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.
Showing posts with label blend. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blend. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Scott van Pelt recalls the Tonight Show fiasco.
SportsCenter does these dj mixes of the month that play around with a lot of soundbites. They also did a recent "things they should trademark" segment. I was thinking about the NBC craziness with Leno and Conan and thought I would write a little remembrance up using quotes. Then I realized this was the perfect time to have an extended use of hyperlinks--it's a new type of reading really. So I hope this isn't too unbearable to get through. It's not very good, but it's the thought that counts, right? (Wrong.)
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Monday, December 27, 2010
men among man
I have never had an original idea in my life, but neither have you, he said, finger pointing out towards the man in the mirror. And he's a crazy man, anyway, you thought, so that I could feel better about myself, but all this was still inside his head and mine. It wasn't out in the open. You are not the type of person to talk about these things. I am the sort who keeps them locked up. And that's a lie, I guess, he thought, as he typed it up for you, but then again, I had never been one to tell the truth. Never one to lie, but also not just one, and just not that interested in truth because truth was only fiction with tyranny and even my sort of communism is not something you think of as practical: he understood that there was always a dominating force, always someone walking into the picture and saying, "Hey! You, out there, you, man, yes! you: you're going to have to listen to me."
I'm calling that a prose poem. Inspired by this from December's Poetry: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=240834
Edit: This is the epigraph: "The me you know, he had some second thoughts." from The Becoming, Nine Inch Nails; adding it at the end because I came to it after writing the piece, and didn't want to make it seem as if this had sparked the paragraph.
Second Edit: The official title of this piece is "Psychology, a Paragraph," and it is part of a larger work called TEXTBOOK which may or may not show up in ebooks are spineless which may or may not ever exist. I have written and will edit and post a secondary work within TEXTBOOK soon, entitled "Sociology in Sentences."
I'm calling that a prose poem. Inspired by this from December's Poetry: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=240834
Edit: This is the epigraph: "The me you know, he had some second thoughts." from The Becoming, Nine Inch Nails; adding it at the end because I came to it after writing the piece, and didn't want to make it seem as if this had sparked the paragraph.
Second Edit: The official title of this piece is "Psychology, a Paragraph," and it is part of a larger work called TEXTBOOK which may or may not show up in ebooks are spineless which may or may not ever exist. I have written and will edit and post a secondary work within TEXTBOOK soon, entitled "Sociology in Sentences."
Monday, June 28, 2010
Lows' Prose and Worse Verse
"Lows'" being the possessive of bad times. This one is crazy. Actually, the rest of them from this month are crazy, if they all weren't already. Not much else to get to. Let's let this part end here.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Cannabalizing
It’s a neologism of sorts, but really just a bad pronunciation, that has grown, to me, to mean taking an old work and injecting it into a new one. It’s not quite cannibalizing as Raymond Chandler put it, so I’ve grown to make it into something completely new. Wait, stay with me here for a moment, I’m simply sharing a thought and it doesn’t have to mean anything, because I’m framing another concept.
In Life is Elsewhere, as I detailed yesterday, there are many snippets from various poems written by the main character, Jaromil. Reading the novel, I am led to see these as perhaps sections from Kundera’s own poems. Before settling in as a novelist, Kundera was a poet, amongst other things, and Life is Elsewhere makes that readily apparent, because it is such a condemnation of the poet that it would be completely farcical if not for the fact that Kundera likely saw himself as a poet at one point and is, in fact, lampooning himself.
I feel like this is the kind of novel that any poet should read and be able to fight against it or should give up his or her chosen art—it’s a romantic view of poetry, but it links the art with immaturity, with youth, to the extent that with the working title, The Lyrical Age, Kundera is referring to youth—what’s so enlightening is that there are beautiful definitions of what a poem is, what poetry should do, and all of it lies in the usual uncertainty of Kundera’s work. What I mean to say is that reading this book as a poet is like picking through history as a socialist, where you have to look at the various failures and the characters you disagree with and you have to have a sort of inner monologue about what you think your purpose as a poet is. I had similar fun with an article from Fidel Castro that we read in my Latin American seminar last semester; someone who is claiming to be supporting an idea that you support, this is the transitive property, and this person should be your friend. So reading becomes a game of dramatic irony; as I’ve said before bending art to my worldview has become a pastime, so you simply know more about the world (or your personal view of the world) than the author of whatever you are reading. Maybe you could try it, or maybe everyone already does it? I don’t know, I’m simply sharing it because it’s like tons of fun.
