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

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

Behind the anthropology of sports

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

The Future of Publishing

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

We're back to football.

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

Peter's Mulligan or On Milligan

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

The Anti-Comic

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

Leadership

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