true, because nothing stops me or makes it difficult for me to actually imagine. It's my chosen profession, after all.

What I've really been digging into lately, what I've really been stealing from, is the spine, if you will, of a work. I read Pale Fire not always understanding what it was about--as I've stated before, the book was mostly over my head--but very interested in the way it was written, an idea I wanted to copy or steal if you will. There's not copyright on what you call a novel. So writing a poem and then annotating it in a bad way, well it'd be obviously influenced in form, but I feel like the work would be original. Who am I kidding? What with it being Nabokov who wrote the book, some'd say the greatest writer of English in the twentieth century, why do I even think I can create anything worth even...writing or reading or what... This is also what happens when you "get big ideas." They sound stupid as hell. Anyways... I had thought that I really considered the style of Pale Fire novel and very fitting to a specific story I had wanted to write and could not really find the best method of presentation. I had hoped that, well, that perhaps I would be coming up with my own spines for the books I wanted to write, erm, I mean my own styles or designs or ...

That paragraph just needed to end. So of course I didn't really think about it while reading comic books, but I started coming up with ideas for my own comic series if I could, you know, either draw or have a whole bunch of artists at my beck and call. I thought this was just an immersion in the medium and perhaps it was. But I had not considered how immersion in reading fiction didn't naturally have this result in me, except in recent memory of Pale Fire. Of course, you get ideas from what you read, you steal from here and you steal from there, I'm not saying that I've ever or will ever create anything original, but I am saying that there seems to have been a shift as of late in what I think about while reading. At least, at least every once in a while. This entire post is a big idea I've got that isn't going to happen.

The revelation came while reading Douglas Coupland's The Gum Thief. Coupland's book also has its own odd structure, being almost the actual journal of Roger, one of the main characters, which is a recycled idea of Coupland's, except that in this case he has modified it, by having other characters find it and write their own little bits in. This is perhaps the first multiple perspective book that I've read that actually explains the many narrators away as a plot device. It's very neat. And in reading the first seventy or so pages of it and following my thought process while reading it...something clicked.

This was not the mindset that I remembered in reading Freedom back a few months ago. Perhaps this is simply a mind game I've begun to play as of late and it's always been this way, but I'm considering the possibility that the ideas are getting to be critical mass. I've grown to search for the packaging for them because I can't just keep coming up with them and letting them rot. This connects with my plans for my idea of the four writers who each have at least a story to their own, only two of them are written and now my mind's looking for the clothes of the last two. Of course these would be more physical wrappings, hence clothes and not spine (I'm not making any sense am I), but I'm not so sure it's not something I should be keeping an eye on.

Now here's a big idea that I'd love to see happen: In October I want to begin writing a poem that will make up the first part of a style steal of Pale Fire, following this up with another attempt at a NaNoWriMo to provide the other side of the book. The plots of the books will not be at all similar and the styles won't be exactly the same, but am I wrong to think that the idea, the style, the way of presenting the story, that that is mine for the taking? I guess that's what this post was about. Of course when I foresee comic books to be written, I'm considering an entire medium, not the intellectual property of one man. And while I did in fact think about what it would be like to write a book in a similar style to The Gum Thief, this was a vague thought that I haven't let bloom, nor do I particularly plan to. In retrospect, however, I must concede that my first novel, my first NaNoWriMo was basically styled after Bret Easton Ellis's The Rules of Attraction.

One wonders if I might be able to come up with my own structures and spines, clothes and fashions. It's especially important when it comes to considering poetry, where these very ideas are, so to speak, intellectual property that were we to steal we might find ourselves ripping off whole poems, ashamed upon the realization. This is just the sort of rumination and thought that "design and style" was and is supposed to put me, though I hope it has been mildly enjoyable to you, I'm sorry for boring you, and I'm happy to say we're done with that.

EDIT
Here's a quote from this article on Nicholson Baker:

In "The Anthologist," he created a post-modern novel that, with typical extemism and belligerence, defends not only poetry but rhyme in poetry. At the same time, the book, from a purely literary point of view, is one of the precious few to be an almost direct outgrowth of the novel that may be the greatest post-modern masterwork, Nabokov's "Pale Fire."

I'm sure there are lots of books that are linked to Pale Fire but I'm not enough in the literary scene to know about it. The connection of The Anthologist which I definitely plan on reading in the future makes good sense. Maybe I'm in good company to be interested in creating my own sort of Pale Fire.

RETRACTION
I originally referred to Coupland's book as Glove Pond, a novel being written in the book, which is actally titled The Gum Thief. I think it is very much in the logic of the novel that you would forget the title.

Behind the anthropology of sports

2011-08-15T12:00:00.000-07:00

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.

What is the anthropology of sports? It's a dream, of sorts. You get disillusioned with politics and war, you start to think about sports, and you can imagine certain futures. I'm interested in the way that sports develop lives or essences of their own. They have their own presses, superstitions; the players, the coaches, and the owners are guided by slightly different rules, it seems, with their speech, and what does the recent and current legal dealings of the NFL and NBA respectively show other than that sports also deal with ideas of assembly and petitioning of grievance. You've probably noticed that I've written that sentence to catch all the points of the first amendment to the United States constitution. When I think of sports, I imagine the best sort of nationalism, the kind that's tainted with irony, is considered important because, when it comes down to it, it has to do with a game, something that is ultimately "fun." A future where war becomes chess and sports is a great world to imagine. As someone against nationalism, but somewhat on the fence with a word like patriotism, as an Eagle Scout that could probably easily get his card taken away if he answered the wrong person some wrong questions truthfully, I've often considered what exactly it is that creates the support one has for a local or national sporting team or figure. If it could only be harnessed, as I have alluded, to a change in the view of the world... But enough talk about science fiction.

The anthropology of sports is also a place to discuss the real world tales of nationalism and sports evolving hand in hand. The anthropology of sports is an idea I was considering while watching movies like Invictus or documentaries like "The Two Escobars." It's simply an interest in once again the actual lines of boundary. I'm very much intrigued by the idea of nation-building, how it works, is run, and, as you'll know considering the tag of this post, I'm interested in sports. With a story like the one that forms Invictus you have just this, a nation is helped to form by the victories of a rugby team and the good cheer brought by such actions. The positive side of what I have previously termed "emotional capitalism." Anthropology of sports is interested in simply the essence of that term: "emotional capitalism." Because, ultimately, the good feelings created by sports are not your average currency. Colored, once again, by irony. Feeling bad, of course you tell yourself it's just a game. While this might not make you feel better, it's not your mum dying, is it? It can't be that. At its worst. But the plus side, I would argue can be quite amazing. My father following the Tampa Bay Buccaneers from the late nineteen-seventies, being mildly aware of them for their first few years of existence, before becoming an out and out fan when moving to Orlando and eventually Tampa. I cannot, myself, postulate what it must have meant to him to be on his way to San Diego for Super Bowl XXXVII and to watch his team clobber the Oakland Raiders (who haven't been within scratching distance of a winning season since this Super Bowl, until just the last season where they went 8-8...and fired their coach, after their best record in going on a decade, go figure!). Now there's a story to be told about that Super Bowl in itself, but if at all that would be for another day.

This is an early rendition of the anthropology of sports. The anthropology of sports is a place to talk about the differences between being a fan of a sports team or a player in a sport that is team or individual-driven, a platform to discuss the new compound sports, something like auto racing, which is at least technically, a team sport that is individual-driven (although a good many "teams" might be just one guy...the argument can even be made that each car is a team, as you see a current five-year champion Jimmie Johnson putting down his own pit crew last year, making a switch, and going on to take another championship...one feels an echo of caddies in golf in this conversation), and where I might try to muse on the various stuff I've been fed by ESPN. I hate the phrase, but when it comes to SportsCenter, I really do "drink the Kool-Aid," as in I do believe and feel emotion for a lot of the stuff they put together, even though I shouldn't. It seems like Title IX is something you can definitely investigate anthropologically. In fact, I would say that sports reporters in fact do this, considering perhaps how the impact of Title IX changes American women's sports and their impact internationally. Women's tennis, for example, could almost be seen as a funnel sport before Title IX. The opening up of women's sports could thus be seen as the cause of what is now a lack of US strength in women's international tennis. Ultimately, this is good. Sports offer opportunities, and being good at a sport only because you are pigeon-holed into that sport is the sort of negative view that one could possibly get when considering...I don't know, American Samoa? I guess they do have wrestling and soccer as well as football, according to Wikipedia. I'm really just saying this because I'm not trying to say that Title IX is a bad thing, I fully support it, I just think it is an interesting change that has created interesting results.

So that's where I'm coming from. The anthropology of sports is not for anyone. People who find it unbelievably boring to consider what the national dominance of an individual like Michael Phelps can mean for a country, if anything, will find the anthropology of sports more of the same and I must point to the URL if they wish to complain. I can tell you right now, shit's going to get trivial.

The Future of Publishing

2011-08-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

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

I would like to live in a world where when you buy a book you actually buy the book; the text, however it is presented, is yours. Ebooks could exist as the travel copy and you could have the actual paper thing to read in the bath where you don't want to ruin your $100 (if you're lucky) ereader. Unfortunately, it seems like that time is a ways off if it will actually exist at all. Sigh.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about presentation. Reading a lot of comics in the past week or so has gotten me to thinking more and more about doing something with language, with just writing, that is somehow comic-like, somehow something I could make a "comic book" out of in the sense of it being about a thirty page book saddle stitched. I've remembered a recording of a story I did once that I'm going to go dig through an old laptop to find and thinking about it I've grown enamored to the audio book, the only one of which I've actually listened is Bret Easton Ellis's Imperial Bedrooms, a fact loyal readers might or might not know, I don't remember if I mentioned it. However, at a recent really crazy sale at a library in Ohio, I picked up a few more, some abridged James Ellroy, one read by the author, which'll be my introduction to him, a Stephen King, and Maggie Gyllenhaal reading Plath's The Bell Jar. It's odd to consider the works I've already finished in some way. The idea that this story has been recorded for a few years now, that I recorded it in a house I don't even live in any more...It's all very odd to consider. My initial bursts of writing, my first major "concept" of my writing, is long dead now, I'd say, but I still think about it. One story hooking into it is published in my book (sorry about the plug), another is this recorded thing I've been mentioning and considering doing something with, and well, you get the whole mind working on things and it comes up with improbable ideas, so I think of another being published in some really low key magazine somewhere probably for free. And when I think about that, well, I'll give you a little bit in on this "concept": it has to do with four writers, and we'd then have three of them out in the world somewhere. The fourth could actually be the sort of poetry comic I started this paragraph with when I come to think about it.

Which is all silly really, because the "concept" I had is history for a reason. I sort of think it's lame. I sort of think I've outgrown it. First off, I don't even think about myself as a prose writer anymore, so there's that. But what of it all, really? I'm not going to lie, I thought I had "outgrown" comics too, and lately that's been what I've been reading. (With a new perspective, I will add, but yeah, I never saw me reading this many of them in so short a time. And getting this "into" them. My dad calls it the "collecting bug." My scores of all kinds of cards from various CCGs goes a long way to proving that.) What I've begun to consider, not to be all bullshit-profound or anything, but what I've begun to consider is how you make a life. So it actually pleases me to think that I'm maybe going to find a place for these ideas I once had. That these stories might be out there somewhere like I always dreamed they would. Not that they'll get read, but that they can be. (Or heard...) It's sort of the feeling I assume Grant Morrison might have had in writing Secret Origins #46 about the past of the headquarters he was using for his run on Doom Patrol [exit geekery], the sort of feeling, well I've just finished listening to a live version of "Everything in its Right Place," so maybe that's why I'm phrasing it so, but a feeling of everything falling into its right place. (Catch the echo of "Jigsaw Falling into Place" as well.)

I'm going off for my last year of college (as an undergrad...still uncertain if there'll be more but a clear leaning to "yes"), I remember being ashamed of my age on the internet when I first got to it. I guess things have changed. On twitter and here on the blog I used to shy away from personal addresses to things that have to deal with my existence as (I think...) a teenager back when I created both. I'm not really able to get back into that mind again, just as I'm not able to get back into the mind of the kid who was, well, "obsessed" would be a strong word, but "into" all the Ultimate comics, regardless of who was making them. I so despise the kind of person I used to be once that really actually consider that conviction makes it itself look stupid. Like, you can't hate on something you used to be can you? But I mean I do think plenty of the people who are like that are double what my age was then... Sigh, let's stop with the brutality. No one cares what you think. I don't even care. Blah. Hands keep typing words in my head and I'm not stopping. Need to. K.

New paragraph, new train of thought that I've just missed pulling out of the station. So that's what I've been thinking about lately. I think it's "autopsy" that's making me think about it. Putting a lot of stories up on the web. There's a bit of tension at times, but eventually I just realize that there's nothing I'm going to do with them. It's fun to think that they'll be out there, the ghost of my idea which'll never see the full light of day (for a good reason) lying out in various publications and the internet as in essence my childhood, haunting the world I move through as I get older.

We're back to football.

2011-08-13T12:00:00.000-07:00

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...

"First and fifteen," the announcer's voice is saying but he isn't paying attention because they are fighting again--about what? A brief moment of forgetfulness plagues him as she rants on, but then she touches on a key word and he remembers--the parting in this place and how she can't have any friends over ever, because the apartment they live in has about five visitor spots for the whole complex.

"You picked this place! And you said we would throw Tupperware parties and we would have all this room to impress the people that we could afford this place & look now! It's big and empty and I'm paying forty more than I want to a month because--"

"I'll pay it then; you were the one who was all about going Dutch & contributing equally; I'm totally okay with being the man with the finances--"

"Well that's just it! The man?! I am just as important in this relationship, you never even wear pants!"

Almost laugh, but she'll take it wrong, even after making a joke. As serious as possible, "You're more important than I am..."

"Fourth & seven, now, let's see what they can do--" the TV drowns him out as she has apparently sat on the remote control's volume button. "A running play? Who would've seen this coming?" She is slow to turn the sound back down, searching for the remote with her hands, rather than looking. He does the looking for her, but rather not at the remote. Minds shift, moods lighten.

"Well that's the way it worked, Jon, they faked the punt then the pass, clearly that's going to open things up." He notices the smile on her face--her team is driving...

And that's what this was all about, wasn't it? he thinks to himself. How she couldn't invite her girls to watch the football game. And how awesome is that? To have a girl this passionate about the sport he's most in love with? He stands up and moves from the armchair to sit next to her, to put his arm around her.

"Long pass...this ball looks like it's going to get away or wait! Great leap, Jon, how do you teach that? And can he, yes!, comes down with the ball, 15, one guy could catch him, 10, he could make it, 54321 END ZONE!" She rests her head on his shoulder. Her team's winning now, the world is a bit more bearable.

under the hood
The underlining would normally be italics but I had underlined the words in pen originally and wanted to keep that. The late italics is actually an addition to this typing. In the second sentence, "plagues him" was initially "runs through him." Talking about an apartment complex, I had initially stated "because the apartment complex has about five visitor spots in the whole subdivision" which I have changed to, I will admit, the equally tinny "because the apartment they live in has about five visitor spots for the whole complex." Tupperware, the trademark was "tuperware" in the story, some amazing non-brand name in a world without copyrights or whatever you want to call it.

"Well that's just it! The man?! I am just as important in this relationship, you never even wear pants!"

Almost laugh, but she'll take it wrong, even after making a joke. As serious as possible, "You're more important than I am..."

^ was initially minus the joke about pants, which would actually scratch one of the couples that this could be talking, now that I think about it. If I ever publish stories with these two on the blog I'll link it here with the edit in caps. The odd almost first person before his response is all new, the original only had the dialogue. I really quite like it though.

behind the scenes
This story ties into a bit of a thought I have on the emotions of sports called emotional capitalism that I might write about in "anthropology of sports" some day and if I do you will see the here marked as a blue (or purple) link. Mainly that sporting creates emotions and yet team sports, at least, do not distribute them equally, and there are people that feel great and still others that at least for a while feel horrible. I've tagged it as "anthropology of sports" for this reason. The beats themselves are not supposed to respond perfectly to their tag groups, it's like cataloging comic crossover specials, there are different ways of sorting. The original sentence has a bit of an uncertainty in it, noted by my professor, namely the "they" could be the announcers or "he" and "the announcer" the only two characters introduced, or any number of people. It's confusing. But I think it's all stylistically important. Looking back on this story, it's almost voyeuristic, supposed to present itself as a random apartment living room on a Sunday, if you'll buy that. All the TV talk was meant to be somewhat satiric, but I don't think it succeeds. Sorry if it bored you. I guess I can say the same for the whole post.

Peter's Mulligan or On Milligan

2011-08-12T12:00:00.000-07:00

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...

One of the cool feelings about comics for me is the result of the immense collection my father accreted. To exaggerate as I tend to do about myself, I felt like an archaeologist digging up all these books from the late '80s and early 90's, surprised by my good luck: not only did my father collect during this specific time frame but my favorite comic writers were beginning to be active then, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison...

One of the things that I could've told you about me and comics was that I wasn't going to go looking for new writers. And I didn't. Not at first. I had always planned on reading the rest of Morrison's Doom Patrol and had finally gotten back to it. Through I'll just call them shamanistic means I had completed my collection of the run and now started rereading always wondering where it was I had stopped off. I'm still not sure where I had let off. I could write on and on about Morrison's Doom Patrol, both positive and negative. It's a great read but I think it show itself to be something that the writer will leave for better things. It doesn't show the tightness of New X-Men for example. But this isn't a post about Morrison.

One of the first three paragraphs will self-reflexively reference the fact that they've all started with the same phrase. Even though it was just probably maybe weeks ago, I can't exactly remember how I first started reading Peter Milligan's Wikipedia page but I was thinking about zany comics and the more I read, the more it intrigued me. Milligan follows up Morrison's seminal run on Animal Man with as Wikipedia puts it "a 6-issue story featuring several surreal villains and heroes, exploring questions about identity and quantum physics and utilizing the textual cut-up technique popularized by William Burroughs. Maybe that was what attracted me to him first, reading about Animal Man and then just reading another sentence of the Wiki post Morrison. I've only read one issue of the Animal Man run so far, however. When I finally decided to change my mind and go back on "one of the things I could've told you about me and comics," I went for Milligan's work with the caped crusader as well, pulling up about twelve issues of Milligan's various Batman titles (rather Detective and Batman but "various" sounds better) as well as a Catwoman graphic novel (an actual gn mind you). I've now read quite a few issues of his Batman, as well as the first issue of not only the Animal Man run but of two miniseries, Skreemer and Enigma. Unfortunately of these latter two, my father only had the "collectible" first issues. There's something about him.

Milligan is probably the most comic-book-esque writer I've latched onto. Moore is generally considered a novelist, no one really doubts his talents as a writer, Morrison is more of a zany magic guy than a writer really, Warren Ellis could and does write prose, Crooked Little Vein is amazing, and he's currently writing his first truly science fiction novel which probably surprises anyone who looks at his comic output (Ellis is the one place where I was unlucky, he burst onto the comics scene just as my dad burst out of the collecting business. However my own first brush with comics caused me to go out and get a lot of Spider-Man 2099 comics for some silly reason I don't entirely understand. They were written by Peter David. He's good. I'll give my past self that. And in one of these comics, an anthology called 2099 Unlimited that happened to feature the future Spidey that month, I would run into an early Warren Ellis back-up story, a sort of...I keep saying "archaeological"...treasure to have found when I didn't go out and buy it looking for the Ellis bit), and Neil Gaiman is mainly a novelist these days, plus his Sandman is the farthest from superhero comics as you can really get, and the most removed of magnum opuses for any of the writers (although if Moore never wrote Watchmen then Swamp Thing would be right there). Maybe it's just because the most of the Milligan I've read is Batman that I think this, but it's a sort of kitschy feel I get, the same way I think about The Mentalist. Like I'm totally into it but when it's bad, it's awesomely bad, I delight in that too. Explaining the plot of a four-issue two-series Batman crossover that Milligan did to my friend it sounded crazy, it sounded...like something out of a comic book.

What amazes me about Milligan is the uncertain perspective he gives us. In "Dark City, Dark Knight" there is a panel refrain that I read as Milligan playing the reader as Batman. Referring to the Dark Knight in the second person, I like to think of it as calling out to us. This is a personal interest, admittedly. Reading the comic I was surprised, as I had just spoken of a comic being in the second person in a work of fiction here. Milligan had already done such a thing and it truly took me aback, as if my idea had somehow time traveled. The oddity of course being not that it was thought of before me (everything has been thought of before me), but rather that I had just come up with the idea like half a week before I dug up the comic and read it. The timing was everything.

Before reading that Batman story, I had read the first issue of Enigma, my second issue of Milligan (my first was the somewhat pedestrian Detective Comics #629). The villain of Enigma is a brain sucker. Or at least the villain of the first issue is. I'm not going to go into more detail, it's a very good comic and I'm sure you might have a comic store near you which has it or (the much more likely scenario) you might be left to your own shamanistic rituals to summon it to you. Then I read "The Idiot Root" whose villain is a brain sucker. He must've been preoccupied by them. I love that. The way the actual stories of writers coincide with each other. It's the feeling I get from a Joan Didion or Don DeLillo book, as I've written about here. Obviously I feel they are more literary than Milligan, but he doesn't need to be literary.

I actually went to a comic convention the other weekend thinking I might find some Milligan comics. I ran into a friend of mine there who knew his name. He's still in comics today so this makes sense. But it was no luck on the old comics I was looking for. The next series I will be reading will be either Ellis's Planetary or Milligan's Shade, the Changing Man which for some reason my father doesn't even have the first issue of. I found no Shade or Enigma and wasn't at the time looking for Skreemer. I found this odd. I still do. I am entirely surprised by the minimal presence of DC's sub-branch, the much acclaimed Vertigo, at the convention. Vertigo in the early nineties was one of the most amazing things in comics--a major producer helping to create an alternative to the status quo.