Ha-ha, that said, let me get back to the point—if I were able to create history, I would have the snippets of poems in Life is Elsewhere be clipped directly from Kundera’s poems written in youth. It would be fictive layering, of a different kind, since the reality would be injected into the fiction. This would not be without its precedents in my knowledge, meaning that my imaginings over the origins of these poems are not entirely original.
They come, in part, to what I’ve read that Grant Morrison did with a character in The Invisibles, a comic-book series so crazy that I’ve yet to make myself pick it up. The Gideon Stargrave stories in this series, Morrison states, “are direct quotes from the Michael Moorcock-inspired short stories [he] wrote obsessively when [he] was 17,” which presents us with an interesting comparison. However, the layers on this story do perhaps run deeper, as Moorcock sees the stories as pure plagiarism.
Is Morrison then simply claiming to have quoted stories he wrote as a teen in order to somehow bring up cryptomnesia as a defense for plagiarism? The answer to this question is unknowable and ultimately not all together interesting. No matter what Grant Morrison did, what is of interest is what he said he did, so in this case words are louder than actions. Why exactly would Morrison take stuff he had written as a kid and put it into what he’s writing later on?
Well, we’re getting back to the question of getting better as a writer, then, aren’t we? In a currently abandoned novel I created the character of Philip Forger without much thought to his actual name. Now, looking back on it, I realized that Philip would obviously specialize in forgery, the aptronym forming on its own as a moment of revelation. This suddenly presented an answer to an issue that had been bothering me—what do I make of the novel that I wrote during National Novel Writing Month a year and a half ago? Do I trash it or gut it or simply edit it?
I came to the realization that I could effectively not do anything and still have the book exist. It’s like what Stephen King does to Insomnia in the Dark Tower series. Dark Tower is essentially the culmination of all of King’s writing: it presents a multiverse of all his stories and also ended up impacting many of his books that he wrote to allude to this series. For Insomnia, King ran up against a corner, because he basically reached a plot hole. He was finishing the Dark Tower seven-book series, but the ending wasn’t meshing with the novel he’d written earlier. So he simply writes it off, has a character say that he was interpreting the universe wrong, so the book was messed up.
It’s not a fulfilling or fair answer, but it does the trick, surprisingly enough. Sometimes the easiest way out is the best. So I got to thinking that I should look for the easiest way out for myself and I determined that I could take the book I had already written, already put the hours into, if you will, and I could inject it into the fictional world by way of Philip Forger. He wrote the book and all of the simple slip-ups with the universe I’ve been created, all of the stories that can’t quite make sense now, they are explained away because the book is a forgery. It’s the work of not the writer who escapes into the fiction but of the fictional character who pulls out just far enough to see the world for what it is, but only temporarily. Like Deadpool or Agent Smith.
In Life is Elsewhere, as I detailed yesterday, there are many snippets from various poems written by the main character, Jaromil. Reading the novel, I am led to see these as perhaps sections from Kundera’s own poems. Before settling in as a novelist, Kundera was a poet, amongst other things, and Life is Elsewhere makes that readily apparent, because it is such a condemnation of the poet that it would be completely farcical if not for the fact that Kundera likely saw himself as a poet at one point and is, in fact, lampooning himself.
I feel like this is the kind of novel that any poet should read and be able to fight against it or should give up his or her chosen art—it’s a romantic view of poetry, but it links the art with immaturity, with youth, to the extent that with the working title, The Lyrical Age, Kundera is referring to youth—what’s so enlightening is that there are beautiful definitions of what a poem is, what poetry should do, and all of it lies in the usual uncertainty of Kundera’s work. What I mean to say is that reading this book as a poet is like picking through history as a socialist, where you have to look at the various failures and the characters you disagree with and you have to have a sort of inner monologue about what you think your purpose as a poet is. I had similar fun with an article from Fidel Castro that we read in my Latin American seminar last semester; someone who is claiming to be supporting an idea that you support, this is the transitive property, and this person should be your friend. So reading becomes a game of dramatic irony; as I’ve said before bending art to my worldview has become a pastime, so you simply know more about the world (or your personal view of the world) than the author of whatever you are reading. Maybe you could try it, or maybe everyone already does it? I don’t know, I’m simply sharing it because it’s like tons of fun.