As I think about it now, perhaps I lied. It's very possible, with next month creeping up ever faster (conflicting verb/adverb I know), the next comic I could be reading could be Justice League Dark. I really did make a mulligan on Milligan when I first thought to myself, reading Morrison's Doom Patrol, that no, I wouldn't even want to read anyone I hadn't read before. Reading him, I've realized that Peter and I share more than first names, we have a similar outlook on our arts. Or at least I think we do. I'm sure I'm wrong. I'm always wrong. Always wrong, always bored, and always a paragraph or two long...

The Anti-Comic

2011-08-11T12:00:00.000-07:00

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...

As a writer, an academic, an artist, as a person, I've become obsessed with the categorical boundary lines, piqued by words like "race" or "medium" or "genre." All these little lines we might draw to create the artist's rendering of what we think is the world. Reading comics as of late has been...not so much difficult but odd. Perhaps I could make a connection to reading poetry before I wrote poems. My own lack of artistic talent and disinterest in writing scripts creates a wall, an inability to fully conceive of what the comic writer's job is like. I've been able to consider myself so removed from the musician or the illustrator so as to not be able to uncover their secret ways but perhaps purely due to the importance of the word "writer" itself, the divide I find between myself and the comic writer is upsetting.

How could we investigate the differential between a comic writer and a writer in general? I must admit to putting forth some stupid sentences here, but I think the point gets across. One way to detail some of the specifics of a comic creator would be to look for those comics that stand on the line of definition, called by some comic books by others various other names. Grant Morrison's Bible John, Doom Patrol 54, as well as various writing styles he makes use of in describing his stories could easily be called poetry. Neil Gaiman calls Alan Moore's Swamp Thing #34 a "prose poem," itself a hybrid idea I am very much interested in.

What I mean to suggest is that there exists within the comics medium a force to undo all set rules, to create the anti-comic if you will, similar to what you might find in any art form. Namely the driving force that you might call terrorism if it manifested politically presents itself in art by breaking down the barriers and blowing up the old definitions. What is, then, the anti-comic?

We must first once again define the comic. Here in America it means superhero serial story told in panels progressing along a page. Signal, a comic I do not own and have not read, can be easily seen to be fighting at least a few of those details. It's my opinion that the point of view shifting, narrative uncertainty that comes from the traditional Peter Milligan caption is also right there at the edges of the comic book wall pushing. Chasing Victor, my own fictional comic book was meant as a sort anti-comic. Yet even the name "anti-comic" is itself a useless concept, as the very idea of expanding the definition of the term "comic" is dependent upon calling what is created comics. Just as much of my work is self-titled "poetry" for the purpose of putting forward the argument that poetry can be and is anything it wants to be.

The rise of the illustrated novel like Gaiman's Stardust, the line between a novel and a comic becomes slightly less defined. Stardust was serialized in four "issues" presented in prestige format, a noted comic book publication form. One wonders what is the difference for the illustrator when creating an "illustrated novel" or a "comic book." While one can easily make the argument that these are two distinctive forms, further complication does arise. Gaiman returns to such an idea with "Fifteen Portraits of Despair" in Endless Nights where one truly does get the idea that they are reading something different than a comic, something new. Grant Morrison develops this further by bringing it to the mainstream, writing Batman #663 as (I will quote a comics site here) a "story written in prose with some illustrations."

Rodó, I think it was, connected Edgar Allan Poe and Transcendentalism in way that probably made the macabre poet spin in his grave. He was making true connections between two supposedly opposed opinions and helped use these to create his own worldview. The Caribbean can be defined geographically as the islands in the Caribbean Sea, but in studying Caribbean history, the word means something else entirely. Caribbean grows to be defined as impacted by colonial warfare and populated by a majority slave population for centuries. I, myself, began to imagine somewhat facetiously the concept of "Caribbean" as being completely unrelated to geography, fully governed by its new definitions.

This relates to a potential change in the definition of "comic book" as being related to a sort of mutation of form, not simply the traditional narrative and style, but rather the very essences of what a comic actually is. I will leave it to writers themselves like Warren Ellis or Neil Gaiman to pick up on what these essences actually are and as usual will present little if any necessary information to the nonexistent public that reads this blog. The anecdote that comes to mind is about a discussion I had with a friend of mine a few years back, going something like this:

"Alex Ross art gets ruined by word bubbles."

"That's comics."

Ultimately, Ross's paintings of superheros lie right within the divide between comic books and other forms of art. The medium grows and expands outward into the world like a culture, poems are in essence comics, yet superheros are not simply all that comics are because comics can and are anything. And here perhaps is where I most identify with that mysterious figure called the comic creator, standing there on the edge of what you yourself consider a specific form, you shove and push at your own boundaries, always hoping to expand, to open up, and understand as much as possible.

Or rather that's who I want to be. I also want to be someone who's written a good enjoyable blog post but I've failed at that. And in poetry there is always someone else out there at the cutting edge pushing the envelope far out of my reach. But as a comic reader or as we like to call ourselves as a fan-boy, this is why I am drawn to these types of things. You feel like you are a part of it and no matter how delusional you are, the ultimate result is a very fitting catharsis.

Leadership

2011-08-10T12:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Joan Didion has a bit in (I think) The Year of Magical Thinking about having dinner with a bunch of writers and an actress, the situation causing her to muse on the lack of complete control that one has as an actor, in comparison to the writer. Or rather maybe it was writers, directors, and the actress. To make the comparison true, as far as movies go, we have to call it the director, as a screenwriter has very little actual impact on the final piece. One of the interesting bits about comics for me is the usual collaborative process. Lately I've been reading both comic books and a bit about comic books and it's sort of sparked the memory of when this was the one thing I was really into. The most interesting part for me is not so much the accepted hierarchy (writer>penciller>inker>colorist...why, one asks?), but rather the subversion of it that appears so regularly in letters' columns: people writing in to applaud the work of the inker or the colorist... I'm left feeling as if I'm watching a symphony, since I really don't know what music is and what makes it good, other than a sort of feeling I get when I like it.

Now I have a few illustrators that I really do enjoy: Bill Sienkiewicz, Duncan Fegredo, Dave McKean basically anyone who's doing at least somewhat nontraditional comics work. One wonders if this could be the writer, though, choosing how a story progresses. So I have to say "I have a few illustrators whose art I really do enjoy" because one could argue it's not them making the choices. More traditional comics art I'm fond of comes from Michael Zulli or Mark Buckingham... The mystery of all this reminds me of the same sorts of questions that boil up and out of watching a sport I'm not horribly familiar with.

Football has been with me for so long that I can't remember, and baseball is an old friend that I've gotten quite acquainted with since 2008, but basketball is still a new thing. What interests me the most about the sport is conceptual. The hierarchy that's so standard in baseball or football (and as mentioned above, in comics), does not exist in basketball. Apparently the "point guard" is the "quarterback" of the sport, but the positions themselves are surprisingly sketchy. It seems like every big name from LeBron James to Dirk Nowitzki is somehow a bad fit for their particular position; the impact of this is not usually negative, but is perplexing. Perplexing to the extent that questions come up to what actual positions players play on a game by game basis. It's all fun for me, the way that every team might have a Derrick Rose captain-like player, but isn't dominated by the same position league-wide.

The exact opposite occurs in football where every new year is granted the supposedly new title of "the year of the quarterback." Personally, I am sick of the continuously exaggerated importance of what is the most important position in the sport. Andrew Hudgins writes in a poetry review that the worst thing you can do to a poet is to exaggerate his (or hers, but the review was about a man) talents and I think the same can be said for a sporting position and its importance. I mean, the QB is important but DeSean Jackson or Larry Fitzgerald can and should be dominant with only an average passer to get them the ball. Running backs like LaDainian Tomlinson of years past or Adrian Peterson and Chris Johnson in recent years only rely on the quarterback to hand them the ball. You can even break that down further; consider the success of the wildcat in the past few years, especially that fateful day that the Dolphins stomped the Patriots with it in 2008.

As a Floridian football fan, I took interest in two trends that I saw as an alternative to the growing dominance of the quarterback--which I feel has reached the height that pundits speak of the position as if it is the only important one out there--in the past year; slowly I also watched them die.

Cadillac Williams is the BJ Upton of Tampa's football team, a player who showed immense amounts of potential and never really lived up to it, although for Williams his chances were plagued by injuries. (When BJ hopefully gets traded in the off-season, as it would be likely good for all involved, then both players will have even more in common, being formerly of a Tampa team.) Last season, however, as Josh Freeman continued his rise to greatness, I was interested to see Cadillac playing a new role in the game, not only during the plays where he was just as likely to put down some dominant blocks for his quarterback as to rush with the ball, but during play-calling, where he himself appeared to be involved in getting everyone on the same page. I was interested in this development, someone other than the quarterback functionally at least academically as the same position. Once the ball was snapped things would change, but before then he could have been Freeman it seemed. It's an arbitrary decision, ultimately, to have the quarterback be the offensive brain on the field that leads the body of organs that is the rest of the team. Consider even the defense, where (at least I think) it's all different positions team-by-team that hold the helmet with the speaker in it.

The Florida Gators also used an interesting set-up for a sport so led by the quarterback. Jordan Reed, listed as a tight end, featured perhaps the most productively as quarterback, while John Brantley, the supposed starter at the beginning of the year, was put through the ringer, trading places with Reed and another surprise fit in Trey Burton. Brantley was put in in one case on a third down play after sitting out for the whole series and he did what you'd expect him to do, he threw a pick. But I blame most of this on the abysmal job done by offensive coordinator Steve Addazio. What interested me most was the parts played by the quarterbacks whenever more than one would be on the field. In one case, Burton's job was to watch the play clock, while I believe it was Brantley was in to take the hike. This sort of mind-splitting is a potential future to the game that has been completely swept away by everyone and their brother on ESPN saying that the quarterback is simply going to become a more prominent position.

I think now of Aristotle saying that "he who is to be a good ruler must first have been ruled." I'm not sure the order is overly important but I do think work on either side of the coin is helpful, and enjoyable. Trent Reznor's comments on creating soundtracks for David Fincher go in that direction. Sure, we hate our bosses, but occasionally having someone tell you what to do can be a good thing.

So I got to thinking that what football needs is those comic book fans who write in and talk about how good the inking is, how important the job of the colorist is, how great a job the letterer is doing. Do we really need retired defensive ends bragging about how important the quarterback is now and soon will be?

Funny Book

2011-08-09T12:00:00.000-07:00

"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.

Comic book has its origins in comic strips or rather the two share a common ancestor. In America, according to Wikipedia, the first comic book came in the form of Famous Funnies, itself the end result of a few new ideas. The first comic books were in effect the Sunday comic strips cut out and given new life on their own. Hence "comic" for humor and "book" for paper existing on its own rather than a part of a newspaper.

Or one might state all this as true. It occurs to me that these could be simply circumstantial history, not cause and effect. Consider "manga" which Wiki has as deriving from "whimsical drawings" in a more denotative translation. Perhaps "comic" or "humor" is something we feel when first considering the sequential images of an art narrative. When does it become a comic though? Individual rules can be made but must inevitably be broken. One could say panels make it a comic, but then you can't divide comic strips from comic books, although giving those two different names I've divided them quite well. A single panel Family Circus isn't all that much different from a circular painting or drawing... Must there be panels? The cover of Anti-Story appears almost to have a narrative to it, with different images seeming to have an order, one we cannot quite understand. Warhol's soup cans could be said to have panels, as could some of the work of Milan Bozic, so we can't blame the term "comic book" on the tennis turning of the eyes that a sequence panel narrative does (picking up speed in comparison to the ocular twisting that must be done with an actual book).

I have begun to consider the turning point of the phrase to be captioning, speech balloons, or thought bubbles. But even this differential has its flaws. Comics are written without words, often on purpose. Marvel had a run of I think they were "Shut Up!" comics, the kind of crossover that actually works, being simply thematic. So, say, Grant Morrison's New X-Men issue that was a part of this ploy would not be a comic, while Neil Gaiman children's books where characters occasionally speak in bubbles wouldn't? Gaiman is an interesting case, where a comic like Mr. Punch while more mature perhaps, reads very similarly to his children's books, giving off the feeling that it truly is a part of the same genre.

So one wonders how you end up getting called a "comic book." And why would this matter? Because "comic book" is a pejorative. Because of its humor basis? Surprisingly not. In America, the comics powerhouse for the English-speaking world (case in point being the British Invasion of the late eighties and early nineties, where several writers from the UK made the leap into American comics), comic book became code word for superhero story. And vice versa--superhero means comic book. Tied up in this is the idea of "comic" as funny, and the sort of negative connotation around a word like "cartoon." Stick the two together and you get that comics are children's stories about superheros. You wonder at times about the American view of violence and its accepted ubiquitousness in our entertainment and this pops up. Violence, here, good guys beating up bad guys, is considered reading for a child. Functioning on multiple levels, it also becomes propaganda as there are "good guys" and "bad guys," concepts that one truly has to question the existence of in the real world.

So we have a growing idea of "comic book" that is almost purely connotative. Comic books are neither particularly comic nor are they books, rather short stories. Even short stories is inaccurate, as the closest thing you get to the comic is the television show, both being serials. Often both also lack a creator's name in any place of prominence (and perhaps the same could be said for movies, although we talk about movie directors all the time and don't mention television show directors). Looking through old issues of comics really tells us the problems of the past--a medium that doesn't think it needs to showcase its own creators is a bastard medium. Television shows are at least marketing actors, comics were only marketing characters. There's a disconnect here. A comic that has it's author/penciller/inker team written out on the cover along with the logo is trying to make a statement. Less so now and more so twenty years ago, but I'm sure there's still plenty of character-selling comics to be found these days.

Yet this isn't a solution. Creating a divide in the industry, a divide in the definitions of the word "comic book" is very much what led to the forking of the genre, the creation of such stuck-up terms as "graphic novel." Why is it a graphic novel? The term actually does have an accurate and true definition: namely a single release story more than the length of one issue. It becomes, however, in the hands of people who are accepting of the bastardization of "comic book" into kid's story of superhero violence, an escape. So you have people reading Watchmen, the graphic novel, although it is Watchmen, the comic book, which was collected as a trade paperback. The idea of a "graphic novel" can only be truly understood as a question of length. Here "book" is discounted by the actual size of a comic, about 30 pages give or take 10 (or more if you want to get into experimental stuff like Fell, and "novel" is given as being longer. If comics are television shows, then graphic novels are like films, in the sense that there is some crossover, sequels do happen, but there aren't many overlapping stories taken from narrative to narrative.

As I've said before (in the previous post, I could link you but it's buried in there and you don't want to have to read the whole post to find it, unless you want to read the whole post which means you could just hit the back button and do a small scroll down), comics are more than the pages that might eventually get collected. They are the waiting between issues, the letters to the editor, the covers (which might or might not get into the trade), and the advertisements. Graphic novels have none of this. Watchmen has all of this. It's a comic.

And for anyone who wonders who I am to bitch about this, I share my point of view with most of the creators who supposedly write "graphic novels," as you can see here, as well as comics readers themselves (ourselves...)...Only the most ashamed of us read only "graphic novels." This is a graphic novel. This is a comic. The only difference between the two is the initial length, the method of release, and because of this some storytelling procedures. Compare The Green Mile, originally released serially, and Insomnia.

Not much of an etymology, failing at my original goal, just how I like it.

TECHNICAL: Etymology will be a new tab, replacing the previous "language" which only had one post in it anyway.

Autopsy Presents: CHASING VICTOR

2011-08-08T12:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Dear Editor,

Originally, upon reading through the first five pages of issue 26 I found the second person point of view odd and misplaced. When hero introduced himself to "you" or rather me, I was a little taken aback. Rereading the panel, however, the piece finally clicked. I'm not all that supportive, as a straight, cis man, of playing female leads in paper plays, but I must admit I was finally intrigued.
"Who are you?" we ask the mysterious man in the shadows at the back of the bar.
"Who am I?" he says and hands us his card...
"Chasing Victor? What is that, a stage name? What are you, a comedian?"
"Yes, in fact I'm the comic you're reading."
--James Ballard

To Reed and Drew:

Congratulations on reaching your thirtieth issue. When I first bought the anniversary book, I thought there must be some mistake--why would someone put out a "comic" that's just ads and 30 blank white pages? But then I realized this was the very essence of Chasing Victor. He may be out there ahead of us, we may feel his existence within billboard signs and television commercials, but in the end we are left with our pens uncapped and an inability to string words together.
Keep up the good work.
--Archie Blank

Archie, Reed is glad to hear your support for this issue. Rather than use a fill-in team for this book, his baby, he decided this would be a better waste of your money.

To Bill:

I hope this book gets better with the price hop starting with #34. Bring back the characters setting and plot. They were enormous fun.
--Paul Kuberg

To Chasing Victor team:

I most enjoyed the recent issue "'Paint the town,' said." Congrats on the fill-in writer, but who did you get to do the ghosting? I'm not sure I'm supportive of putting "Mystery" in the credits...
I was very interested in the new character you introduced, although the scenes were a bit difficult to make out, what with him out taking up a third of the panel in the 3X18 grid... I believe he is supposed to to be some sort of writer of semi-autobiographical mystery novels which he occasionally illustrates...
--Sally Crimber

Unfortunately his name is Mystery. You misunderstood that character completely, the panel is actually showing a close-up on Victor's kneecap.

To Bill:

I was very insulted by issue 63 "The Customer is Always Right."
Why, I must ask, did you have Victor wear a uniform to work that covered the tattoo no one has ever seen (as the inking scene was done in the all dark issue #50) which reads "Conservatism is Narcissism." I was even more abhorred with Victor's pun, upon picking up the book that the man left behind in his rush to leave the panel, shocked by what his wife had become, stating "the Customer is Always Read!"
I must say that I am quite the customer but although I read, I am not a red.
--John Publique

Our apologies, you have quite the point, as long as we're reading you right. However we must ask, like a tree falling in a forest with none around to hear it and whether it makes a sound, does a tattoo that's never visible to anyone make a language that can be read?

To those chasing Victor:

Please in future issues refer to our hero as he was originally known: The Victor. The article makes all the difference.
[unsigned]

Dear Drew,

Issue 55's torn off cover was the most amazing illustration I've ever not seen looking out at me while window shopping at the comic store. I almost had to go in and buy it.

Thank you! Drew is very happy with all the positive feedback he's getting for it.

To Bill, editor extraordinaire:

Wasn't it your idea to include a letter's column in the story of last issue? I thought the random fictional letters were a pretty good read, although it was a bit annoying at times. You must, if you were the writer, learn how to write better, if you want to try something like this. Ultimately, you need to gaze over an idea like this, rather than rush it out on some budget of time that you've put yourself into. Gaze at it and eventually tweak it here and there, staring at bits and pieces until you go blind, staring then at the story itself instead of the words you type, becoming, in a sense, a character, a watcher, a reader, becoming as at least I have experienced, a better writer.
--JLB

EDIT
Some technical drivel: Bill is the editor of a fictional comic called Chasing Victor of which we have various letters to the editor. Reed is the writer and Drew is the illustrator as their names might suggest. Bill himself becomes victim of a pun where he first gets introduced at the start of a letter that questions a new price hop in the comic. (The letter is written by Paul Kuberg, a bit of a frequent character with me. He'll probably end up on the original "autopsy" one of these days.) Hence a higher bill hardeeharhar.

Kuberg also calls for the creators to "Bring back the characters setting and plot." At the risk of explaining a joke and making it not funny, there's more to be written about this sentence. I like to play on punctuation in my poetry or rather I should say I would like to play on punctuation in my poetry as I don't really have any complete punctuation poems. Here, however, I have a bit of a completed project that plays on it. "Bring back the characters setting and plot" might appear to be missing some commas, but the language is actually correct, meaning that "setting" and "plot" were characters in the book who have disappeared. Not viewing the book as a serious work but rather as a conceptual idea, I'm not exactly sure if it's just a typo or what.

Playing it close to the deadline, actually got this out pre-noon in the West which is amazing because I thought I'd slept through that time spot. Woke up and was pleasantly surprised by a clock, but I still wasn't sure I could do it in time. This actually became the main focus of the last letter. Jorge Luis Borges was "the great Argentine writer" as I've quoted a science professor I've had before. He went blind at the end of his life and it impacted both his writing and his worldview. I think I might be bordering on the edges of taste with my reference to his blindness but I like it.

I wanted to write a story that was similar to what I think of Borges's writing: he creates the concept of an impossible piece of art, for example Pierre Menard's Quixote, so I wanted to make a comic that couldn't exist. Or rather that would be horrible if it existed. What's so great about Borges is how he can argue the good side to having a new author of Quixote something that links somewhat humorously to the book's story, in that it was in fact ripped-off and with a sequel being published. The praise of a "torn off cover" was the sort of thing I thought Borges might come up with if he was conceptualizing a story about comics.

I've been reading old Doom Patrol issues for a while now and I read the first issue of Enigma yesterday morning and I had been thinking how do I work "autopsy" into comic books. There's a concept I've begun to consider of the comic book as an object of its own--one that gets cut up for a trade paperback or is distinctive from a graphic novel--the waiting for the comic each month, the letters' page, the advertisements are all part of it. This I parodied before I even first mentioned it, presenting an issue of blank pages which would only have all these extra elements to make it into a comic book.

The Victor is a pun on "the Batman," a name I myself can't help but think is cooler when used occasionally than "Batman." Probably best would be "the bat man"--it just seems the most logical of creations in a world that does not have the standardization of names that comes from having a fictional hero running around with the name for a thousand issue. Loyal readers would recognize Chasing Victor--it's a story I still have in purely the conceptual stages. Here are other excerpts from it. With Victor, the change to "the Victor" actually makes a big difference in how we understand the name, something I've explored before in the linked post.

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

2011-08-07T12:00:00.000-07:00

(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.

Take this as a transition, looking around the web for a little reading to help frame my "debriefing" of Halo Jones, which I really did read late at night a while ago, I found this interview with Ian Gibson, where he speaks specifically about some of the stuff I was writing about in yesterday's (a few hours ago) post. I'll give you the whole question and answer, because reader, I think you're smart enough to pick up on the relevant bits I'm talking about and because I found the whole thing fascinating.

Let's start with that Titan post-signing party where the idea for the Halo Jones story first started - did you have a discussion with Alan Moore on this occasion?

Ian Gibson: Yes. I'd been talking with Steve MacManus (then editor) and he'd been asking what I fancied doing as I'd just finished a long stretch on Robohunter. I'd previously approached him about doing a female lead story but he'd shied away from the notion. But when I asked if I could work with Alan on something he okayed the idea and we wandered across the room to introduce me to the hairy beast. I started by introducing Alan to the idea of a girl's story and suggested that it should be as lifelike as possible with no thought balloons or panels to "explain" things. I told Alan that I thought we could get away with making the story "self explanatory" in the way that we figure some things out (in our lives) only after the event. I never see any panels floating in the sky to warn me that "I'm in for a big surprise" or any handy "little did he know" notes attached to the lampposts. And Alan agreed that it would be a nice change in comics. So he went away to work on the project. Some six months later he came to see Steve and I and said he had all the ingredients for a great story: girls, rockets and monsters!

Now I've had a bit of trouble with my new blog writing in that I'm starting to ask myself "why?" a lot. Certainly, with blog posts before the last twelve or so I had the same issue, but I wasn't so seriously going after a consistent format with a certain way of writing. Or at least I don't remember doing this before. I'm sure I did it back when I've done blogaday stuff before. Sigh, anyway, I need to quit my whining and get on with it, right reader? I hope in this debriefing to create a style that I can continue with and not be continuously questioning myself.

The Ballad of Halo Jones is the sort of comic that reads as if it is very British. This is simply another kind of Orientalism, a concept I probably do not know well enough to actually write about but still apparently am going to refer to every now and then. Simply put, the comic feels like something you can't do in comics. Female, not-hypersexualized lead, character; no superheros, rather a science fiction deep future setting; black and white art... Probably only the last bit can be called British, but it is all fairly irregular. The British comics scene, in as far as I know it, is more like the Japanese market: namely magazines serialize comics and tend to be lacking in color. I'm not sure the reason for this, but I could suggest simply the time it takes to color (these magazines are weekly), the size of these magazines making color an expensive and unwanted extravagance, or any number of other explanations that I'm simply not thinking of.

Other than that, Halo Jones, published in the British giant 2000 AD which is probably as close to a DC/Marvel that they have across the pond, stood out just as much there as here. I suppose there is a wonderful sort of paradise (I guess I'm exaggerating) that one can imagine when reading Halo Jones, thinking that this is what British comics are like. Basically, the superhero, the male market, and the collector have all done their separate numbers in defacing the comics industry. Just like the two-party system does for politics and elections, these issues have all caused the industry and individual comics themselves to be mainly bloated, useless, and boring. Or rather I should say "niche-y." People read them, people like them, you have to admit it, even if the numbers are "low," they're still generally in the thousands. While I think Spider-Man, Batman, or the Flash can be written well and I often enjoy reading certain superhero comics, I have no interest in the traditional turn-out. I guess it's the same with films, in all seriousness, and you simply have to change the dominant genre to romantic comedies and realize that that isn't as omnipresent as the superhero in comics, but yeah, connections can be made. The problem being that "comic book" has become synonymous with "superhero story" in the way that "Kleenex" is "tissue."

Halo Jones truly meshes with Alan Moore's own rules for writing in the fittingly titled "Writing for Comics," especially this bit from early on in the third chapter:

The job of the writer, whether he or she is attempting to depict a colony on Neptune in the year 3020 or society life in London around 1890, is to conjure a sense of environmental reality as completely and as unobtrusively as possible. (20)

What's apparent about the book is that its world is very fleshed out. It seems to me like this was a bit of a collaborative effort, after reading the interview with Gibson, but it's still apparent that between the two creators there was a very clear understanding of what the setting of the book was. I think, over all, the oddest feeling about Halo Jones is that it feels...unfinished, underdeveloped. Not so much an issue involved in the ending being badly written but that the entire work does not seem like it functions on its own. Reading the interview, I learned about the rest of the book that's currently in developmental hell, which really made a lot of sense. Halo Jones feels cut off, reduced, and incomplete. You get the sense that the work was going places, and apparently it was, considering that Gibson talks about there being a potential for nine books (of which we have a published three), which are locked up from either copyright issues or an inability of the people involved to communicate.

With books like Flex Mentallo finally seeing reprint in the next year and the Marvelman mess apparently getting fixed (fingers crossed), one has to read about all this Halo Jones trouble and think we might actually hear more about the heroine someday. In my own experience with writing, stories, once they've gotten themselves into your mind as stories, really do not have a statute of limitations. Marvelman which is from the same era, although it was around longer, is likely to see new Neil Gaiman/Mark Buckingham material when it's all wrapped up legally and in the hands of Marvel that would've come about 20 years ago otherwise. Then again, there's an ever growing however small possibility that that is never going to happen.

Ultimately, I think reviews are a somewhat antiquated process. I think it's necessary to write something that maintains interest (unlike anything I've ever written), supplies at least a minimal amount of information about the work, and brings the work to the reader's attention. I guess there are claims for negative reviews, but I don't really think they are necessary, unless you have a debate sort of thing. Anyway, I know some people would rather read a review and on the (very slight) chance anyone reading this is pissed, I will toss you here to a review I'm not going to read and to a song that while not exactly descriptive of the story, or, obviously, canon, is something in the spirit of the book and I think fairly entertaining.

Now, I know I'm probably not really throwing any new readers Alan bloody Moore's way, but I found Halo Jones rough at times, but always immense fun. Moore is very good here, but he's not in Watchmen form, which makes for probably a better read. I'm sure if the book ever gets continued with Alan at the helm, I'll probably be left thinking the same thing I usually think after reading one of his stories--"I need to stop writing now."

Self Vigilant Kitsch

2011-08-06T12:00:00.000-07:00

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...

Metafiction in many ways is too adult a word. It cannot be precisely explained, the concept itself thrives to a large extent on unnecessary difficulty, and it's not very hard to be on the side of the fence proclaiming the whole idea is a load of junk. That's where Stephen King is and when one of the bestselling writers of all time is against an idea, you have to lend it some credence. (Although King's own critique seems to be of merely the word "metafiction," as the place I read him putting down the term was in the afterward of an undoubtedly metafictional novel.) Combine this was the child medium of comic books. Even with the creation of a masterwork like Watchmen (which isn't a graphic novel, people, get your words straight), there is a simple terminology response. Of course comic books can't be serious art. So, yes, these are "graphic novels." Forgetting perhaps that the lack of seriousness in the majority of books or even the majority of art. How then, could comics be metafictional? That would make them...[surprised sharp intake of breath] serious! And of course a good number of them are. There is a sort of comic metafiction that cannot be reached in any other medium. Consider the following:

Two of Warren Ellis's recent experimental publications (all recent Ellis comic publications seem to be experimental) seem to work off an old classic of comic books that has really fallen out of flavor: the thought bubble. Wikipedia offers the following on the dwindling number of thought bubbles in comics and the growing disapproval of the tool,

Writers and artists can refuse to use thought bubbles, expressing the action through spoken dialogue and drawing; they are sometimes seen as an inefficient method of expressing thought because they are attached directly to the head of the thinker, unlike methods such as caption boxes, which can be used both as an expression of thought and narration while existing in an entirely different panel from the character thinking. However, they are restricted to the current viewpoint character. An example is Alan Moore and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta, wherein during one chapter, a monologue expressed in captions serves not only to express the thoughts of a character but also the mood, status and actions of three others.

Warren Ellis, as well as my memory works, appears to follow the same practice for the most part, as do virtually all writers/artists/comic creators. With the emergence of Alan Moore's style of writing which, just as described above, often uses captions or actual speech to refer to multiple scenes at once, something which seems to have been either independently developed by or as is most likely strongly influenced Grant Morrison. Moore even began to dislike captions, choosing to use conversations to narrate otherwise unrelated activity because, well I guess because it felt real. Once again I might preface with "if memory serves," but this is something that strongly shows in Watchmen. Morrison at times eliminates words altogether, either for a page or two in his early Animal Man or for an entire issue of his lauded New X-Men.

Work that references the speech balloon or thought bubble would ultimately have to come in comics, then, as this is one of the idiosyncrasies of the medium. Consider the Neil Gaiman children's books, The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish or The Wolves in the Walls, illustrated by his common collaborator, Dave McKean, which become their most comic-book-esque when the characters speak in balloons, made brilliantly complicated the "he said," "she said" bits that sit outside the balloon next to the words. Even as the book comments on this bit of comic book jargon, the book itself first must become a comic book, rather than a illustrated children's story.

For Ellis, the thought bubble is something to be vaguely commented on. Consider the recent (and especially experimental, even for him) SVK, the acronym of which has helped supply our somewhat useless post title. Although BERG, the producers (if I have my understanding of both the situation of SVK and the word "producer" right) of the book refer to the secrets of this book as "hidden layers woven throughout the comic book," for the most part they are talking about the thoughts of characters.

Warren's interest in the thought bubble may not even arise from comic books themselves, but rather from science fiction, another often bastardized section of writing, although a genre rather than medium. As a predominantly science fiction comic writer who is somewhat moving away from comics or rather at least traditional comics for the here and now, Ellis has written about all kinds of science fiction staples, from space races to the future, albeit comic book style. In SVK he writes about mind reading, which in comics takes on a whole new mode of presentation. Although an omniscient story can tell us the minds of characters, comics literally show character's thoughts, sitting there next to the character. SVK in fact makes thought bubbles a part of the narrative itself. As Thomas Woodwind, the main character puts it, "I could see thoughts, I mean, see them imaged as a projection." What I find the most fun here is that Ellis has taken a question that I haven't really seen asked elsewhere (although I'm sure it has) and provided his own history as an answer. How would mind reading work? A little tongue-in-cheek as a complete answer, Warren's response is, in fact, "thought bubbles," and that just gives me the giggles.

In FreakAngels, the ongoing but now as in today (Friday), the day I'm writing this, just over. Unlike SVK, FreakAngels is experimental in a way unrelated to thought bubbles, but still relates to the structure of the comic. As a webcomic, FreakAngels is a new take on the Cory Doctorow way of publishing, that is the work is free online and sells as a print edition. According to everyone involved it's a success too, just as Doctorow's many books have been, before you trash the concept as unworkable. FreakAngels also deals with mind reading as well as mind control and Ellis provides another solution to his illustrator in this case. It might be a bit of a one-off but it does offer a way to avoid thought bubbles for thought-speech, as seen on this page, thought-speech is seen more as an amplification of actual spoken words. "Just talk normally," as Connor, one of the FreakAngels, puts it. Instead of thought bubbles we have speech balloons without arrows.

(A further bit of metafiction in FreakAngels that I read while catching up on the series, after writing this blog post is written up here. Links in this post would be casual spoilers...)

Ultimately these are questions a comic writer has to ask that any other medium doesn't touch on. Grant Morrison, another comic writer, has been working on comic specific metafiction since the eighties, and in contrast to Ellis is much more bold. Morrison's methods are a bit of a double edged sword, namely Warren Ellis writes a plethora of different kinds of stories, while early Morrison writes metafiction, which occasionally blends too much into the narrative so as to make his presence pesky. All this besides, early Morrison comics are great because of their newness. Like Das Racist in rap today, Morrison threw a lot of names, concepts, and theories out into books like Doom Patrol that had probably never been in comics before.

Now to talk about Morrison's metafiction in depth would ruin what's good about reading his comics, so I will simply write about a specific case. In Animal Man, specifically issue five, Morrison uses comics to parody cartoons. Issue five, "The Coyote Gospel," both celebrates and mocks the sort of zany violence and style of our children's so-called Saturday morning shows in ways you couldn't do anywhere else than perhaps in a cartoon, where the shifting of realities would still be difficult. Now I know I'm not doing the comic any justice in this bit I've written about it, but I don't really want to get into it. The more I explain, the less fun the issue'll be! (Not that this blog is going to turn any of its nonexistent readers to a much more popular comic...but I can dream, can't I?)

These are aspects of the style of the comic book medium that result in a specific kind of metafiction that simply cannot be done in other mediums. A lot of people write about comics as being new, as being full of potential and I hope I've shown some of the ways it has been opened up in the past, I guess it's thirty?, years that have made it a medium that has the potential to become as a whole more mature. Of course, all I've tried to say here has been more brilliantly stated by Neil Gaiman, yet another comic writer, and I'll close with a quote I've stolen from his Wiki page:

Asked why he likes comics more than other forms of storytelling Gaiman said “One of the joys of comics has always been the knowledge that it was, in many ways, untouched ground. It was virgin territory. When I was working on Sandman, I felt a lot of the time that I was actually picking up a machete and heading out into the jungle. I got to write in places and do things that nobody had ever done before. When I’m writing novels I’m painfully aware that I’m working in a medium that people have been writing absolutely jaw-droppingly brilliant things for, you know, three-four thousand years now. You know, you can go back. We have things like The Golden Ass. And you go, well, I don’t know that I’m as good as that and that’s two and a half thousand years old. But with comics I felt like – I can do stuff nobody has ever done. I can do stuff nobody has ever thought of. And I could and it was enormously fun.”

Living Fossils of the Soccer World

2011-08-05T12:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Women's soccer has always been bigger in the US. I relate this to a comment of my father's once about local sports here in Tampa, something along the likes of "if you win they will come." And while the Tampa Bay Rays are somewhat finding this bit disproved a bit and are always bitching about only getting thousands in the teens to come to their games, I think there's some truth to the idea that is practically American. Namely that if you put up success, America is going to fall in line and support the cause.

(It seems like we should note how this relates to team sports: a United States team appeals to the patriotism of America in the way that the Williams sisters or Michelle Wie truly do not. A national team, like a local team, allows the sports viewer to feel involved in the action, transcending the feeling of being a "fan" in a way that individual sports cannot quite reach.)

So when the US team won the first FIFA Women's World Cup in 1991 (before, I think, it was actually called the Women's World Cup.), there were the roots planted for support for the national women's team in a sport that is curiously absent from American. Sure, we have Landon Donovan (although many Americans might think he's the guy who made "Mellow Yellow") and David Beckham playing in "Major League Soccer," but even the existence of a term as "major league soccer" shows the games lack of American support. Called, accurately, football worldwide, in America we give it another name and maybe play it a bit as a youth (as I did) but rarely get into it past the age of fifteen.

Women's soccer, at least from a fan if not participation perspective, is different. Americans enjoy a feeling of superiority that was strengthened by their victory in the 1991 Women's World Cup, bolstered by the follow-up win in 1999, and ultimately resulted in the ratings boom that was the 2011 FIFA Women's World Cup final...where the US didn't come out victorious. However, this said, the support from the American people did not wane, as the final was still a nice place to be. The victorious Japan won a national event showing one of the true strengthening powers of sports: simply the ability to show the power of a nation. Having gone through horrible natural disaster just months before, the Japanese people as a whole had something to feel proud of. The players even dedicated their performance to those impacted by the earthquake. Ultimately, beating Brazil and outlasting Germany, the other titans of the game, was seen as a good showing if not the greatest possible end at the World Cup.

What I was interested in was an odd bit of reporting that surfaced following the World Cup. National support was overwhelmingly positive and sports media showed themselves to be just that: media. Odd rules rule media, which I find to be responsible for both the common liberal bias (which I love and support) and the odd quirks that pop up from time to time. (A great book I've read for class in the fall about some of the quirks of media and politics can be looked at and ordered here.) In response to the national "good job" and not sarcastic "nice try" being handed out to the women's national team, people on SportsCenter and ESPN in general started throwing out words like "choke."

Which is all well and good. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press and all. (I'm no fascist, I'm more liberal than you are.) What got me was the way the media went out to get the supporters, the people who didn't think that the team had "choked." Hope Solo would eventually come out and say she herself to issue with the word "choke," which you can see in low quality here. Looking at some of the comments, you wonder who it really was that went out to support the team. I must admit to relying on the same reporting from what is basically the only national sports media outlet (ESPN/SportsCenter...I'll say in the parenthetical that Sports Illustrated and Sporting News, one of my dad's magazines, get honorable mentions) that there was actually national support. People like the president are certainly going to support the team. That's their uh JOB?! Supporting patriotic activity and nationalism is really what the president does. So that's not news.

But that's neither here nor there. To frame their questioning of the supposedly positive response to the women's team, multiple sports reporters or at least Ryen Russillo, I don't quite remember anyone else specifically, asked the question "What if it was the men's national team that lost two leads late in regulation and then in extra time?" And that's when I started scratching my head.

In early anthropology (and I realize what kind of picture it paints that the majority of my references to anthropology are criticisms of its origins; you have to be pretty disgusted with the field's origin to be a good modern anthropologist in my opinion...although I'd say the same thing about being white man...) anthropologists would search for "living fossils" of multiple kinds. The primatologists would be after the "missing link" both in bones and in the living, breathing bigfoots in the wild (brilliantly parodied in a different context by Futurama by putting forth the idea that no matter how many missing links you have, you'll end up with missing missing links); the cultural guys would go searching for "wild people."

The problem with this kind of logic is that these things don't exist. Nothing alive right now is a fossil. It's a stupid thing to consider. The idea that people are evolved from monkeys is junk. Monkeys, apes, primates, whatever other names you want to put here, and humans have a common ancestor. You can't determine anything specifically about humans from living chimpanzees. You can make comparisons, but you can't actually say that anything a chimpanzee has today was what it had in the past.

Let's bring linguistic anthropology into the picture: false cognates, this term itself further complicated from (as you see linked at the top of the Wikipedia page) the confusion of false cognates and false friends. False cognates in biological anthropology are called analogies. They contrast with homologies. Homologies are traits shared by related organisms that are due to their common ancestor. Analogies are similar to what they are in language: like a certain impacting situation is to one trait, another different situation has cause this other, similar, trait. A comparison made by my biological anthropology professor was to a small primate's bipedal structure in comparison to ours. It's analogous but you can pretty much say it didn't evolve the same way, simply because we have very little in common with the animal relatively speaking, in comparison to the apes (our closest and not-bipedal relatives). This is a fairly slam shut case, but anything going the other way is harder. You can prove without much doubt that certain similarities are simply analogies, but you can't really prove homologies. You never know if different situations caused similar, but ultimately different, evolution in the past.

This relates to a poem of mine called "Show me a time machine and then maybe I'll start to accept your doctrine" which you could read here, but really only the title is related. Basically, science falls here, as it does with evolution if you want to argue that, into a territory it doesn't like. Value judgment, opinions, beliefs. You can think that certain similarities are homologous, you can even have computer simulations heavily in your favor, but it's just an opinion. I think it is necessary to use science as a way of putting forward the answers most likely to life's biggest questions. I'm not championing teaching Intelligent Design in the classroom. I just think it is a little vain when scientists and college students who think they are scientists make claims about "knowledge," something science isn't interested in creating in the first place. But back to the poem title, obviously if you could go back in time and take a time lapse sort of video of evolution as it happened, you could fairly easily make good judgments on the differences between homologies and analogies...But you can't.

Just as you can't imagine what the US reaction would be to the men's national team "choking" as the women's national team reportedly did. First, the men's team would have to be in the same place as the women's team for this comparison to work. That is they would have had to have won enough World Cups to have US support of the national team at a similar level to that of the women's team. The relatively late arrival of the Women's World Cup is enough to have inspired the US support of the women's team: two World Cup victories means the US has won two of six, a third of the World Cups. The men's team would not have the same level of support if it had won two World Cups out of all of them which go back to 1930! The status would be higher, but you can't say it would be at the same level. Secondly, given the same positioning, if you set the situations to somehow be hypothetically the same and the only difference be gender, how can you claim the response would be differently?

It seems simply disingenuous to assume that the women's national team which has better support in the United States and has had more success would only get a general positive response to their World Cup runner-up position because they are women. Asking the question of how the people would react if it was the men's team is useless. There are countless differences between the two and simply pretending those differences didn't exist, you are left without a point. You do not know if you are right or not. It's not reporting to lay out opinions and it isn't reporting to ask questions and answer them yourself that can only be answered with opinions.

So yeah, sure you can think that the men's team in the same situation would be trashed. You can think the women's team choked. You are certainly allowed to think these things. And share these thoughts. But that's not reporting and to tell you the truth I do not care what you think about such things.

(If only I actually didn't care what they thought. If only I watched SportsCenter, Pardon the Interruption, or Around the Horn every once in a while. Sigh.)

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

2011-08-04T12:00:00.000-07:00

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.

I'm not sure if it's rereading Grant Morrison's Animal Man run or some other nostalgia inducing activity, but I've been thinking a bit lately on my history as a writer and how it's changed. I first began to conceive of the term "writer" as an occupation on a summer trip I took with my uncle up to the upper peninsula of Michigan. I read the first trade of Animal Man issues late at night supported by the northern late setting sun overlooking Lake Superior over the pages of the book as I flipped them. I'm sure that's more idyllic than I really should be. Take my memories with a grain of salt. Or sand. The Storyteller reflects on memory a bit in a very interesting self-aware way that I don't think I even mentioned in my remembrance of the book. Any self-respecting writer would have remembered to mention that.