Ha-ha, that said, let me get back to the point—if I were able to create history, I would have the snippets of poems in Life is Elsewhere be clipped directly from Kundera’s poems written in youth. It would be fictive layering, of a different kind, since the reality would be injected into the fiction. This would not be without its precedents in my knowledge, meaning that my imaginings over the origins of these poems are not entirely original.
They come, in part, to what I’ve read that Grant Morrison did with a character in The Invisibles, a comic-book series so crazy that I’ve yet to make myself pick it up. The Gideon Stargrave stories in this series, Morrison states, “are direct quotes from the Michael Moorcock-inspired short stories [he] wrote obsessively when [he] was 17,” which presents us with an interesting comparison. However, the layers on this story do perhaps run deeper, as Moorcock sees the stories as pure plagiarism.
Is Morrison then simply claiming to have quoted stories he wrote as a teen in order to somehow bring up cryptomnesia as a defense for plagiarism? The answer to this question is unknowable and ultimately not all together interesting. No matter what Grant Morrison did, what is of interest is what he said he did, so in this case words are louder than actions. Why exactly would Morrison take stuff he had written as a kid and put it into what he’s writing later on?
Well, we’re getting back to the question of getting better as a writer, then, aren’t we? In a currently abandoned novel I created the character of Philip Forger without much thought to his actual name. Now, looking back on it, I realized that Philip would obviously specialize in forgery, the aptronym forming on its own as a moment of revelation. This suddenly presented an answer to an issue that had been bothering me—what do I make of the novel that I wrote during National Novel Writing Month a year and a half ago? Do I trash it or gut it or simply edit it?
I came to the realization that I could effectively not do anything and still have the book exist. It’s like what Stephen King does to Insomnia in the Dark Tower series. Dark Tower is essentially the culmination of all of King’s writing: it presents a multiverse of all his stories and also ended up impacting many of his books that he wrote to allude to this series. For Insomnia, King ran up against a corner, because he basically reached a plot hole. He was finishing the Dark Tower seven-book series, but the ending wasn’t meshing with the novel he’d written earlier. So he simply writes it off, has a character say that he was interpreting the universe wrong, so the book was messed up.
It’s not a fulfilling or fair answer, but it does the trick, surprisingly enough. Sometimes the easiest way out is the best. So I got to thinking that I should look for the easiest way out for myself and I determined that I could take the book I had already written, already put the hours into, if you will, and I could inject it into the fictional world by way of Philip Forger. He wrote the book and all of the simple slip-ups with the universe I’ve been created, all of the stories that can’t quite make sense now, they are explained away because the book is a forgery. It’s the work of not the writer who escapes into the fiction but of the fictional character who pulls out just far enough to see the world for what it is, but only temporarily. Like Deadpool or Agent Smith.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Psst! Over here...
So here we are again at the end of another work week. And with an irregular sleep schedule like mine, Friday’s have the nice alliterative pairing with another word, “fatigue.” It shouldn’t surprise you, then, to find a bit of a random thought dumping of a post centered on sleep. The unpredictable injection into that formulaic piece is, of course, death. Or not “of course,” I’ve been thinking about this post for so long, that I’m afraid I might be jumping ahead of myself already.
My lack of musical knowledge is something I’m probably always going to have to live with and that’s something of which I’ve grown to deal, because I did make a decision at some point in my life (not that I can recall the specific instant), to not pursue music of any sort. I don’t feel like I could’ve been a master musician—or a musician at all—but that I could at least understand it. Maybe read it as well. That might have been a different life to live. But whatever, enough about this. I offer this as just another annoying autobiographical pause, because I mean to explain why I analyze songs and albums fundamentally through their lyrics. We all have different ways of thinking about our favorite tunes, I would say, but it’s not something we really come across too much, because we leave it to reviewers to set a certain way of talking about music.
And maybe that’s not true; it was a simple slight that just slipped into my head, so I electronically jotted it down. The thought contained in those words could perhaps be expanded to say that I think it would be great if we got more writing from the common public on music, poetry, books, etc. I want people out there raising questions and postulating answers to the utmost extent—aiming for the impossible goal of asking every question you ever could about everything, which is obviously something that could only be reached if we stopped creating more things that expanded everything—because that’s what the internet is for. So I’ve written in a story about how a writer-character wants to write an article about what “Hotel California” means to him, but doesn’t end up doing it, similar in a way to the recent Warren Ellis tweet: “Things I’ll never have time to write: 10,000 words on the relationship between Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’ & Bo Diddley’s ‘Who Do You Love.’” I think I would enjoy reading that, but of course I find myself not having enough time to read as much of Ellis’s various running columns, as I should, so I can’t complain.