So why have I decided to let you, the invisible (unreal?) reader, in on my recent private musings? Maybe it's simply a lack of true creative output that has caused me to become interested in what I've written in the past. One could easily make the argument that blogging is generally creative nonfiction, but I'm not up for arguments right now. Creatively, I'm still in amassing mode but it's really taking too long. I feel the need to write again, somewhat, but also fear an inability to create something I can tolerate. So at least for the near future we are left with a lot of remembering what I used to write, while little whispers in my brain turn this way and that, eventually, one hopes, forming themselves into ideas for the page.

To illustrate what is the most interesting change in my writing since I began to see myself as actually writing as being the one writing, the writer, I plan now to dig up a bit of a treat for you, the loyal and not altogether real reader. I had written what I guess was fan fiction before and some "stories," mainly the output I had from class assignments in that realm, and I could trace what I think my first story was way back to the fifth grade, a nice pulpy romp through a world where sardines did their own version of Planet of the Apes, sparked by, if I remember write (heh heh), a photo of a family being sealed in a sardine can, but the following is what I consider to be my first story. As the me who is writing this, anyway. As Pandrio Androtti? I do think the pen name was soon to originate around the time of the writing as well, the last name anyway. I had stolen the first name from my father who took is from his father...

Here's "It's a small world after all."

Conrad was late. It was very much like him. His friends would say that he’d be late to his own funeral if possible, but that was not where he was going today. It was not his own funeral that Conrad needed to be at ten minutes ago. It was his father’s.
                Conrad had many memories of his father. Stories that Dad told when he had grown old and couldn’t do much but reminisce about the good ole days. The good ole days with all of Dad’s friends and acquaintances and all of their adventures.
                Funny they all died before he started telling those blasted tales thought Conrad, no one left to shoot down the exaggerations and falsifications. Conrad didn’t believe most of his father’s tall tales.
                A story for every day of the week. Conrad’s father never drew short of them and would sputtle off one to anyone who was willing to listen. Old man Jenkins who lost his head in a graveyard and stalked the cemetery ever since trying to find some sort of exit. Or young boy Bill who never seemed to grow all that much older and must have lived for a hundred years. Never the same stories, Conrad thought, he probably made them up as he was going along.
But what of the only things that would show up in more than one of father’s stories? He paused for a moment pondering what Dad had called them, but realized he was late again and sped off down a short cut to get to the funeral.
                It started to eat away at Conrad that he couldn’t think of his father’s word for them but he still recalled the description. Big ones, they would guard the land in the days of Dad’s youth—supposedly—these great giants were one of Conrad’s doubts in his father’s stories. Especially his last ones.
                Shortly before his father died he told the family the story of the giants and what happened to them. The dark morning of the loud sound, the dawn and the explosions and then, nothing, “the earth stood still,” his father spoke fluently, deeply engrossed in his tale.
                Let the rubbish die with that damned old fool, thought Conrad as he continued on his trek, half an hour behind and not making the greatest time. He should stop thinking and concentrate on getting to the funeral. But what were the blasted names of those big creatures? He thought and thought but the word would not come.
                He remembered the closing house that they used to kill his uncle, or so his father said, and the terrible winds that took his grandparents, in the stories that is. What did he call them? They killed quite a bit of Dad’s old friends and family and gave him great stories of his bravery in escaping them, but what on earth was the word he used?
                “Aah, humans!” the word suddenly came to his mind. Those were the brutal, barbaric beasts of father’s tall tales. I have to admit, thought Conrad; the old man had to be bright to make that one up.
                The cockroach scuttled off quickly into the darkness, up ahead squeezing through a hole the width of a quarter. It was late.

It seems fitting now to have the opening the way I had it. The paragraph leading up to the story above was, I think, the closest I've really come to writing a little bit on the work the way we hear a tidbit from Matt or Dave before each episode. I've marked this post "autopsy" although it's out of sequence and doesn't quite fit the bill in the first place, because I think someone (probably only a future me) would like to have these old stories on the web in one place or at least one tab group.

If you compare the fantasy...I guess it's a fantasy story?...story above and compare it to anyone of the excerpts from F O U N D or really any of stories I've written here before. You can really see a change happening. Of course a few of those links could be seen as fantasy writing (I changed "fantastic" because it would sound like a compliment), but I do believe that they chart a shifting of focus in my writing. And in linking to them all I've stolen an idea from another source, Ron Silliman, who often does multiple links to the same story giving (I think) a few different approaches. I've turned it into a narcissistic thing, imagining a bored out of his (or her) fucking mind reader actually clicking through individual links on this site. Or rather I'm interested in hyper-linking, I think it's fun to have all these fingers off the page that go into others. (Yeah that, let's go with that.) It's something I always thought was cool but underdeveloped and too expensive in comics--the links to other storylines and the little editor's note saying: "Go check Insane Man #3 to see what really happened to the Crazy Clown and why he's lying about it to Hussein Bolt!" (Um not to insult Usain Bolt, or Barack Hussein Obama, or for that matter Saddam himself...I just liked the sound of the name...) I just looked forever on warrenellis.com to find where he talks about the editor's notes and the linking of comics (explicitly early Marvel, something I have from my dad about his own youth and reading Marvel only to be displeased by nothing ending in an issue...nothing ever ending...), hopefully I find it sometime and edit it in here. If I do I'll capitalize the "edit" and you'll see the link on "here."

When Borders first hit the hurdle of bankruptcy and vomited up a few stores to hell I found myself holding both Freedom, my first Jonathan Franzen book and perhaps my first book that Bret Easton Ellis really couldn't say enough good things about even far after the fact (I think he only did make the one mention of Netherland), and Zero History my first William Gibson before the "genre switch" if you want to call it that. In reading Zero History I really felt possessive of Gibson or akin to him, in that I saw myself in a lot of what he was doing. Not to say I could do it nearly as well, even the hard skiffy or the oddly hard science reality fiction, but that his shift in writing really reflected with me. I remembered a quote that didn't really strike me when I first read it but was something I did hold onto and grew to relate with. (Whole article here.)

Amazon.com : Now that you're writing about the present, do you consider yourself a science fiction writer these days? Because the marketplace still does.
Gibson: I never really believed in the separation. But science fiction is definitely where I'm from. Science fiction is my native literary culture. It's what I started reading, and I think the thing that actually makes me a bit different than some of the science fiction writers I've met who are my own age is that I discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs and William Burroughs in the same week. And I started reading Beat poets a year later, and got that in the mix. That really changed the direction. But it seems like such an old-fashioned way of looking at things. And it's better not to be pinned down. It's a matter of where you're allowed to park. If you can park in the science fiction bookstore, that's good. If you can park in the other bookstore, that's really good. If people come and buy it at Amazon, that's really good.

Talking about Amazon as if it were the fabled place of judgment that many writers of talked about: the dream that bookstores might simply place every book alphabetical by author on the shelves and leave it to the audience, not stereotyped by the idea that only one section of books can be "literature." (I might add that I think this belief has both its advantages and disadvantages and I think at least Neil Gaiman, when he was talking about it, mentioned how this was only the way he thought sometimes. Or something like that.)

I began writing as a comic reader, in all seriousness. My favorite writer at the time was probably Grant Morrison. I wrote a lot of fiction that would be pigeonholed as bad fantasy or bad soft science fiction. I find it odd now to consider how much science fiction my dad has read. Probably hundreds of times as much as me. Perhaps thousands. And I think...I think the genre appeals to me, mildly. Warren Ellis, William Gibson, Cory Doctorow, I've read some PKD...but the hard stuff actually scares me. It scares the writer in me. And that's what's probably different for me and allows him to read so much of it. His favorite writer is Heinlein. And he can read a Heinlein book and not have to consider what it is like writing a book. It's the same kind of heeby-geebies I get when I read mystery novels. I write in a nondescript toned down style. I tend to think I only write about what I think the story needs. My characters are (at least I like to think of them as) without appearance. I dislike reading stuff like "he had a full head of brown hair." It doesn't interest me. But science fiction or mystery both have not so much rules as tools that I do not know how to operate. So I can write a story about a cockroach (above), but I can't imagine writing a locked-room-murder-mystery (a phrase I think I have in rough in the first draft of a poem in my notebook), and I'm simply not smart enough to write good hard science fiction. I think I can write a bad version of Kurt Vonnegut's kind of it, but I've read more Vonnegut than my father (I think).

So my own interaction with science fiction has been very odd. The main thing I can think to speak about is a story I've just dug up in an old notebook. It's called "Olympus Mons." I think the eponymous character was a space pirate. Very odd to read through snatches of it. At one point I think I really thought I would be a genre writer. Even a science fiction writer. Nowadays that seems to me not only absurd but presumptuous. If I could only...

(It occurs to me now, or rather it occurred to me far enough back in time that I've gone and dug the book out of my room, that a lot of this post could be inspired by Chabon's Maps & Legends which I've already devoted a serious amount of wordspace here. I think I misprinted the name as Maps and Legends a few times in that post. My apologies, Ron Silliman would not be proud. I could possibly conclude that it was the bits on comics in Chabon's nonfiction collection that got me back thinking about rereading Grant Morrison's early stuff which I learned one marvelous day my father had runs full of issues of in boxes in the garage back I don't know, five years? I could also blame the Grant Morrison documentary I watched a few months back. I've been looking now for a specific reference in the Chabon book, he talks about thinking he wanted to write science fiction and then talking to an actual science fiction writer at his university...yes okay in "Imaginary Homelands," Chabon reflects on meeting Gregory Benford, "a fine writer of extremely 'hard' science fiction" who showed "polite and kindly bafflement" at what Chabon's own dreams in science fiction looked like. So, one could easily state that everything I've written here has been written better by a published author in a book that I've read and stole it all from to make a blog post, but at least I enjoyed writing it, so it doesn't need to say anything new. So there!)

It's just something to think about. I wonder sometimes why I enjoy writing and what it does to make me different from other people. The way I experience narrative or art is different, I think, not better (or worse), but different. You are not a character when you get into the work but rather a creator, and seeing how damn good all these other people are...it's down right reading-'Salem's-Lot-at-too-late-o'clock-with-bizarre-new-age-music-and-children-proclaiming-"we-are-the-lost" scary. Just a thought.

June

2011-08-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Buying cassava was a new experience. Part of a study attempting to get more in touch with the actual results of the Colombian Exchange. It was just something I couldn't really visualize--all these different crops moving this way or that over the Atlantic Ocean? It didn't make sense to me how this would make that much a difference, because weren't they evolving based on climate changes? And if the climates were similar, then wouldn't they be pretty much the same?

"No," you said this morning over breakfast before sending me off for the manioc, "consider me and you: we both come from suburban families with mild religious backgrounds and we end up exact opposites, didn't we?" This was a question I didn't want to answer, because it couldn't mean good news for our relationship. Besides gender, I didn't really believe that opposites attracted. But you had written whole term papers on the Colombian Exchange--not just the crops but even the epidemiology so maybe you had a point...

"Sir," the man at the vegetable stand brought me back to the present, "what do you want?"

I want to know the answers to the questions unknown. I want to rule the world. I want to have as much money so as to make the concept of money, to me, useless. I want to eradicate my own disgusting bits of capitalism, my own dirty parts. "I want to try some mani--I mean cassava." Names were important to me, of course manioc was cassava, cassava was manioc. Using the words I had always used was a way of keeping my childhood close, of forgetting the man I was quickly growing to hate that I was turning into.

"You've come to the right place," the man said and smiled somewhat mischievously, "I've got a feeling that the girlfriend wants you to cook for once." Was it that written out on my face? I had always been inept in the kitchen, unable to decipher even the smallest of recipes, having difficulty remembering how to work the stove, etc. It didn't help that you were a regular Emeril, even dispersing the "bam!" intermittently in a way that I found cute. It also didn't help that you wanted to involve me in this--it was one of those things, like music, that I had allowed myself to avoid understanding completely for the better part of my life. The enigma was a large part of what I loved in these far reaches of my universe. You, obviously, played a decent violin; but this had worked in my favor, since I'd bought you one for your birthday and it had led to a speeding up of certain relationship processes...

"Yeah, I guess that's about it," I replied.

"You're the novelist, right?" the guy said as he looked through a few potatoes. They were all just potatoes to me. "Up there on the third floor?" He pointed to my apartment building. He was a bit familiar, perhaps someone I'd shared an elevator with.

"Fourth floor, actually. How'd you know?"

"Ha, that's where I live...sound of the typewriter keeping me up at night occasionally."

"Oh, really? Sorry...I didn't know it was that loud. But I guess the sound carries..."

"Not much a problem, mate," he said, picking up a particular spud, "you rock it old style with the typewriter though..."

"Yeah, it's the only way I can write. And I'm not a novelist. You have to finish a novel for that..."

"Oh shut up," he replied somewhat jovially, "this good for you?"

"Is that a cassava?" He hit his face lightly with his palm. I reflected on the fact that you were so interested in new things, in anything that was just coming out. I had never thought about the contradiction between the two of us in a good light before. It was almost as if you were an anti-depressant, as I was stuck in dwelling on our differences and their complication of the relationship. I paid him and left.

Now, trying to prepare this meal, I reflect back on what you yourself said about it in the most compromising of places. "Think about it this way: when you write you are the writer and the 'you' if there's a 'you,' that's the reader and they couldn't be more different, could they? Their functions are entirely separate and yet you reach this pact called reading." And then I didn't know what you were talking about, but accepted your kiss on the cheek before you turned over and adjusted the sheets. But now, on this June afternoon, waiting on you to come back from work, thinking about my own current lack of a job, it just seems to make all too much sense.

NOTES:

under the hood
In the first sentence of the second paragraph I added the article "the" to make it "the manioc" so the reader could hopefully realize I am speaking about the cassava with a new name. The paragraph ends on a note that hearkens me to the early Radiohead song "You," which is actually a very good fit with this piece (I typed it up listening to my new favorite by the band, "The Butcher.") I especially make the connection between the last sentence of this paragraph and the line "and why should I believe myself not you?" The fourth paragraph was originally drastically different, beginning with the quote (I added the extra wants). Following the quote only "Names were important to me," is the same in the final and original versions, but was followed by "but had no effect on you. When our professor in the class we met in had first referred to the crop of the Arawak as manioc, you'd just gone right along. I put up a bit of a fight, however superficially, calling it cassava because that was the word I had grown up using for it." The fifth paragraph originally ended after the quote with the italics starting a new paragraph. I thought it flowed better without the enter & indent. "He was a bit familiar, perhaps someone I'd shared an elevator with," is a new sentence. "But I guess the sound carries..." was originally "But I guess sound does carry then..." Later in the dialogue, a reference to "crop" was changed to "spud" to play on the potatoes. I amended the penultimate paragraph, adding "in a good light" to a sentence and changing "It was almost as if the world had suggested it to me" to "It was almost as if you were an anti-depressant," and "noting" to "dwelling on," plus adding "and their complication of the relationship."

behind the scenes
"June" was named after a month to reference some of the prose poems of Tao Lin's you are a little bit happier than i am (which loyal readers will recognize as the title I ripped for my own book) which are titled by months. I wanted to write one of these for myself. And then I started writing... This happens quite a bit. You try to go one way and it goes off in another. The "cassava" addition is odd, I know. The story behind them is that I have become very interested in Caribbean studies and the Colombian Exchange is one of the more intriguing concepts in the field. Finding this appearing in my fiction is I think (I hope) a good element; the bizarre reality of this interest lends something to the character. The last paragraph seems to comment on the entire story's point of view (i.e. you and I) and is a recovery or explanation for one of the odd parts of the story. This would appear in a longer story for the class, where the same point of view would be used--it was what interested me at the time--the idea of the story as a play, the reader and writer are acting characters in. Ultimately I think several aspects of this story might be expanded; writing it, I wanted to continue it further, but the piece does come to an end. The idea of holding onto our youth..."Using the words I had always used was a way of keeping my childhood close, of forgetting the man I was quickly growing to hate that I was turning into" (a new line you'll know I've just written while typing up the story if you read the "under the hood" bit) is a very concise and abstract area where I could find much to write about. The influences of this line go back to nice anecdote.

Bret Easton Ellis has a few scenes in both Less than Zero and American Psycho that mirror each other to the extent that nearly all the same lines are used. This paints a difference between the two books by making the two characters separated by nuance; essentially the effect is to paradoxically make the books both more different and similar. (Have I said this before? Am I repeating myself again?) What I really connect to my own line is a divide Ellis creates in the Less than Zero line "I'm surprised at how much effort it takes to raise my head up and look at her." In American Psycho this is "I'm not surprised at how much effort it takes to raise my head and look at her."

It is in these spaces that the entire story was written. I hope this makes sense to someone other than me perhaps.

Praying in Common

2011-08-02T12:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Joan Didion writes the same book over and over. So does Don DeLillo. So does every great writer, I might make the claim. A part of reading works by such people is comparing against their previous work. It's recognizing characters now masquerading under new names and slightly changed everything. This where you get "theme." Where you get your own personal section in Wikipedia discussing your "themes." Of course Chuck Palahniuk and his sort can have a place on their Wiki page to discuss "writing style" but that's because Palahniuk is only continuous in his style. His themes are all over the place, which he pays for in a lot of hit and miss. A book like Survivor or Lullaby can be really quite good but you know he won't write another book like this, although you wish he would. Didion and DeLillo both know what to change and what to stay the same. The reading experience doesn't change book-to-book, you have to learn a new set of names and a new set of "details," but if you went all cut-up technique on either oeuvre you could still create good books. It's all going to mesh in together very well.

It seems that here, although this seems like an already unnecessarily long opening to a piece on a specific book, I should still add that this isn't a universal belief. A lot of people (or some people...I'm assuming it's a lot) disagree with me. They criticize Franzen for writing Freedom because "it's the same book as The Corrections" and maybe it is (I haven't read The Corrections), but I don't think this would bother me. They insult every Radiohead album that isn't Kid A because it's "too familiar," as if novelty was the sole judge for music. They criticize Point Omega because it's too much of what DeLillo has already written, or rather they do so as if novelty were the sole judge of novels. (Sorry, had to.) I don't mean to mock these opinions simply because I am introducing them comically. They are just as good as mine, which is why I feel the need to note them.

But to get to Didion. What one first realizes about any Didion book is her place as author. In Play It as It Lays she plays two traditional roles, scripting some character-narrated bits, as well as portraying the story in a limited omniscient focused on the female lead. David Thomson's introduction in my copy of the book quotes Didion from her interview in The Paris Review as having said this about the point of view:

I wanted to make it all first person, but I wasn't good enough to maintain a first. There were tricks I didn't know. So I began playing with a close third person, just to get something down. By a "close third" I mean not an omniscient third but a third very close to the mind of the character. Suddenly one night I realized that I had some first person and some third person and that I was going to have to go with both, or just not write a book at all. I was scared.

This could be fairly irrelevant to a discussion of a Didion book other than Play It as It Lays, if it weren't for the presence of the quote haunting her other novels. Maria, the main character of the novel, gives us the classic Didion-esque idea, "What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask." From here we can understand Maria as the main character of the novel. Even having not picked up Othello until after reading the book, the quote still got to me. It sticks with you. The greatest part of it being that a solid question to ask of the play is "Is Iago evil?," a question that I do think some people would be incapable of understanding.

However, Maria, quickly becomes a character in third person, that of the "close third" Didion names. In Democracy, which is her fifth novel, but the one I read next, Didion is the narrator, but the story is still essentially told in the same way. The main character of Democracy, it could be argued, is Inez Victor. Didion's presence in the novel seems to be simply one of her "tricks." It allows for an interesting amount of reflection on the story that cannot be seen in Maria's narrative, allowing for the story to be much more global in shape. However, even if two points make a line, a connection between two books does not make a career-long interest for a writer.

Let us then (finally) consider A Book of Common Prayer. The main character of the novel is once again not the narrator. Grace Strasser-Mendana gives us the story of Charlotte Douglas. Grace can be taken as a fictionalized version of Didion herself, although I do not mean biographically (of which I have no evidence of connections during the time of writing). While it seems a bad habit to get into, calling a character's emotions, feelings, or understandings those of the writer (calling Joseph Conrad racist for example), I do believe it holds true in this case. There is not an added sense of irony tacked onto the narrator's tale and I do believe we can take her pretty much at her word.

To summarize then, Play It as It Lays is narrated by Didion in your traditional god-role as third person writer, although the only mind she's in is Maria's (other narrative voices also arise), in A Book of Common Prayer she plays the role of the narrator as a character in a film, given a new name and background, and in Democracy she is at her most truthful, explicitly stating her role which hasn't changed from the previous two novels.

Now this is probably boring for everyone but me. That said, I am very interested in this "growth curve" if you will. Didion wanted to write Play It as It Lays in first person. Admitting that her first novel was in first person, we can see that the tricks she had to learn did not seem to have to do with the point of view itself but how the point of view impacts the narrative. Play It as It Lays is far from a straight forward linear book itself, but the other two create bizarre and beautiful looping structures of story, as certain sentences and quotes arise from the novel to recur later, a technique adapted by Bret Easton Ellis for Less than Zero. The idea of these words blowing by characters later on in a narrative structure is an appeal to the process of writing itself and something that really excites me. In A Book of Common Prayer this maximizes out to its highest potential, as phrases occur in such a frenzy as to make the last paragraphs appear random, appear impossible to understand.

This is where the first person narrative is important. We understand the book as Grace's witness to Charlotte Douglas and because of this, the ending works, the overwhelming of our (fictional) writer by words is not something we could accept as truthfully were we to be reading it in third person. It would not compute.

In closing it seems necessary to say that in my belief a writer like DeLillo and Didion need no book reviews. You just need to read one of their books. At least I know I can't review them better than their books on the shelves of your local library can. So I do not make the attempt, knowing I would fail. My apologies if my exploration in place of any sort of review bores as much as I fear it might.

"Books" of "Poetry"

2011-08-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

"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.

Nox is an interesting...uh...book?...yeah I guess, book. Here's what I've written about it before:

I'm not trying to get more reflective than this so I'll just continue in the same fourth-wall breaking mode. Anne Carson has talked about the book, stating, "I know that I have to make things. And it’s a convenient form we have in our culture, the book, in which you can make stuff, but it’s becoming less and less satisfying. And I’ve never felt that it exhausts any idea I’ve had” (quoted from her page on the Poetry Foundation's website). This is something I think she addresses in the design of her latest book, Nox, which we might better call a work of art. It's a scroll of some sort. Not something I can understand completely from reading about it, which is a bit of a thrill, considering this world we live in, where we basically just read summaries about everything instead of actually experiencing it, but that's neither here nor there. I know that I am going to pick this up at the library here at the university right when it comes in. Or rather when the first person returns it, because it's on order now and someone already has it on hold.

Retroactively we can see Nox as one of the reasons for this feature on my blog at all. It was thinking about Carson's comment that has really gotten me to seriously consider what the difference is between the book and the art itself. When I read Nox it was an odd experience, because you would hold the scroll all together as if it were a book but pages bleed into others so you'd change it up to sort of capitalize on that. It was an experience. The book is based on a piece that Carson actually created, copied to I'm not sure what amount of authenticity, but I would assume quite well. It appears that this bleeding through of various pages could be due to "water damage" in the original work or rather the intentional use of water, as well as the fact that graphite tends to get anywhere (a lot of the art/poetry appears to be in pencil).

What I really enjoy when considering the book (that dreaded word again) is how bold Carson is. Critiques of her have considered her writing to be, quite frankly, not poetry and she answers back by making a work that is not only questionable at times as poetry, but is never actually a book, but rather a facsimile of her creation. Carson's original work is referred perhaps ironically as a "book," but if it actually is basically the same as the mass produced version it's more like the scroll than Freedom or even the published version of On the Road. Ironically, ultimately, Nox is a sort of methodical read. Even more than your average poetry book, it falls into a structure that really can lead to a feeling of repetitiveness. But Carson, as I have said many times before, works on a level above me, and I think Nox is surprisingly inviting for her. The book includes clipped definitions of every word in the Catullus 101, an elegy written by Catullus for his brother, working its way through the Latin, forming the skeleton of Carson's memories of her own late brother--in this way we get both Carson the translator and Carson the critic, once again spacing herself from the poet. I think the entire book feels very much like an important stepping off point, like In Rainbows, it's the work of an artist hitting a groove that accentuates everything that (in this case) she has made to this point.

But as much as Nox does everything I want it to do as a Carson book, it also comes with an artsy price tag. That was one of the things I enjoyed about checking it out of the library. Carson's page after page of minimally worked paper could certainly upset someone's pocket book. It's the most interesting way to spend $35 on a book this side of The Original of Laura (which I just saw is actually $55 and a terrible money grab for a "book" you can read in the book store...am I repeating myself?) but I have to wonder about it. Nox, existing as it does on the fringe of visual art and poetry, logically has a price between works of art and books of poems, but one would wonder about the market for such a book. (Of course, Nox's repeated weeks at the top of the poetry bestsellers' lists sort of answers that question, doesn't it?)

I guess the poetry world is based on the support-the-artists reality of life as a musician. As in poetry books are quite expensive with the idea that you don't sell a whole shit-ton. Or at least that's my assumption. In reality, I'm not sure where all the change goes. But the whole chapbook history sort of sets you on this path to different styles of "book" for different (generally more) amounts of money. And this is how small publishers continue to exist. I understand and enjoy this, but it still seems a bit broken. What one thinks about while reading these expensive books is "How can you reach equilibrium?"

This is where Douglas Coupland is king. Coupland books often come designed by the author--as in he's the cover designer. It's very cool. (I mentioned this before in the post I've quoted earlier. I guess I still have the same trains of thought in my mental station.) And it's not expensive. Which isn't possible for everyone, I understand. But perhaps it's Coupland's art that works best here; made only better by its mass production, Coupland's art, like his writing, has a way of getting at the zeitgeist that is strengthened by its growing omnipresence.

To finish, I think I will close on a personal note. In making my book, I was happy to find how little the costs could be on creating a book. As a written artist, like Carson, I see the book as a good object but not a necessary device for my art. The blog is an example of something the book is not. Any blog is. However, as a person who thinks a lot about money myself while trying to consume art sometimes one has to think to oneself, is this much experimentation worth it? It's Carson's steadiness in her answer that makes her such a strong figure, but alas, I am not as sure for myself. Reviewers have seen Nox as the anti-ebook and considering the plight of ebooks in poetry, I think this is an interesting idea to consider all on its own, but ebooks bring up once again the question of price. Ebooks give you nothing tangible for a certain amount of (in my opinion too much) money, while Nox is as tangible as an object as I've seen the presentation structure of poetry get. Ultimately, however, when it comes to work like Nox one has to be thankful for the continued existence of libraries. This is art and valuable art at that. But as the reader, one always has to remember consumption comes, but at what cost?

NOTE: Anyone wanting an actual (well-written) review and overview of Nox could easily get one for example here. Sorry, I know I can't write, and yet I just keep on trying.

The Streets

2011-07-31T12:00:00.000-07:00

"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...

"The street finds its own uses for things" is just one of the great quotes that William Gibson put out into the world with his seminal cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer. The quote probably enjoys its fame due to its versatility--the image of the street itself being broad enough to be inset in the minds of twentieth century city dwellers, who seem to have an idea of what the street as an abstract term must mean, combined with the open words "uses" and "things." Basically Gibson meant anything and everything.

It's that image of the street that really gets to me, though, and its presence throughout modern culture. Throughout the rap world for example, I can name off the top of my head the British rapper named The Streets, the character in Lupe Fiasco's The Cool, also named the Streets, and what is a bit of a reach but what I see as a brilliant evolution of idea: Das Racist's lyrics in "sit down, man," "You can stare at the street/but the street stare back at you," referencing Nietzsche's Abyss. The image has grown as it expanded so much so that the image of the street as being aware of your presence (implicit in the last two examples) is quite fear-inducing. And to show the importance of the word, Mike Skinner, the British rapper, wants to change his name. The Streets has meanings he think are no longer relevant to his music. The important part being "meanings." Definition bleeding out into connotation growing into both allegory and metaphor.

Let's go ahead and lead off from here, Fiasco gives us the next turn in our nonfiction narrative or should I say style, map (am I writing a form of atlas?). If we look at a song like Kick, Push, we are given the effect of sport on the street. For what is skateboarding but the response to the growing amount of cement? Both the street and skateboarding are modern concepts; incorporating the age-old invention of the wheel they form new ways we negotiate with our changing terrain. Of course the street was developed far earlier, but the street as metaphor for the underground, itself a metaphor, the street as the way we now consider the term...I would postulate that this is quite young. Skateboarding is a part of it, people going down urban areas pulling tricks are perhaps one aspect of the essence of what we think of in the term "the street." At contests this is called, in fact, "street skating."

So if we consider street skaters as aspects of the street itself, then we can develop the metaphor further. I would say that street skating is everything Gibson meant when he said "the street has its own uses for things;" stairs become obstacles to jump, railings areas to grind, and all pieces of the environment are used for tricks. I would say that skaters interacting with our increasingly paved world are very much the best modern example that we have of the connotations of the word "cyberpunk;" the hacking done here is of real instead of virtual environments, but the similarities between virtual/cyber-actions and extreme sports could be what led to terms like channel and web surfing. The internet is, in all reality, simply a new face of the street, called "the information superhighway."

What always surprises me about skateboarding contests is the technical language: Tony Hawk will spill out jargon like you've never heard while watching people skate around. While this leaves me to wonder what he's actually talking about at times, I think what is apparent about it is that skating can be quite scientific when you consider it. You wouldn't expect this from a sport so often graded by judging on a numerical scale. While being technical, the sport is greatly artistic--ultimately based on value judgments, although you do have to go out and nail the trick. I think this creates a very positive sport for one to take part in. The idea of urban (or really any) youths seeing skating as an escape from the troubles of the modern adolescents seems commonplace, but do people seriously consider why this happens? The sport blends art or at least style with difficulty, with sport, is in fact the closest combination to what I consider the two sides of a spectrum. Although one can often turn his or her nose up to the concept of "the art of a game" considering such facetious, skating can and must be described at times in this way. Skating becomes a good term in this case, hearkening back to ice skating or even rollerblading, both cousins of various removes.

My father talks about how he had to use geometry in driving, judging how much he had to turn a steering wheel, or the angle to take to avoid oncoming traffic. Skating is no different, perhaps boiled down to just this, when we consider the skateboard as a tool of sport (or art) and not transport. I just can't see the negative side of children doing a lot of thought to degrees and physics, the force one has to apply to a board or the fact that a 900 is two and a half turns. It's a win-win, both an outlet from reality and an immersion in the mathematics of reality, of what can really be done with your body and four wheels on a board.

Street skating contests truly take Gibson's quote to its paradoxical end. Considering street skaters agents of the street, the creation of locations for their judging is a new use for the street engineered by the street itself. This occurred to me watching the X Games XVII the other night and looking on the created "street" made specifically to board. Once again we must praise William Gibson's ambiguity; the street makes it own uses for all kinds of things, including the street itself.

To quote Nabokov in the voice of Charles Kinbote, and also to reach a personal word count number for this point, I say in concluding, "I trust the reader has enjoyed this note."

NOTE: I have placed this post in the tab group "sports sunday." All these posts will retroactively join "anthropology of sports," but this will be the only "anthropology of sports" post tagged "sports sunday."

When at last you give in...

2011-07-30T12:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Anyone remember this? (Of course not, no one's even reading this question of remembrance, much less actually recalls the post.) The concept from that post (and yes, it would make sense to at least refresh yourself on what the fuck it is I'm talking about you assholes who disregards the link) was that complete control of a system, no matter how corrupt, holds certain forces in check, and when you drop even metaphorical bombs on these structures without thought to the inevitable negative consequences (need I say Iraq?) you end up cutting up a good bit of your nose to spite not your face but your ear, it's not the whole package but a part of it. I found this concept to have support both in anthropology's growing dissatisfaction with racial classification and the economic policies the West decided (naively, if not dumbly) were best for the area formerly known as the Eastern Bloc after the Eastern bloc got into that copyright trouble with recording company (quite an accurate portrayal if you identify said company as the West...) so I think we can truthfully conclude that I saw the concept occurring in two unrelated contexts.

But often, the contexts are not so apparently disjunct. Take one of the two original sparks in my mind for this post: the connection between Michael Chabon's call in "Trickster in a Suit of Lights" (the first article in his Maps and Legends) for a new appreciation of popular writing, or as he has it, entertainment and Philip Stevick's call for a newfound acknowledgement of experimental fiction in his introduction to his anthology, Anti-Story. The concept itself is very simply in this case: both of these men are criticizing the common short story in canon style, dubbed "epiphany" heavy by Stevick (who gives us a half of a page citing the vernacular etymology back up through to Joyce) and by Chabon as "plotless and sparkling with epiphanic dew" (his lack of explanation for the word showing the differential that forty years has put between the two men--Stevick, writing in 1971 sees it necessary to explain the word, Chabon in the oughts, does not...or he just wasn't going to because he's not a critic and is writing an article not an introduction but I'm going with the choice that supports my point). The concept could even be claimed to be exactly the same: the writer critiquing the contemporary short story and its insistence on the "epiphany" structure. The context, however, complicates.

Maps and Legends is a book Chabon put out a short while after his admittedly genre'd Gentlemen of the Road and large stretches of it read as a love affair with the concept of "genre" itself, of pulp writers, and hacks, and I probably shouldn't use any more diminutive words because I'm already taking him too much out of context, but the point is across. One could read the book in the essence of the American importance of freedom, the right to write stories that aren't just the ones you call literary, and it would function quite well as such. Chabon, admittedly a writer of a great many of these literary tales himself (e.g. his collection A Model World and Other Stories if I'm actually on my game), does not mean so much to eliminate as to expand what is considered respectable writing. This sits quite well with Stevick's goals with his anthology: experimental fiction attempting to expand what was considered well and proper. However, the complication arises when we precisely define what each writer is criticizing as the only flavor of ice cream in the whole frozen foods aisle and what different brands could be brought in to expand on this monotony.

Anti-Story attempts to collect stories in relatively self-contained sections with cute little titles of protest like "Against Analysis," "Against Subject," and "Against Scale." Chabon talks about horror stories, adventure yarns, and pulp mysteries. The stories the two christen as supporting their cause could really be no different. How could this be? They are railing against the same establishment! I'll admit, it appeared as if they were, but that was due to the context. If you look at the context you are going to call all sorts of people names based on their predecessors thus Bolivar is the George Washington of South America, Fanon is the Black Rousseau, simply complicating matters because you could make an argument that the conditions were similar, although the solutions, which actually arise from the individuals, were not...

You see Stevick's ideas, as old ones often surely do, would grow to be a part of the problem. So while he would be delighted with a story that attempted to break down your ordinary narrative, Chabon will grow to connote "epiphanic" with "plotless." Ironically, the narrative of Chabon's own life shows the bumps and potholes in this road: after publishing his first novel to great acclaim, he would fall into a hole with his second. As he relates it in "Diving into the Wreck," an article late in the same collection:

In the final stages of work on my first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, I cam upon a little picture that nearly ruined my life. It was a reproduction of an aerial painting of Washington D.C., by the architectural visionary Léon Krier--a tiny prospect of blue water, white avenues, green promenades, glimpsed from a tantalizing distance, unattainable, ever receding.

That doesn't sound like much, you say. And it doesn't. But I don't want to type up more of the quote...and the point can still be made. In this reproduction of a painting, Chabon saw a second novel and he wrote a book for five years before giving up on it. It is important to note here Stevick's spark for his anthology--similarly he was stunned by a piece of (non-written) art: a sculpture of a large O that rocked when pushed. Ultimately Chabon's second novel would be about a writer who can't finish the book he's writing--who has the opposite of writer's block, it's as if his story has gotten the bends, and is continuously decompressing itself out past the 1000 the 2000 page markers.

To show the two writers at their most disparate, we can juxtapose a piece from Stevick's introduction with a line from Chabon's second novel (Wonder Boys). "If, in a fiction," Stevick presents, "we stay within a particular perceiving mind, then we are not really seeing a character at all. Plot, too, has to go."

Chabon: "'Grady,' she said, sounding more than a little horror-struck. 'You have whole chapters that go on for thirty and forty pages with no characters at all!'"

It reads like an argument between the Stevick and Hannah in Chabon's novel. These men are obviously very much at literary odds with one another. Or are they. For although this entire meandering piece of boring writing has been about cut away the context, we can't simply take the words out of context. (You ever get the feeling like you never really learn anything, make a certain decision, or believe a specific truth but perhaps it's not your fault? That it would be impossible to do any of that?) Stevick is talking about stories and Chabon is talking about novels--but still 30-40 pages without characters could easily be a story in the Stevick book, extracted from the neverending novel Chabon locks it into. To be fair, Stevick says that at 30 pages the writer is entering novel territory. But actually fuck that, let's not be fair to that. 30 pages, Stevick? That's like a 2 song e.p. release getting called an album.

I will conclude on another conclusion independent of context. Chabon criticizes the literary field for its dependence on the specific type of story considered somehow right for serious fiction while still being a writer of (at times) nearly exclusively this kind of story. This reminds me of William Gibson speaking in the introduction to his Burning Chrome of

another, variant species of science fiction, unnamed but to my mind somehow distinct, which seemed to start from less fixed assumptions of history, a fiction whose writers seemed willing to entertain ideas that suggested we might, in fact, not know where we'd come from, or even where we were--that we were perhaps failing to recognize where we were for what it most basically was.

Gibson, championing this style of science fiction, doesn't really write it. It came to me in reading Burning Chrome that the country I found most odd in Gibson's books was Japan: a world power. And it dawned on me why it was like that. Russia obviously makes sense because of the Cold War, but Japan's presence is due to the taking off of the Japanese economy (was it the economy?) post-WW2, the sort of growth that I'm sure you could have sketched out to top the US at some point in the not too distant future. And this fact grounded Gibson's work in its presence, as I didn't grow up in that world, or rather if I did I was too young to be aware of it, so it seemed like...well...science fiction. Which is perhaps the point? The fact that Japan's expansion was an inaccurate prediction might cause the reader to realize "that we were perhaps failing to recognize where we were for what it most basically was."

Ultimately, though, from both Chabon's and Gibson's editorializing against, amongst others, themselves, it seems that we try to portray what we want to accomplish in our fiction when we portray the entire industry. Not so much who we actually are, but rather the ghost of the hope of the negative of the photograph of what the work was in your head and the shoddy rubble we set aside it as actually accomplished in this world.

What Follows a Long Day at the Office

2011-07-29T12:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Well at least it's five o'clock traffic and not eight AM--I could not take five more minutes of work in this state! Someone spilled coffee on me back at 2:30 and since then people have been giving me the "You're wearing that stained piece of garbage stare?" stare. But--oh shit!--it's Wednesday and Joe's mother is going to call...

This has been going on for a month or so now. Joe's mother calls at five-thirty and I politely decline her mention of coming down to say with us for a month or so. I don't feel any regrets for such actions--you hate your mother-in-law, don't you?--but it has become a nuisance. And I know when I don't get home, she'll leave a message and then Joe'll have to to hear about how ole mummy wants to see her boy again for a few days.

But...maybe I could just erase the message. Even if I don't get home till six, he works till seven; maybe I could just--No! I won't stand for that. Not telling someone that their mother, who they know you don't like, wants to visit isn't a lie. Erasing a phone message is.

And even if I did erase it--next time they talked, she would ask him if he got her message and I'm found out--or worse, he checks the caller ID and wonders what his mother wanted. I'm a terrible liar, but a great omitter. When I've actually talked to Susan then I can say easily to Joe what we've talked about and not mention her begging to visit, but creating an entire conversation? I would be stumbling and stuttering and Joe would get mad at me or rather frustrated until I admitted the truth and then mad and, knowing him, he'd probably take the couch for the night because he "wants the space" and never throws me out of our bedroom, which I'm of course somewhat grateful for, but then again I don't enjoy spending nights alone, regardless of what I am.

I honk my horn--it's 5:28 and I'm still five minutes from the house even without the traffic jam. My mother-in-law is very prompt and I just know she watching a clock right now, waiting to call at 5:30, probably staring at the VCR over a rerun of Wheel of Fortune playing on the TV.

The minute hand clicks over but I catch a string of luck--three lights stay green and I catch sight of the accident, a huge hulk of a wreck, the kind of scene that makes you fear for the driver as you would yourself. Past it, traffic thins. I fly home at 15 over the speed limit and walk into the house at 5:37. Maybe she took a nap...maybe she just didn't call?

Keys, door, lock the car over my shoulder as I walk in, all of this orchestrated and calming, until--the blinking red light on the answering machine.

And so my inner monologues of ethics begin once again.

NOTES
This is typed fairly verbatim. The story is sort of an undoing of Machiavelli. Our narrator devises the (somewhat self-serving) noble lie and then devastates it. Destroys it. I was very much in the character's head for this one--the way I think you can only be with a pen. It's just a different way of writing. Typing here, there's actually less delay, I can type faster than write, but perhaps because I've been writing for so much longer than I've been consistently typing, it's very different to longhand a story. I would wonder how this one would look typed. It probably wouldn't. Chances are good it wouldn't exist. Writing now, these notes, I feel myself falling into a bit of a Nicholson Baker groove. I'm reading A Box of Matches. It's a collection of dispatches from the narrator over a period of time, waking up each morning and rustling up a flame in the fireplace with a match from a box. You could maybe see my two stories as something like that. Just not nearly as good.

That, anyway, is what I have learned.

2011-07-28T12:00:00.000-07:00

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.)

El Hablador, Mario Vargas Llosa's novel on the storytellers of Machiguenga culture is a masterpiece. Of course, I was forced due to my own failure to learn the Spanish language to read Helen Lane's translation. So you could always give me shit for talking about the original when I've only got the translation. At least it's not a Zemblan translation of the Timon of Athens. (Pale Fire joke.)

The back cover of my copy has the following quote: "Brilliant...A whole culture is contained within these dreamy narratives," sourced to Raymond Sokolov at the Wall Street Journal. Now I've begun to think that reviews that claim a novel contains an entire culture are not just a bit Orientalist in thought but also a dime a dozen. The Murakami novel in my bathroom that I still might not be halfway through (and this is years later) is supposed to have "all of Japan packed into it" or something with slightly better phrasing (I'm not moving the laptop and going to the book to correct my error because it's just not worth it. Neither was writing this. Fuck all) and I don't know if that's right or not. The book, the famous one, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, is obviously a masterpiece (which you could also give me shit for...um...using "masterpiece" again for a book I've only read [less than half of] in translation), but I'm just not sure it has all of Japan. Japan is huge. Murakami, like Top Gear, somehow has his own list of critics, who I'm sure would not be admitting that he's gotten all of Japan into the book.

That said, I think The Storyteller really comes close to Sokolov's quote. Now I'm sure the Machiguenga aren't going to agree with me there. But that's the beauty of Llosa's book. His narrator, who I read as being a somewhat fictionalized (if at all unreal) version of Llosa himself, writes the book from Italy, which is pretty damn far from the Peruvian jungle where the Machiguenga live. It is this distance that adds the sincerity to the work. The eponymous storyteller only appears in Llosa's memory and imagination, himself an outsider among the Machiguenga. This causes the reader to view the novel with irony, with disbelief, with an idea that within the fiction there is fiction. But I'm probably not making sense. My major point is that Llosa never comes out and says "this is what happened, this is what they were, are, this is the Machiguenga." No, he finds a character to voice an important theme of the novel, "That, anyway, is what I have learned." Implying that the speaker has been taught. Questioning the ideas themselves so far as in, if they are wrong, I learned them wrong (my own personal interpretation and not completely implicit in the quote, I know).

So we do get some "facts" about the Machiguenga: they do not use names but refer to each other in some relational fashion (e.g. "the man who lives next to me," "the girl who climbs trees," "the butcher," etc.), they appear to refer to a lot of people as "Tasurinchi" or ... I think ... god (which is a beautiful thing to consider isn't it), and they do quite a bit of walking. But ultimately it is the "dreamy narratives" of Sokolov's quote that hits me hardest. The Storyteller is beautifully dreamy (I sound like I'm asking it out on a date); from the delightful fictive nature of the entire book to even Llosa's truly "real" scenes in Italy, which seem driven by some logic that we don't abide by while awake.

It is in fact this "dreamy" element of the novel that makes it work. While I think it does its best justice to the Machiguenga by way of its insistence on its own unproven nature, it also launches itself artistically on these same aspects. Namely, Llosa imagines the storyteller as a speaker who then narrates several chapters that can be seen as somewhat prosey prose poetry. Which seems a downright stupid way to look at it, to stretch the piece into a category it doesn't quite fit and then to call it a square peg in a round hole...But I really think it's an important part of the novel to note. Llosa creates two speakers that gives us two completely different styles, that I feel I could somewhat facetiously call "prose" and "poetry." Somewhat loyal readers will recognize writings on this divide.

I actually had a somewhat dreamy entrance in this book, now that I think about it. Llosa, you might actually know, won the Nobel in 2010. I saw this on Ron Silliman's blog. (Another recognition for the loyal reader.) So I looked up Llosa's novels on wiki. And found The Storyteller. This was quite the gold nugget: an anthropological novel based in Peru for the anthropology major who was once attempting a Latin American studies minor, match made in heaven, I'm telling you. So then and there I decided I was going to check it out from the library at some time. And then Borders, my favorite chain book store I might add, began their slow descent to nonexistence. This led to me finding myself at various times in a Borders picking up books ranging something 30-70% off. And during one of these hunts of the now randomly shelved books I found The Storyteller (as well as Zero History, as well as Freedom...both of those hardcovers I wouldn't be caught dead having if I didn't get them for about 30% cover price).

I bought the book and I began reading it then. But stopped, just as I had done a long time before with Pale Fire. It was actually my vacation and the specter of it in my future weeks before it happened that had me restart and finish both books. The Storyteller did not let down the surprising way I came by the novel, and speaking of odd, poetic, dream like connections: both books (The Storyteller and Pale Fire) both make mention of the conversations to be had with fireflies.

I must apologize to the reader for this haphazard post, but The Storyteller is a very good book. I believe that the best way to learn is through benevolent dictatorial lecture, although this is extremely rare, and combining sources is never a bad thing. I have tried to portray that this novel's portrayal of the Machiguenga is beneficial even if it's all you are ever going to learn about them.

And of course as always there were a good many more thoughts I wanted to share that I have forgotten. Both Pale Fire and The Storyteller have their great parts of debate where clashing ideologies are shown each to have their strengths and faults. In closing I will note here that it seems that Kundera is onto something when he refuses to admit that his works try to get you to think anything. They don't. They supply you with a lot of information. They don't want to make you think a certain way. I don't and neither would, I suppose, Llosa or Nabokov.

This Good Ink

2011-07-27T12:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Pale Fire is a very smart novel. Which is to say it's a very difficult novel. As I put it to my uncle, "I keep realizing that there are jokes, but I'm not getting them." The book is consistently over my head, hanging in the sky like a second sun. But this is my fault. It's my second Nabokov, after The Original of Laura, if you can call that a book, and as I have said, it's above my level of intelligence. I've got to read Lolita; I'm hoping that's more on my level. Pale Fire is esoteric in the best possible way. Nabokov didn't write it for people like me to understand it. What people like me are supposed to do is look at the book like the Grand Canyon, this great chasm that, although you know the origin, is still incredibly powerful due to its enigma. This is the general approach I take towards art--if I don't love it it's my fault. But there is some definite truth to it here; I could see myself rereading this book in twenty years and finding it firing on all cylinders. (Matthew Zapruder speaks of a similar experience with John Ashbery's poetry here. I hope to find the same happening for me with Ashbery as well as Nabokov.) The book is perhaps unlikable but it can't be seen as without its high merits.

The same cannot be said for the cover to the edition that I have. Perhaps the whole edition itself. But before I critique the monotony that the book industry has created, I will first vent my frustrations with the cover specifically. The image is almost that of a painting--a purple rectangle is framed by what appears to be an ordinary black frame (imagine that), which in turn is framed by a grey color that appears to be shadowed. Oh shite, I'm not the greatest descriptor, so let me look for a pic... A match lies in this purple, smoking from being freshly lit, with the title and author's name lying in frame as well. As I said, I'm not the best descriptor. I don't even think I should be using the word "descriptor" ... it's "describer," isn't it? Anyways, so let's get back to the image. It's brilliant, isn't it? It's striking, minimal, memorable, and just pretty fucking grand. It's serious. ...

... It's serious. Let's throw you into Pale Fire a little bit. The eponymous part of the book is in fact a poem that takes up about forty of its pages. This poem is a bit controversial on its own and has enough of its own story to make recent news. The rest of the book consists of the editor's commentary and foreword for "Pale Fire" (compare to Pale Fire). What is very interesting, from a writerly standpoint is the choice by Nabokov to present the book as unedited, post editing. That makes no sense, but I can explain it. Nabokov's pseudonymous character-editor, Charles Kinbote, makes stray remarks throughout the book that would be, in any serious tome, expunged. At times he asks for certain things specifically to be changed, at others he simply writes something incorrect and corrects himself in text. One mention I specifically remember regards the poet's age, the note to page 167 being:

The poet began Canto Two (on his fourteenth card) on July 5, his sixtieth birthday (see note to line 181, "today"). My slip--change to sixty-first.

The humor of this note is expanded on by the fact that line 181, the one alluded to in this note, reads in part, "Today I'm sixty-one." The fact that Kinbote puts down sixty is comical, but also productive...let's just say that these slips of the mind cause us to doubt Kinbote's mind's ability to stand up straight on its own.

But let's interpret the scene seriously. The joke is childish, silly, and stupid. Someone who finds a book with this cover, buys it, takes it home, and starts up the old reading engine behind their ears, isn't going to want to run into this sort of juvenile humor. (I should perhaps note here that Nabokov could perhaps tell me exactly why he made this joke--why it's a great, smart, and useful point to make. Like I said, the book is over my head.) This is me at my most immodest (I hope): making assumptions about how other people are going to act. But I really do think that any bookish college writer could make jokes about just randomly forgetting something that is blatantly in front of your face. Kinbote would at least be working with some sort of potential metaphor if he were to tell us a story about searching his house for his glasses and finding them on his head hours later. And what's better about that is that it could be serious.

"My slip"? This is a somewhat occasional feature of the novel. Mistakes must be emended before the book is brought to press, right? I think I could force that one out of Kinbote if I had a month to debate him about it. I'd have to agree to go through it with him and change these mistakes (basically simply delete him saying "my mistake" over and over again) and considering the kind of man he is, I wouldn't want to do that but... I'm rambling.

What I really think needs to be done with this book is that it needs to be presented as a fair copy. Or whatever the fuck it's called. It needs to look like it didn't get printed, but made it to the publisher's desk. Or do this in some faux-way, make the cover look like an aged parchment (an idea from the top half of the cover of another book I was reading at the same time as Pale Fire), make the book look like you are attempting to make it look like something other than another boring, serious, "literature"-section-in-book-stores novel. Because when interpreted seriously, one finds Pale Fire either crudely difficult or uselessly juvenile. The book is presented to the reader as a text that would never be published. Why doesn't someone exploit that?

In fact, let me go on to something I briefly mentioned at the beginning, why does it have to be a book at all? (Or, a question I might ask at a later point on this blog: Why does any book have to be a book at all? Many of them do work well as such, but couldn't they try something else out once in awhile?) I'm going to put in a completely random block quote from a friend of mine on a Facebook status right here and then connect it back to this post:

the best parts of The Hulk stories aren't when he's fighting off bad guys or saving a girl he loves; they're when he's on his own, in some backwards, South American city, trying to avoid anyone because he doesn't want to hurt anyone.

Consider the writer of a Hulk story attempting to cater to this part of the character. You might occasionally want to write a story where our jolly-green-giant-friend doesn't even appear. For Pale Fire, some of the best of the book comes from its own haphazard existence as a book. I would play on that. The poem is written on note cards in the world of the novel. I'd put it out as note cards. The commentary could be a typed manuscript. The foreword the same, simply encased in one of those presentation folders. Because that's the way the book is going to be best experienced.

However, once again, let's double back here. I'm sure it would difficult to follow my demands to a T. But in the spirit of them, you have to inject some sort of playfulness into the cover. In writing this blog post I did a little looking around at Google Books' scanned edition of Pale Fire. This cover one works. In a beautiful touch, a quote about the book is presented in a faux handwritten style. Which is what you need: some part of the cover making you aware of the book as an incomplete work, as it is supposed to taken. The incompleteness of the book is what makes the novel complete, namely, I would add, due to the fact that it isn't, can't be, and does not work perfectly as a book. Comment on this, as a book designer, please comment on it.

PS: I must restate my immense support for the artistic effort turned out by, I believe, Stephen Doyle and Alison Gootee. The problem is simply that the cover does not work so much with the book, it defeats the book's purpose. As a designer, I do feel it is important to, if possible, somehow place the essence of the novel into the cover. (Such as using a handwritten font causing the reader to consider the fact that this book is only typed ironically, somehow wrongly.)

God I've gone on about this for much too long and must stop boring and confusing you. Hey, wake up.

Scott van Pelt recalls the Tonight Show fiasco.

2011-06-29T00:47:00.000-07:00

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.)

You play to win the game, playoffs? You play to win the game. Don't talk about playoffs. Don't talk about five years down the line! The sideline, where coaches are taught to stand at the ready to trip you into jokes on you and the egg on your face. Standing up, wiping away the phrases and zingers, you realize why they call this the punchline. Do you think Leno was saying "Can't wait!" when he was thinking about the end? The poem is always a gimmick, striving, playing the game, in order to get its inscrutable point across. Across the pages of the many months of YouTube tabloids, we find Conan taking his talents to twitter, then eventually not Fox, but TNT; Leno, however, would become LeBron, nearly an anagram. The poem is always pleading its own existence. I speak now, as the voice of a television reporter using amateur uploaded information as the basis of my argument. Letterman says "he is who we thought he was." I am like a writer who can only work with the letters of the alphabet, I must remember my history within the context of my existence. The macrocosm of the microcosm, the situations turned, the sides switched, I try to recreate the world in a way I understand, for I am known for one purpose. Or I am unknown. Sigh. The problem is that these things go on for far too long. And they repeat themselves, leaving you halfway on your way to conflating characters and scenes, cliques and teams. As I have done. As I am. A hippogriff of sports, comedy, and politics.

I might try to rework this. I would love to be able to pick up a voice reminiscent of John Yau, although I have much less talent. Anyways, you might eventually see an "EDIT" under this, or a new post. Um...yeah. I guess the URL does say it all, but I'm perhaps most pushing it in this post. I wasn't trying to waste your time, it just ended up that way.

Ghosts in their early twenties

2011-06-24T11:29:00.000-07:00

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...

The language was a hybrid mix of Spanish, French, and Portuguese, which threw her off because she had not known her late father to have been a man of many words, much less entire dictionaries and vocabularies that were just all Greek to her. Even odder, she had thought, upon finding the manuscript, was that the letters used were the sorts of things you would expect in those very countries: accents, diereses, and tildes galore; for a man who wrote, when he did, as if he were a character in a Cormac McCarthy novel, she was thrown off by the apparent attention to detail.

The issue, then, became the fact that upon looking up a few words and attempting to decode the purpose of her father's document, she realized that the phrases sentences, paragraphs, and individual pages all eventually careened into gibberish: the language would start out tight, grammar appeared to her always successfully enacted, but the actual lines would not make sense. Perhaps the phrases were idioms? she began to wonder, with a somewhat negative feeling in her heart. Perhaps, but did it matter? Because her father was dead, her brother had read the eulogy weeks before, only slightly smashed, and she had only found this book because she had, like she always did, poked her nose into things that were not her business.

So far in life this had been quite successful: she had gained a husband through her nosiness, a good paying job, and had also been able to bring up children that could not truly consider the fact that they even could lie to her or keep any secrets. All of these benefits however seemed somewhat trumped in this text of her father's, a book she knew she was making too big a deal out of, but was unable to stop herself. Memories of her father were few and far between; she could recall him pushing her on a swing in her youth, a few rebellious teenage dates brought home to dinner, a road-trip across the country with the family, and then...well then all it had been was phone calls and holidays, which wasn't supposed to be something you felt bad about because you were supposed to be able to continue that part of the relationship until your parents were in their sixties and then you'd reconsider it, yourself now arriving on the shores of middle age.

Now, there was this growing feeling inside her that the manuscript was either an accusation or a pardon and the potential for the latter outweighed the former. She felt that if she had nothing done with the text, it would feel like an accusation no matter what, so, looking for a translator, transliterator, transmuter of tongues (she didn't know what to call someone who would have to work from different languages and tie them all back into English) seemed like a win-win scenario. And it was, in many ways.

The man she got a hold of explained himself to her: he would do this free of charge, because, although he had not known her father, he had known of her father, but how was that possible?, she wondered, it wasn't like the man got out that much. It wasn't like he had any friends. But then again, a new voice in her head, it wasn't like you knew him very well, now, was it? This scared her enough to get out of the house and let the man work. He eventually called out the front door to her, explaining that she was right, there was a large degree of idiom, but she was wrong about the language: this was not a Franishoguese, but rather a lingo spoken by a small sect in a town about thirty miles from the house her father had lived for fifty years in. They were weird people there.

Disturbed, she watched the ground, and noticed there--pulsating, moving--an earthworm. She considered the various letters it looked like in her mind. The man called out to her that the last part of the manuscript was a translation of the shortest verse of the King James Bible. Staring at the worm, feeling the language of the letters it spelled out burning in her head, she realized something. The document was something along the lines of one long prose poem, and, working backwards on it, the translator, whatever he was, would eventually construct a few pages that looked remarkably similar to the ones in your hand at the moment. Jesus wept.

NOTES

This was the first homework assignment in my writing class. I've forgotten what the assignment itself entailed, but I liked the idea that I was writing a very condensed narrative. Upon becoming self-reflexive, the piece comments on this condensing as "prose poe[try]" which is very much what I was interested in writing in every work I turned in for the class. The only major edit I truly recall from typing it up a few days back is that I changed the references to the "book" to "manuscript" in at least one place. I had used "text" and "manuscript" in the original, but also, as I have noted, "book." I felt this inappropriate on account of the fact that I would like the eventual reveal of the piece to be that you are in fact reading the entire document. Which, I guess, in a way, would make me the main character's famous father. And I had thought my writing so modest!

Speaking of modesty, I must admit that I am unimpressed with the amount of information that I can give without stimulus on this story. In the perfect world, of course, someone reading this with a question in mind regarding the tale could always comment on it and allow me a bit of a theme to rap on for a few words. But then again, no one is reading this. And I'm sorry to that no one for boring nobody.

Wait...that didn't sound all that humble.

EDIT:

I can mention a slight rift to write on: the "Jesus wept" part is simply the first thought that occurred to me. My mother mentioned this to me when I was young and it has stayed with me. Of course, anyone willing to do the most minimal research will know that this isn't even the shortest verse in the original writings, so its notoriety is simply the creation of translation, but I think that's quite cool in itself.

Spectrum

2011-06-12T00:28:00.000-07:00

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...

My stepfather has taken to introducing me in some way revolving around my interest in sports, as in interested in SportsCenter, and not playing sports. I'm not sure if I'm happy or upset about this. (That last sentence sounds like life...) But it puts things in perspective. Sports are a serious interest in me as a fan. I know how pathetic that makes me sound. But I'm framing a point here so stop chiding me for being pitiful; I even dream occasionally of writing some sort of ethnography (except it'd be an ethnology, sigh, because I'll never do fieldwork) on the anthropology of sports, their position in our political environments and culture and what they do to impact people as a whole or as a band/tribe/nation. There was a bit in Fanon about this (update: I'm reading The Wretched of the Earth), that I'll inevitably edit into here. (Or might just put on my tumblr and turn the prior here into a link to the block quote... EDIT: read the photo if you are going to read anything, the caption is simply ideological drivel but I couldn't keep myself from cutting that part out for special judgment...) And while Fanon's nationalism is the toughest part of him to take, I'm getting a little chummy with America and being American myself, as of late, even if I do think it's stupid, pointless, and downright wrong to create a national identity based on the "pride" you have in the (nonexistent) differences between you and people who are in your special club of citizenship, as in the "pride" you have in being better than them. (That was a run-on with a lot of anger in it, my apologies.)

So as someone who considers himself an artist, and one interested in medium-blending, my way of viewing sports has been interpreted through an...should I say "artistic"?...lens. I'm actually enamored by press conferences from sports players, something I really can't see enough of (which might be due in part to my limited exposure to such); a Brett Favre debriefing after some game last season really caught my eye and I campaign to my father time and time again about how I want umpires to hold reflections after games going over how they felt they called it, as both a means of accountability and also for me to get a lot of the talking about the game from people who actually played it that I enjoy so much.

What you get a lot of in these little exchanges is phrases like "the art of the game." It was from an idea like this that a seed was sparked in my mind to create my own personal definitions of "sport" and "art." The other side of this came from certain bands and musicians that I hear of secondhand (and always forget the names of) who are known for being so great because of how difficult their music is to play. Now this sets off warning bells in my head because art is not supposed to be art because it is difficult. In my opinion, in my definition that is, art is supposed to be based on the work itself and does not so much reflect on the physical talents of the artist (it perhaps does show mental talents, but I tend to consider looking at talent as being relevant when discussing art as being distracting and leading if the wrong direction). In my opinion, the beauty arising from something because of how difficult it is to do it isn't art, and I didn't know what it was until I thought about it (and maybe considered SportsCenter segments like "Top Plays"), and realized it was sport.

Now I don't mean to disrespect anyone here. This is just a personal definition I have come upon. Although, with that written, I must admit that I do not feel bad about a potential view of my calling certain things "sport" as being a similar put-down to Truman Capote's about Kerouac's style, "That's not writing, it's typing." (The quote there to see for itself later in the article.) It's just that this qualification has solved a lot of issues for me in my regards to art and how the ability to make art is changing.

I was listening to MGMT's Oracular Spectacular with my mother when she spoke of the difficulties in playing music that are largely changing today. I'm not going to say making music is getting easier--I don't think playing laptop, as people on Radiohead albums inevitably do is easy at all--but it is changing. Really, since the synthesizer's introduction into the music scene, I, the uneducated observer, can claim to see a change. Simply you didn't need to be playing a specific instrument to make the sounds that you were making. And computers and their resulting musics have also changed the way music is made and instruments are viewed. Consider drum and bass. There aren't a lot of drums and bass guitars being used in that type of music. And I like d'n'b a lot. "I ain't trying to diss," to quote Jay-Z on Ludacris from "No Hook." What I'm trying to say is that there is a level of sport in music that is changing. When you can use a computer...well, okay, I'm going to be Bubba Watson about this and just go ahead and say it, it opens up the ability to more people.

Now I don't even know if this is true. I don't know if there are more people making music because of the introduction of the computer and software into the music industry. I don't think I'm saying much to make the argument though. Nor do I simply think this is an issue of computers and technology. Rap music, like basketball, is another field to study. You don't need an expensive instrument (computer included here), to rap, just as, if you have a park with a court near you, you don't need anything expensive to play basketball. But this doesn't make rap music any less of an art. I do see it as making it less of a sport--it becomes more a mental activity than playing the piano.

What I think results from this transition on the spectrum of sport to art is that with a sport you can do the same thing. Originality is not an issue, it's simply an accomplishment to do what you are doing. So whether this is a Willie Mays catch, a sketch of someone as a model, or a performance as first violin in an orchestra of a famous piece of classical music, there is an element of sport involved. You aren't supposed to simply cover a rap song. The reason for this, in my opinion, is due to rap's place in the artistic sphere rather than the sporting arena. If you are rapping with someone else's song then you really aren't putting much in at all, are you?

In this world of my own definition, writing is the least sporty of any of the forms of "art." It's purely an artistic discipline because the simple act of me hitting keys to string letters together is not at all considered hard and is available to the overwhelming majority of people, even more of which can take a pen or pencil to paper to write. Consider the fact that "covering" a written work is called plagiarism. Remember the Capote slight? Kerouac was just "typing"? Because typing is nothing to be proud of. I've touched on this before and actually written about it in a story for my fiction class a while back. Here's an overly long excerpt (actually the first paragraph):

La persistencia de la memoria. The first thing that had drawn me to Dalí was the titles. As a writer, I would stare at his various creations and think how easy a job I had in comparison. Where he had a painting, a sculpture, or a lobster telephone to construct, I simply dealt in words, in placing the twenty-six letters of my alphabet into the shapes of which I had become the most familiar. My laptop also made each erring toss of my chisel easily erased and forgotten, put behind me. As a man of common false starts and missteps this was an incredibly fortunate characteristic of my profession, but not something of which I was proud. You see, what drew me to Dalí was that, in my medium, to create his greatest pieces of work, all I would need to do was string together the perfect string of words, my specialty, and yet…yet he had beaten me at that as well.

My point is tied to the mediocrity principle. It is my belief that we should always be aware that our unique qualities are not especially special. That humility is the best thing we can ever have. So, as a writer, it seems fitting to me to often think that there is nothing I do when I write that anyone else can't do. I might enjoy doing it more than other people, but everyone could do this if they set their mind to it. It's a belief. I'm sure there are some who disagree. So really, "sport" is a compliment. Not everyone can paint the Mona Lisa or come out with OK Computer. Some people don't have those abilities just as LeBron James can get to the basket a lot better than anyone reading this blog. And that's how I see it.

I guess that's where I'm going to stop typing...

EDIT: related point here

Sporty Spice

2011-06-09T22:53:00.000-07:00

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).

The Spice Girls interest me as an introductory element even with my limited knowledge because of their names: with Sporty, Scary, Posh, Baby, and Ginger as titles, the Spice Girls are both a girl group and an exercise in connotation, albeit much more importantly the former than the latter (outside of this post). From something as immediately apparent as a singer's hair color to her accent or her social upbringing, all sorts of levels of analysis must be considered by anyone who is willing to seriously think about them (or look up information on them...). This is, in fact, an update on the John, Paul, Ringo, and George situation because three of those four were simply given names not possibly interacting with lives unlived when given and Ringo isn't a word, nor is someone named after the fact that they wear rings all that interesting (in my opinion).

But to make a story already too long a bit shorter, I will say this. "Sporty" or just "sport" by way of the Spice Girls becomes what I have above mentioned: tomboy attitude and a certain type of clothing. There are gender roles buried under this word that I'm not going to get into because plenty of people with PhDs can write better about them--I just want to get across the importance of definition. With the Spice Girls you have this whole double-sided influence going on: the name derives from physical or character traits but then reflects on the singer and creates feedback (i.e. was Baby Spice simply the youngest member or did she embody her name in more ways than literal age and did any of this follow the nicknaming?).

I'm interested in the impact we can have of names. A story I've mentioned and even sketched here before is narrated by a James Bond. Not the. As a writer, I am interested in words. As an occasional writer of fiction, I am interested in fictional characters. So I find it fun to explore the ways that both words and their definitions and fictional characters and their names can possibly impact your own story or poem or character sketch or some other something to end this run-on list with. There's a half-formed skeleton of a poem in my notebook about how our names accrete their connotations and denotations throughout life and how what we live could be seen as a book but could even be seen as simply one entry of a book, one definition in a dictionary.

I began this post considering a divide in my personal definition of the terms "art" and "sport," but I've moved on from that. That's going to be done on another day with another example. The Spice Girls, purely through their names, can easily stand on their own. The brief mention of gender roles above is even echoed in "spice" as a name. Probably something everyone else in the world doesn't have to write four paragraphs about before seeing. So what exactly is Sporty Spice or Scary Spice? There's an inner dichotomy here between both gender roles and ordinary characteristics (at least from my vantage point). Sport is defined as masculating (is the male dominance of language really so apparent that emasculating is a word and masculating isn't? just because you can cut off a penis? sigh) and--I'm going to go out on more of a lead here--a tongue piercing and an aggressive attitude are somehow so not-what-you-would-expect-from-a-girl-in-a-girl-group that we have a resulting fear.

The world plays wonderful games for our enjoyment and it creates mystical elements that fall into place so much so without you even trying that you simply cannot prove anything, but only make distinctions. So when I offer the statistic that both of these somehow split personalities within the Spice Girls are named Melanie, I look like an astrologist and not a scientist. And I am not a scientist but I'm also not a numerologist. Or an astrologist, if you must make me return to my original statement. It's just one of the beautiful moments, you know? Like when someone you want to talk to just happens to be three out of five of your classes in the next semester. I'm not insinuating anything. I'm just smiling.

And while you could credit my good mood to the fact that the Red Sox have (by way of a seven-run inning) taken a solid lead against the Yankees while I have written this long meandering post about less than the nothing that makes up an episode of Seinfeld, I would say that perhaps that could be a part of it. But even a word like "happy," just as "sporty" or (my personal favorite) "posh," has its own feedback loop. In bequeathing it upon oneself, a person is thus inclined to act in a certain way. And such and such and so and so...pretend someone can actually understand what I'm trying to say rather than try to get my trying to get across a string of words that are more meaningful than simply their repetition.

Two upcoming thoughts for posts along this line I'm carving in the sand of this blog: eponymic determinism where the object of which we are eponyms is our life, or rather not simply us but all things--the importance of the words we use and the result of changing them--this is going to be an artistic post if you didn't already figure it out; as well as the above-mentioned concept of "art," "sport," and the importance of definitions.

Warren Ellis somehow gets cooler whenever he is talking about the pirate radio stations in Britain that rose up in Maunsell Forts after World War II. The actual building of these places, to help British defenses during the war, is quite amazing in itself. Their eventual uses simply stun the mind. In Americana there are long incessant speeches given over the radio by a character whose name I have forgotten, but are really Don DeLillo getting in a groove and rapping on it, a term I'm borrowing from Tom Wolfe who might be borrowing it from somewhere when he uses it in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and which is, at least to the best of my known, etymologically distinct from the more familiar use of rap, the genre of music, today. What this Frankenstein-monster of a paragraph stitched from various body parts of thoughts into what is a barely recognizable body of a mind thinking is trying to get across is that this is a past I imagine myself continuing when I am at my most vain. The voice on the radio in Americana talking on and on about this and that--and I've never heard that voice and so what if it has ever really existed--and the thought always unspoken underneath the meandering thinker's thoughts run wild is, you have a dial to twist. If I am not worth your time, I apologize, but that was not my intention. Do not let me bore you. Do not let yourself be bored, be controlled. Avoid the restraints of a mind deemed unsuitable to your own, but always be willing to limit and minimize what is incompatible with your worldview.

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

2011-06-04T19:21:00.000-07:00

6/03-04/11
under the influence of the dark side of the moon
What's your opinion of Trotsky? There's a pun here I can't quite achieve. In investigating the walls of the Pepto-Bismol container, the bright young gentleman from Boston on which she had just too much of a crush to tell her husband remarked, "Too much pink." I held my tongue but it was difficult, the slithering object fighting and fighting to find its way out of my fingers. "Not enough Floyd," lay the reference like some sleeping cthulu cemented deeply into my mind as another memory I would inevitably tell to his third wife back when I was into the luring-women-out-of-marriage game that your father first started back in Jersey some thirty odd years gone by.

11:53PM
11:56PM
11:58PM
12:00AM
12:00AM (later)

Conclusions

2011-04-13T21:56:00.000-07:00

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

In 1989, as the communist bloc began to fall, economists quickly began working on plans to fix the faults of several decades of socialist government. Many came to the conclusion that “shock therapy” was the best option; old institutions would be “blown up” and new private enterprises would be formed. Metaphors can only be drawn so far, but anthropologists were among the leading group in distancing the term “race” from its biological origins, often employing similar actions in an intellectual way. Even using the term “race” has become in the minds of many anthropologists somehow passé, something to be looked down upon. In Eastern Europe, following the “shock therapy” tactics, the absence of a strong state (as well as the specter of the former socialist governments) helped create an almost feudal environment: mafia-like groups formed, filling the vacuum left behind when institutions were “exploded.” Racial studies without a tie to biology show a comparable displacement. In Cuba, this can be seen by the nature of a political state making use of racial terminology whenever it deems it useful.

Whereas it seems counterintuitive to show nostalgia for the Eastern Europe of the Soviet Bloc, it is also wrong to idealize the roots of “race” in biology, with its main outcome that most common of xenophobias, racism, but this does not mean that there cannot be more work to be done. The view of race as “socially constructed,” is changing to “politically constructed,” a future potentially as horrid as its biological roots, if one considers the number of nationalist as well as racist conflicts fought in recent years.

The Afro-Cuban identity is a promising field to study this transition from social to political; however, the anthropologist appears in good position to act in order to minimize this hazardous situation and would perhaps be in an obligatory place to do so. Rather than simply eradicate the word “race” from the ethnographer’s dictionary, as the Cuban state attempted in claiming to have deracialized the country, it might be more beneficial to report on the ground, as anthropologists should, and in that way hope that race does slowly become less important and exclusive. Reports of its demise have been largely exaggerated.

The Splintering of the Left

2011-04-13T14:20:00.000-07:00

Testing, testing

Ron Silliman has written about the fragmentation of the left; the way a single liberal group split up into identity politics. I'm writing a paper on Afro-Cuban identity and politics, so identity politics has become a bit of a major interest. What's interesting to me is the debate between mass-culture objects and specific-sect art objects (the so-called "fan service"?) The issue is drawn when one forces restrictions: Silliman himself proclaims that we can no longer create "good" or potentially "honest" (scare-quotes; I don't believe he used these terms) art that appeals to the group. (Taking him out of context here.) We have to section and splinter our own works. This is an excuse for a white male writing poetry that for some reason he sees as being specifically for white men. I guess. It sort of confuses me.

Now the correction to be made here is to simply express the obvious: the world and the future should both be stories that begin with openness, with opportunity and potential. So sure you can make art that is likely to be enjoyed specifically by gays or blacks or redheaded stepchildren and it is--I almost said "great," but it's not great; a world where you can't do this is unconscionable--fitting that the world of today allows such pieces. But to label the work as such seems counterproductive for it limits your audience institutionally or at least from the creator's mouth. I would not want to enjoy the art of various (often formerly discriminated) minorities if they do not wish their work to be taken in by white males. The new white man's burden is the simply distaste in your mouth as you go through every day considering the fact that practically every serious issue in the world today is the fault of your ancestral group.

But to think that the mass-culture object is gone is incorrect. In Rainbows was Radiohead taking their new millennium sound and making it work for a whole lot more people than it had before. This is not selling out. This is not the televisionization of art. Silliman seems to be using his "views" as apologia for something he doesn't need to apologize for. The world, as it is now, permits the creation for a specific group or section of culture. You are absolved as well as the marginalized. That's what equality is.

Tempest

2011-04-08T22:51:00.000-07:00

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.

"Your mother!" I scream. Joe has done it again, waited until the last moment to tell me that this dreadful woman will be staying with us for a week. "Ooooh..." I begin, stretching out the sound, getting used to it and letting it roll. I can hold a note for hours. This is how I calm myself down. It's a good thing Joe doesn't know this, because it is an angry sound & I am not an angry person. If I didn't get in the habit of making this face, this sound, then Joe would have no way of telling when he upset me. This happened on our honeymoon. I didn't want to make a scene but we need a scene--Joe & I--to understand each other. We're loud but we're soft-spoken; like to pretend we can read each other's minds. Just last week Joe said to me, "When was the last time we had a conversation for more than a half hour?" I told him at dinner, but it was small talk, so that didn't count, because I knew what he meant. Not that our marriage is uncomfortable or at all a problem--we've come up with ways to deal with this. My currently stretching "Ooooh..." for example. Let me walk you through a day in the life... We wake up, make love, he goes to work, and I do the crosswords in four different paper before making lunch, never breakfast, just lunch. Then he comes home for that meal and we perhaps end up back in the bedroom for a few moments, "slam, blam, thank you, ma'am," then we eat & he's back off to work. I knit for exactly 87 minutes and thirty seconds, then nap, and inevitably make dinner. You see, we're happy & neat & beautiful in our own way. Oh, I'm sorry, have I been talking to you even more beautiful people in my head just a touch too much? I get so comfortable in the "Ooooooooooooh," which I follow with a terse-in-comparison "nooo," that I'm forced to talk to myself, to keep my mind working. I can't talk aloud because I'm calming myself down, although it looks like a temper tantrum.

NOTES

Original title: "So Much Character" <--amended from "Character" which was a simple labeling of the assignment from the description given by the professor
"Then he comes home for that meal" <--correction of original "from that meal"
"Ooooooooooooh" <--adjustment of original "Oooooooooooh" with 11 os, amended to twelve because it's four in both earlier uses and I wanted to present this one as if those were specific parts or thirds

There was another correction I made, or at least I think I might have made another correction, but in my typing, I passed it by (EDIT: it was the title adjustment that I've added into the list; glad to have remembered that). A few thoughts on this story: just now, typing this, I thought "allowed to talk aloud" would have been interesting. Gimmicky and kitsch no doubt, but I'm not above either. I wanted a story that had a Nicholson Baker-like link to the photo and I also wanted to examine the mind of this woman, who I think I recognized as one of the infamous women of Wife Swap but who in all seriousness might have been someone completely different, my memory is so vague. I particularly like my idea of beauty postulated here. I wanted to create a paradisaical life for this woman, something as far away from the photo as one would expect. I'm not sure if I came close. I'm not sure if it reads like a woman or a nineteen-year-old boy. Probably the latter; the truth is, generally, right out there on the page. But that's what I was going for. Being able to say this much about this little burst from the pen in class and feel as if I'm only half lying while analyzing is definite fun. I am hoping that these autopsies are all as successfully.

Talk to you later?

THE NAMES

2011-04-07T01:28:00.000-07:00

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.

I have probably mentioned here a few times or so a book called roadkill stylized in the graphic image I first got of Stephen King's Bag of Bones when I realized that it was about a writer whose wife dies. Of course the bag of bones is not his wife. King is not so cruel. I, however, know that I'm too soft on my characters (Be a sadist, suggests Father Kurt, suggests quite strongly), so I thought what the hey? And I started thinking about a novel.

Of course at this stage in my writing career I can say that I'll probably never write a successful novel. roadkill is about a guy named Mike (was it Mike? I'm not even sure where that file is saved!) who loses his wife and mother in a car accident. They get flung to the side of the road where they lie, guess the metaphor!, like roadkill. But what it's really about is Mike doing his job with the cultural resource management (CRM). Because in writing the book, the first 6? 10? pages before I stopped, I figured out that that's where Mike worked. Basically because I was a first year anthropology major and that sort of job seemed fun. Anyway, so under this grotesque title I was laying the roots for some sort of archaeology story. And then there was the specter of too many attractive, ghostly females and the fact that I still am not sure what the CRM do or how they do it and the book stalled after opening scene, flashback, sex and dialogue, then Mike goes off to work and I lost it.

Anyway. I picked up The Names about three weeks ago and dug into it. It's classic DeLillo. I'm not even sure how you recognize him, but he's blatantly recognizable. And I realized that I wanted to write this book. The narrator, James Axton, is separated from his wife who sidelines in some amateur archaeology for part of the book. Most of the book where's she's on-screen/continent, as they amount to the same in the plot. Axton is in risk analysis. He boards a lot of planes. The whole essence of both the book and movie Up in the Air, the latter one of my favorites and the former definitely an enjoyable read, are condensed in this book into 2 pages. That's DeLillo.

The place that archaeology plays in the book is exactly what I wanted in roadkill. Looking at it now, I could come up with all kinds of themes and ideas--which is good since this is a future book and not killed yet, just sleeping--but when I wrote in the job I didn't know these things. What does an archaeologist do? Well, he digs through the things left behind by dead people (for the most part). Mike has two newly dead loved ones. I think I've drawn the lines well enough.

But the most interesting part of The Names was not so much in the way that it made me feel like I wanted to have written a book called roadkill which was basically the same book just 1000X worse, but in the way that it really dug into my daily life: classes. I'm taking an anthropology-heavy workload this semester and The Names could easily have fit into class discussion in all six of my classes! The book is really about languages and letters (e.g. the name The Names) and I'm in Language and Culture; there's a cult in the book that kills people so there's some detective flush on the bodies and I'm in Skeleton Keys, a class in forensic anthropology (the cult uses a hammer at a certain point and I was a little unsettled by my professor showing us a case where a hammer was used soon thereafter); the examination into past languages and the cultures that birthed them or were born from them often took into account religious practices--the cult is questioned as to whether it has a religious purpose--and I'm in anthropology of religion; Axton's job has him flying all over Europe and the Middle East from a base in Greece and I'm taking Eastern European anthropology (the biggest stretch, I promise); the book is about writing and it's about people and anthropology somewhat and I'm in "Writing in Anthropology" (so I lied; sue me); and finally the non-anthro class I'm in, an introduction to international relations fits perfectly, because that's what Axton's job is really in, he has to judge risk in the context of INR.

Now I guess I should perhaps apologize for this myriad of a post somehow pertaining to one "topic" written at much-too-late by a blogger who's avoiding an essay he should be writing (but aren't we all?) but I won't, and will instead point out another interesting little bit in The Names. Where DeLillo uses dialogue he begins with Axton talking with (insert character here) and eventually gives us Axton speaking of that person, referring to what they said, assumed summarization and the like that you expect when the writer doesn't want to make you read through 30 pages of quotes to understand part of the story. But that's not all Don is up to. Later in The Names third person arises completely--how do you know? the character thinks about James Axton, the narrator, something you can also see in one scene at least in Ellis's Glamorama and in a few parts (I think) during the middle of King's Christine (which is beautiful, as all of King's first person/mostly first person works are)--and you are left wondering why exactly DeLillo has chosen this. Not because it seems like something we should question. But because it works and you don't know why.

A scene in the book involves the following exchange:

"You are from?"
"America."
"Where is your suitcase?"

Of course in context the American is a traveler and is in a foreign country as a tourist. I.e. it makes sense that the other person knows he has a suitcase. But as a means of closing this post, I want to ask the question of why this resonated with me. Why did it seem that, yes, all Americans should have suitcases, that when we reveal our homeland that question should be next, no matter if we are in Mexico City or Seattle. Maybe it's just the whole migration thing or the idea that we always carry more than we need.

Maybe. The thing with DeLillo is that he basically causes you to lose the ability to think. To determine. I haven't made a point yet, have I? While reading this book, I started having literal issues thinking and speaking on my feet. My lisp became more pronounced. Interpret as you will, since you will.

The Kind of Irony You Can't Write

2011-03-25T21:40:00.000-07:00

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

By the very name, academia, I can tell you that, other than through the drab capitalist ways that one often lives these days, it doesn't put bread on the table. It's unnecessary and pointless and amounts, most days, to a bunch of old white men yelling at each other and on the other days to their spittle drying on the walls of the ivory tower.

Or something like that.

As a writer, I have to say that I've never been particularly interested in the completely factual. I see faction as fiction bleeding into reality, rather than the more logical definition of reality putting on the stylish clothes of the novel. As a blogger, I've been useless: writing shitty poems or long meandering posts and not bothering to edit them enough. Hell, I'm still not even sure what the fuck a hipster is.

So this is not pulling the race or gender or sex or Marxist card, it's just building an aesthetic. Imagine words like bricks building a house in your brain. The way that Ron Silliman unpacks terms is not to explain them but to make them useless. Sentences, in a poem like ketjak, are characters, are old friends over for tea, and all you are going to do is have the same small talk conversations and absolutely nothing important is going to happen.

Because really, all the important things in life are just pissing contests and you can't seriously argue they should exist. The oil industry needs to fucking stop controlling the world. But is this important? No, because the people in charge of the world will be dead before there's a serious issue. And as much as your parents might love you, they seriously can't give a flying fuck either way. Can't, not won't. It isn't possible.

So, anyway, I like to say random crude things about the dominant group because I hate hierarchies of all sorts. I'm sort of like V, the destructive one, except not cool, abused, or fictional. It isn't going to matter how much we lower discriminatory practices. We still discriminate. And that's not tolerable.

Thomas Jefferson is the perfect example of the American: someone with brilliant, beautiful ideas who was just a downright rotten person. I'm not going to say that I'm a better man than Abraham Lincoln, but I will say that everyone who lived through the nineteenth century without getting lynched nauseates me a little bit, as I'm sure I would to myself were I just another goddamn ignorant slave owner.

My father looks for himself in politicians. He uses elections as mirrors. And I guess I do the same. It's funny that politics would then show us to be such different individuals.

And now the point I wanted to make in the beginning, but felt I had to warm my fingers up for: the term transition in political anthropology or political science or political whateverthefuckyouwanttocallit means both the transition to socialism and the transition from socialism to capitalism. At the same time, mind you.

Unpack that.

And as for the offended, I spit in your eye. And then apologize.

Because consumption is not enough.

2011-02-19T20:39:00.000-08:00

dialogue [Anne Carson writes them better; my apologies]

The King of Limbs: You know, in Andrew Hurley's notes on The Maker, a later work of Jorge Luis Borges, he claims that a lot of the pieces intended to create conversations between writings from the great Argentine writer's earlier days. Do you postulate that perhaps we are a similar discourse?

The Dead Lecturer: I don't postulate anything. I'm dead.

TKoL: What would you...consider us to be, then?

TDL: Well, I'm nothing. I'm dead.

TKoL: But there's a whole book about you...

TDL: "I am the doorway."

TKoL: Funny. But really. I mean...we're condemned to sit in this grey matter here like two prisoners of war, so I thought we might try to converse.

TDL: Already said all I wanted to say and then passed it on.

TKoL: But I thought you were dead.

TDL: If you had asked me about death, maybe I would have told you.

TKoL: Well, if you're going to be that way! I guess we'll just have to wait here in silence until the next wave of form and notion comes in to wash us out on the page.

TDL: There is no page.

PLAINWATER

2011-02-17T22:01:00.000-08:00

"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.

Okay so let's just start out with the facts: I can be quite the asshole. Calling out reviewers on Amazon is common assholery and I'm not arguing with that--in fact I'm not just agreeing with it, I'm suggesting it, as writing is (ironically, considering recent posts) most likely done by the solitary man (or woman). So let's be the douchebag friend everyone has, because, as far as assholes go, s/he is the easiest one to deal with. In so doing, I am only going to quote the review. Not name the writer.

If you've noticed Carson's stardom recently you owe it to yourself to read this first book. I give it only 3 stars because a lot of the book is actually pretty dull poetry. But about 80 pages of it makes up "The Anthropology of Water," an extraordinary journey in one woman's life, emotionally, poetically, and culturally.

Let me now admit something. When I first read this review what went into my memory was somewhat an insult to poetry itself. That's what percolated and caused me to write this post. Now on reread I misread as I so often (too often) do. There's no outright claim that "The Anthropology of Water" isn't poetry. It is somewhat implied, but I'm stretching it. Still--Plainwater is a much more friendly book from Anne Carson in comparison to Men in the Off Hours, which you can click the back button and scroll down a bit to read about. It's not on the same level as The Autobiography of Red or The Beauty of the Husband, but the reviewer is write in showcasing "The Anthropology of Water" which probably does outshine the other two books, on average.

What I wanted to talk about was my conception of poetry. It's becoming more and more in line with Li-Young Lee's--namely that poetry is the highest form of writing. Not so much that line breaks are the shit but that writing at the highest state, no matter what, is poetry. So in this way, "The Anthropology of Water" is doubtlessly poetry.

Now this is a simply definition and I don't mean to be stuck up or anything but in self-comparison there is a difference. Last semester I took a fiction writing class and began writing stories for the first time since I had really started to think of myself as a poet. And they were different. At their best, then, one might realize, they were poems. [Note: I plan on transcribing some of these at some point if I can find them. I printed them without saving out of Word for some reason at the time. Please don't question how I write; I don't.] So one of the major distinctive factors I can speak about is the ultimate aim for the work: prose is associated with narrative. Resisting narrative is, thus, poetic. Let me simply cut out two scraps of "The Anthropology of Water" where Anne Carson resists narrative.

I wanted to tell a story in the style of Samuel Beckett or simple industrial noise, that is the sort of storytelling we like nowadays. Details are in bad taste, they expose our infection. Just before becoming infected we invented anthropology to house our details. This science of man, which is always about other people, whose details are exotic, calms us and opens out the further possibility of anthropologizing ourselves. Hence modern love. Well enlightenment is useless but I find interesting the distinction anthropologists make between an emic and an etic point of view. (223)

and

It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together. Be careful of this storyteller's tendency to replace precise separate lines with fast daubs of ink. I know how to fool your mind so that your eye accepts what it did not see. A curtain of wash is not a desert. Where ink bleeds into paper is not an act of love, and yet it is. See.

Now, by definition, we've classified this well into the territory of poetry. Carson is clearly fighting narrative. She's clearly making light of the idea of the story. But there are issues with definitions, any and all. First of all, Carson often writes narrative-ly with line breaks (voila! The Autobiography of Red, which although floating around, has a fairly linear plot and thus strong narrative in that fashion). So I haven't worked all the kinks out yet. But the other issue is resolved: namely what about narrative breaking prose? Well, it's poetry.

Li-Young Lee pointed out As I Lay Dying (I think; Faulkner anyway) and Moby Dick as being books he read as poetry. I would point to novels like Democracy and Miss Wyoming. Ultimately, these questions are to be discussed personally. We can debate them, but I'm not going to change your mind and I shouldn't. The whole hierarchy is self-created to influence myself in the right direction: so for me the aim now is killing the narrative, putting herbicide to the tree of plot. Because that's really, really prevalent in my work and it shouldn't be.

But of course I've cheated. When I post the stories here that I wrote last semester, you're going to read them and say, well here's the plot; here's the narrative. I'm just trying to get myself distrustful of narratives, like any good anthropologist or even political scientist--distrust the Grand Narrative forced on you. Even if that narrative is narrative.

Have I devolved enough to lose you in this post? That wasn't the point but you can believe more or not. Now I'm going to finish Plainwater, because I'm not going to lie to you, I have a good 10? pages left. And then bed. Probably dreaming I wrote this. Or rather writing this dream. Or wait--

Layering

2011-02-17T21:25:00.000-08:00

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.

Consider the following: herpes, the first pet you watched die, your first kiss, and your grandmother's very annoying manner of greeting you that you couldn't take issue with because she is/was (does it change in death?) your grandmother (and trust me, they all have their own particular actions to get the same results, it's one of the things they teach in the grandmother surveys when your mother is preggers with you or whoever's the first born on that side of the family). What do all of those have in common? Well, I'm pretty much bullshitting by this point, in fact that long parenthetical was supposed to throw you off that whole trail. But what they have in common, or what I'm claiming they have in common, is that they are with you for life.

Now the relevance for the above paragraph is circumstantial at best and I admit that no one is going to get convicted on that piss poor evidence but here I am getting stuck into another metaphor rather than actually speaking; the relevance is this: Rousseau has a line somewhere, if my memory holds up, about how you can't go back to the way things were. See, people call Rousseau a primitivist, but he isn't because he's just a joker. His view of the primitive world is not essentially accurate--he points this out when he makes it irrelevant: we can't go back there. So then what does it matter what the there was like? Of course it doesn't.

Hidden in the folds of the amazing technicolor dreamcoat that he has woven in Miss Wyoming, Coupland places a similar thought. Basically the same-old, same-old you can't go back story. Coupland is basically writing about the end of the solitary man. In 1911, Ishi, the last Yahi man, came out of the forest in California. Ishi is a good man to allude to here because he was not solitary, although you might expect it from him. After all, the white man killed his entire society. (This is what I don't understand about people who try to argue with Indians about rights today. It's like, and this is an understatement, shooting three members of a guy's family and then turning to him and saying, Hey, can I borrow your umbrella? It's raining outside. Or rather it's like taking his umbrella after that and wondering why he's angry.) And what does Ishi do when his family in hiding in the forest dies? He comes back to society; he's no solitary man.

Orangutans are solitary apes. That's the findings of primatologists, and not just me talking out of my ass, although it's that too. We aren't solitary apes, but we've always had this sort of vision of the solitary life: Tarzan and all that jazz. Or was Tarzan talking with monkeys and does that disqualify it? Anyway, I'm not going to put that much more thought into another example, so deal with it, rock'n'roll!, as you'd get from Sean Bateman. In Miss Wyoming, Coupland gives us two characters who become solitary critters--one intentionally, one accidentally--and for both of them it fails. I'm just saying that's there's an understanding that you come to when you read this. The book is teaching you something. I'm not sure what other than the fact that if we ever could live on our own, we can't now.

So what does it matter what it was like back then? as we might paraphrase Rousseau.

MEN IN THE OFF HOURS

2011-02-12T13:47:00.000-08:00

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.

Some critics doubt that Carson even writes poetry. I think she does write poetry but of a kind unlike any I've read. "Men in the Off Hours" has its ups and downs, for not all the experiments work. But with Carson's writing there is always wit, and usually, underneath the assembled fragments, you detect her passionate heart, which makes it easy to forgive her various sins. But are they sins? Or is Carson writing the modern novel: part prose, part poetry, part essay. How the lines are blurring. Jab. Jab.

I'm still not sure what to make of Carson. The Autobiography of Red is great and everyone who is interested in the ancient Greek classics, the divide between poetry and prose, the question of narrative, or simply just enjoying yourself in a unique book should read it. But still Carson is too dense for me, most of the times. To say blatantly "for not all the experiments work" is to not understand what art is about. Because you aren't experimenting for someone else to learn from you. You are doing it for yourself. I'm agreeing with Li-Young Lee here, as he's the main recent influence, but also because he's right. The experiments did work, or they would have been erased or burned or "crossed out" which is an interesting concept considering the end of the book (and one discussed in the review). But still...

The end of American Psycho is like this. There's a paragraph that ends on an ellipsis. It's actually portrayed well in the movie. "But inside...inside doesn't matter," the scene revolves into. As a writer, you are always rebelling against these sort of thoughts, because language, thoughts, writing, your bread and butter, all of this is inside and all of it is necessary and needs to matter. In The Mentalist there's a scene where Lisbon says something about Patrick Jane making her a better cop, "revolutionizing the industry" we might call his mentalizing if crime-prevention/suspect-catching were an industry, and perhaps it is. Now this amounts to a joke when placed outside of the television program with its apparent irrealities. But still...

Anne Carson appears to be doing something similar with poetry. Or with art. She's an artist, but poet could be debatable. (As I've discussed before, "poet" should be a self-label.) But there's something to be learned or at least gleaned from her work. There's something there. And I don't have it just yet. The problem, of, course, with interior debates is the Bateman stand-by.

"inside doesn't matter"
but our essence/soul/being is inside,
so, if not, what does matter?

Immateria

2011-02-05T21:20:00.000-08:00

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.

I
"To Have"
(after Lee)

So we're brains in vats. Meanwhile, Whorf was right--
the Hopi do have ideas to teach us--
tenses are only constructions of our minds
so that we may understand each other.
There is no past, present, or future,
but rather a simple accruement of surety
a complex limitation of possibility,
like a train passing us by.

We stand here on the tracks
wondering about the trivial:

whose bedroom will we be in tonight,
whose life will we destroy?
And choo-choo comes the train.
We feel its wind on our faces
as it bluthers on into the night
and register it as the soft death-kiss of another's misfortune.

II
(after "Weapon for Liberty," Promethea 5)

So what if we've got it wrong? What if evolution doesn't work that way and in reality the hierarchy is flipped. Consider the following: the mind, that insubstantial beast fleeing away from the predator that is the material. And suppose we are simply the prey that was not quick enough. Everyone else got away. Escaped. Went on and out and left us behind in the realm of their bodies. So out goes Adam, naming, and condemning, that vain first man. Suppose instinct is the next stage--the mutation that proliferates. Natural selection slowly cutting away the soul and leaving for it something more. Suppose what that does to the power structure. Suppose what that says about your chain of being. Your bearded white god.

EDIT: Original ending to paragraph: After "something more."

Suppose what we've been missing. Suppose what we've been given. It is the world. Now zero out the scales and weigh.

NOTE: Li-Young Lee discusses writing without having the right words and how this varies from the purer activity of knowing what you want to say and how you are going to say it. I had two overlapping ideas and have now written them out, but I did not truly have the words at this point. Potentially I might edit this draft, then, or I might even create a new post to show the editing process, as, for example, Anne Carson has various second and third drafts intersparsed throughout her Men in the Off Hours.

NOTE #2: The poem in this selection originates from the Lee poem I link to but even the least perceptive writer will be able to tell it's darker in tone. It's a lot easier to be darker in tone. I did not intend to write the poem I wrote, so potentially a drafting process would create a completely new poem keeping maybe the first sentence.

The Common Misconception

2011-02-03T20:46:00.000-08:00

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.

Adam Kirsch has an interesting article on The Anthology of Rap in the most recent issue of Poetry and I haven't read it yet. Still, just the idea that Kirsch is writing about rap in a magazine that has the simple and neat title of poetry is a beautiful thing. The most interesting, productive, and evolutionary thought that is going into rhyming verse is in the rap genre. It's not some poets writing sonnets in their ivory tower and it's not Justin Bieber--it's rap music.

So that's a golden star for Adam Kirsch. This is what makes the rest of this piece hard to write: Adam Kirsch also makes mistakes. Reading up on Anne Carson on her Poetry Foundation page, I came across the following excerpt:

Echoing debates that continue to swirl around the Carson’s prose-like poetics, Kirsch wondered if Carson had indeed produced the verse promised in the book’s subtitle. “The writing is clearly prose,” he maintained, “laid out in alternating long and short lines, with no strictness of measure or rhythm; the division between a long line and a short one is typographical only, or at best syntactic.”

Now, I'm not exactly sure what to make about Carson, myself, but that's just because she's too smart for my own good. She's telling jokes I'm not getting at times. Or I think she is. It's Rumsfeld's unknown unknown again. But the book Kirsch is describing is clearly my favorite of hers so far, The Autobiography of Red, which is also probably her most popular. Now I'm no Carson expert, but I've read three of her books and am reading two more at the moment, and the one thing I can really attest to is the fact that, with all apologies to Mr. Kirsch, she is always working very much from within the frame of poetry.

Today I just finished Li-Young Lee's wonderful "remembrance," as he terms it, of both his father and his past, The Winged Seed. The Amazon page for this book has the following interesting review:

the winged seed is probably the most poetic book i have ever read. li-young lee's quiet, condensed writing style is almost sedating. he is one of the most interesting people i've met and one of the best poets i've ever read. he is what many poets strive to be.

It's from "mahoney" and it's a five of five review. Now I'm obviously bringing this all up for a reason, so as tempting a deconstruction of the review itself is, I'm getting back on track. The Winged Seed is, in fact, a poetic book. It might not be the most poetic book I've ever read, but it is really great poetry that goes on in prose with paragraphs for about 200 pages. Certainly, if I was a literary medical examiner, I could examine this book and cut it into two parts and say that there is prose here and poetry there, but what would be the use of that? And anyway, the prose would be the thin layer fat on the body that is the poetry.

What I'm trying to say here is that you can't describe poetry. You can't say "oh, that's not poetry, it doesn't rhyme!" or "it's line breaks are at best syntatical." Some poems aren't going to have line breaks. In fact, I'm currently very interested in the paragraph and how I can use that as a form. And by currently, I mean daily, as in today I became interested in this form. And by "interested" I mean I'm experimenting--writing paragraph poems, but that's not right either, because you could look back and say I've been doing that since I wrote "men among man," just as people stated that they knew Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman had been dating since the two worked together on her first solo album, and Gaiman had to say, wait, this has only begun quite recently. Now, I'm still writing poetry, just as Carson or Lee, but I'm not following the supposed "rules" which don't exist.

Or rather, I'm still writing poetry, just as I believe Carson or Lee would claim to be doing. Kirsch can say all he wants about line breaks, but there are people out there who claim that "rap is crap" and has no artistic value as well. The only useful labels we can create are self-labels and understanding these is an important feature in any critical work. So I must point out that Carson might say she's not a poet. Lee wouldn't, but then again, I'm reading an interview book with Lee, so I might as well say "Lee doesn't. He does the opposite. He refers to himself as an American poet (rather than an Asian American poet, which is a term he doesn't particularly care for." But once again, there are no rules.

I could say some stupid things that I've found myself thinking, like "It actually seems like the less dependent you get on line breaks, the better your poem is...the less gimmicky," but really that is something I only think spur of the moment. Soon thereafter I've changed my mind. I've realized how dumb that is. And anyway, it's just another nonexistent rule that someone has made up. (But at least I'm taking it back.)

Perhaps what we can ask Kirsch is to pick up another issue of Poetry and debate his thoughts on line breaks there. Ron Silliman's last poems in the magazine, which were featured in the June issue of last year, but which you, dear reader, can read right here if you wish, are divided into lines of five words each. So what does that mean? That's an arbitrary move (but then again all language is arbitrary, is metaphor...) so does it make it prose? If the lines had the same syllable count, Kirsch might have an argument, but really we're just debating rules here and I'm not going to waste any more time on this fictive talk.

Art & Design

2011-01-30T15:22:00.000-08:00

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.

Impeccable Blahs is a 2006 album by Say Hi to Your Mom (now just Say Hi) that I mentioned here before. It's about vampires which makes listening to it a humbling experience for me. My own attempt at vampire art (the third section of my book in case you haven't read enough here to know what I'm talking about, which I'm sure you haven't) is a failure in comparison to this. Eric Elbogen, the Trent Reznor character who basically is the only guy behind Say Hi, sings the lyrics over music that I can call minimalist, although I'm sure I'm wrong with that label. The lyrics are given as a block paragraph on the inside of the two panel cover booklet to the album and it causes the concept to even more hit home. These aren't single songs, but rather a contemplation on "vampires. Not creepy, goth vampires but rather people just like you and me who happen to get their nourishment from drinking blood" (as it says in the booklet) that goes on for just over forty-three minutes. Our themes are so similar it's scary and it makes me think that I was ripping off Elbogen before I even realized it. I'm not sure I listened to my first Say Hi after conceiving of my poetry novella (as I call it) so this is not an impossibility.

All of this is just a noteworthy example of design in art. I would say that I'm not completely out in right field when I mention the lyrics written as a block paragraph is some sort of attempt to get the listener to see the songs as part of a whole. Trent Reznor obviously recurs here as someone who does all sorts of interesting things with design. You can read the wiki article on practically every one of his albums and find him doing something interesting with the packaging or the design or whatever the hell it is I'm trying to say. This is a post where I can mention things like Miss Wyoming that has cover art created by the writer himself, Douglas Coupland, or more family-oriented: Rose, Li-Young Lee's first book of poetry, has a cover illustration by his brother (whose name of Li-Lin Lee might cause you to think there was a typo in the credits).

I'm not trying to get more reflective than this so I'll just continue in the same fourth-wall breaking mode. Anne Carson has talked about the book, stating, "I know that I have to make things. And it’s a convenient form we have in our culture, the book, in which you can make stuff, but it’s becoming less and less satisfying. And I’ve never felt that it exhausts any idea I’ve had” (quoted from her page on the Poetry Foundation's website). This is something I think she addresses in the design of her latest book, Nox, which we might better call a work of art. It's a scroll of some sort. Not something I can understand completely from reading about it, which is a bit of a thrill, considering this world we live in, where we basically just read summaries about everything instead of actually experiencing it, but that's neither here nor there. I know that I am going to pick this up at the library here at the university right when it comes in. Or rather when the first person returns it, because it's on order now and someone already has it on hold.

And there's something to hold here. I've self-published one book (here) or rather two, but one was simply to hold a novel I had written in my hands. There is definitely a disconnect, as a commercial artist, from the pen or keyboard or paintbrush or microphone we work with to the book or painting or record we create and it's very interesting to know how much control we have over this. I don't want anyone to forget that. Mostly, though, I want myself to think about it more, so I wrote it down. And what is a blog, really, but just another recreation of this same concept? &c

Sentences in Sociology

2011-01-22T20:46:00.000-08:00

From TEXTBOOK

I

She fell in love with a masked man not knowing him for a city; Legion, of course, was the name.

II

We fear the Borg because we all want to be the Borg, not be inside the Borg, as, for example, you might fear the most popular girl in the high school, not be among the Borg, as, for example, you might fear the most popular guy in the neighborhood who, as your friend, would make you look quite scrumptious to the most popular girl in the high school, but to be that controlling mind, the person running it all, and resistance at that point would be more than just futile, it'd be counterproductive, since we, each and every one of us, have such great plans for the world.

NOTE: Currently reading "Short Talks" in Plainwater which is sort of like this. I wrote these a few days ago now and just started reading this section today so the apparent similarity in purpose was a bit striking. There may be a few more of these--anything that comes to me expressed without line breaks and about a collective in some sort could end up here, as long as it doesn't just end up purely ridiculous if I put it in one sentence. Then again, the second one I've already got here is somewhat ridiculous itself, but that's the joke.

THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING (Didion, 2005)

2011-01-21T18:26:00.000-08:00

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.

Trent Reznor recorded The Downward Spiral in the house where Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson family. I'm not sure why. I can't put myself in that situation mentally--it doesn't click. But an interesting thing to note is how he came to realize that he maybe didn't want to be doing that. Apparently he met Tate's sister and was asked if he was somehow exploiting her death by living in the house she where she had been killed. Something clicked. I'm not saying there are real categories called "better" or "worse" in the world, but things change. "It made me see there's another side of things, you know?" Reznor would say of the encounter.*

Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking creates a similar realization in the reader. This is a memoir of the year after her husband died, while her daughter was hospitalized. There's the idea early on that Didion, as a writer, and one can suppose, a reader, would often retreat to literature to get advice or help when faced with difficult situations. This is a book about grief. In turning to the literature about grief she finds some difficulty. It's limited and clinical. In writing this book, she is able to expand that category, because I can defintely see the book as an aide of some sort. It's a mixture of a textbook and a friend, with narrative added in.

One of the more damning facts about this book is the way it loops around Didion's novels. The scenes in hospitals eerily reflect those that I had just read recently in her Democracy, an eighties novel in which Didion is both the writer who is writing a novel and a character who interacts in the story. For me, there was an unsettling transition between books. It sparked a realization.

Or perhaps a reminder.

When we deal with fiction or, to some extent, entertainment of any kind, there is a certain amount of emotion that we, as the audience, put into the work. Even the emotionlessness of a Tao Lin reading is attempting to make you feel something, I think. I know that there is a lot of feeling that you can hide in the apathy of a Bret Easton Ellis novel. The Year of Magical Thinking is a reminder of how stupid and pitiful we humans are for being able to do this. An animal cannot feel anything for a fictional death. And we try to rationalize this by saying that animals cannot feel anything. But this is just another lie.

At the heart of this book is a question about our society today that chooses to hide real emotion. Grief should be private or nonexistent. Sure, you feel bad; we feel bad too. Now get on with your life. Didion, very professionally, is able to evaluate herself and realize that faced with this sort of chokehold, she was forced into magical thinking (the theme which brought me to the book--I'm taking a class on the anthropology of religions, and based on the title, the book seemed a good fit). She does this convincingly and realistically, without resorting to boring the reader with her emotion. It's a book that I'd like to describe, as Barack Obama's first book was described, as "unsentimental," but that wouldn't be right, because the book is all about sentimentality. What is also about, however, is the realization of such. So much of what we see as wrong in the world we try to sweep under the rug. But these emotions, actions, and thought processes are omnipresent for a reason. They're going to exist and happen whether or not you want them. I feel, as perhaps Didion feels, that realizing them lessens the dark side. If we understand what we do and why, we can deal with it better than pretending it can just not be done.

The realization that struck me was one that I would fashion, as I wrote this, into the image of the movie theater. Here we can express as much emotion as we wish--it is even joked at, how even the tough me cry at a good film. And yet we grow as a society to support emotionlessness when faced with realities. The power of fictions should perhaps not be so strong, or improportionally placed. "It made me see there's another side of things, you know?" Reznor said. And I cannot understand why he was doing what he was doing in the first place, but I'm sure he could say the same of me (admitting he's famous and will never know of me). What I can understand is the realization. When you think to yourself, hohum, this is someone's life. This is real. It's more important than I had thought.

Why must we come to these realizations? These dawnings of the obvious truth on our big, huge brains? Animals, it occurs to me, probably realize nothing. Everything is known or unknown. What does that say about us?