The point is that I don’t want to have to go to a book club to talk about a book and maybe I don’t want to dig through forums which generally seem to amount to people saying “liked it,” “didn’t it,” “this scene was cool.” But I guess I’m getting both off-track and stuck up, so I’ll pull it in a little—this is not that big of a fish, I’m just no expert out here in the waters; what I’ve learned is that I enjoy casting a lot more than the rest of this gig, but once you’ve got a bite, well you have to do something about it.
By now you are perhaps wondering what this has to do with sleep and death, and, kind reader, I am getting there. Quite quickly at this point, because in this very sentence I will present the case of the 2004 Modest Mouse album Good News for People Who Love Bad News. The various threads of this work present an interesting portrayal of the “sleep/death” line that I’ve been considering lately, not the least as I drearily picked through files at my summer job, my productivity level unfortunately dropping as the week drove on and the drowsiness mounted. (The previous sentence is hopefully not entirely true; I like to think that I keep a fairly regular activity level at work. I followed it out, because it is actually one of the fears that pops up into my head when I have about an hour or so left in the day.)
My abnormally large amount of introductory thoughts (which is quite the feat, considering that I generally do drone on and on before getting to the small, pitiful point) is due in part to the lack of strong evidence for my ideas in this post, but also due to the fact that I’m simply working with a small thought here and one I wanted to dress up to make it larger. About a third of the way into the aforementioned Modest Mouse album, we are treated with a creepy little 13 second rattle of a song—coincidentally the same length as the opening to Radiohead’s “The Bends”—where it is I would assume Isaac Brock who says to us “I’m already digging, I hope you’re dead,” which repeats once.
It is here that we are treated with the classic Poe scenario—the uncertain death which could potentially lead to premature burial (both the name of a Poe story as well as an important plot element to many, including “The Fall of the House of Usher”). This recurs with force and in a much more sinister way in the late track “Satin in a Coffin” which includes the refrain “Are you dead or are you sleepin’?” Apologies, dear readers, who thought I might be making an original point, but I’ve stolen this one directly from the lyrics book. Here, our premature burial situation becomes even more evident—taken in this light, and somewhat out of the context of both the song and the album, I will admit—the response of “God, I sure hope you are dead,” becomes somewhat understandable. We don’t want to be digging graves for living people now, do we? (An aside to this being that I once wanted to write a story about just and send it to a horror magazine to get the first rejection slip, but I never did. I’m so often a failure as a writer.)
This interesting connection between both songs broke into something more for me, when I listened to “Bukowski,” probably my favorite on the album, on a further time through the soundscape. In it, our singer/speaker, if you will, is reflecting on the boredom of listening to someone “talk, talk, talk in circles” (not quite the exact quote; and another thing, he wouldn’t like me much, would he?), and asks “when you get to the point, make sure I’m still awake, okay?”
And I thought, wow, sitting there being bored to death by this speaker, you could fall asleep and be seen as if you were dead (which is ironic, considering the hyperbole). We need to make sure that this person is still awake, because on this album, sleep ends up being death.
See that final conclusion? It didn’t pack much punch, now did it? But then again, it was an odd thing, having already conceived of these connections (but not completely of this blog post), to be watching the Larry King interview with Lady Gaga the other night (which I know I’ve already mentioned this week), and to see the question posed to her, “Why are you so fascinated with death at 24?” She answered that it haunts her dreams (though probably not with that exact cliché), and I thought that there was a connection there. Sleep being something we can explain scientifically, but death being something that many people would say transcends science and even dreams in a way. All these things were somehow worthy of noting to myself and in what better way than in a location that I can access from an internet connection anywhere.
It’s just too bad that I’ve bogged down that simple thought to be remembered in this long post. And consider the oddity that was me finding in Girlfriend in a Coma, a Douglas Coupland book that I read last semester, while leafing through it today, before writing this post, a chapter entitled “If it Sleeps It’s Alive.” If this were a story, I might have broken out in chills at that moment, like Bret Easton Ellis when he rereads his own books (and experiences revelations! How funny)in Lunar Park, but it wasn’t so I simply thought it was a cool coincidence.
And I’m just about quits now, but before I go let me get down an idea that came to me while writing this: What if something like Wikipedia ended up linking you, in the future, to various pages of people reflecting how they were affected and how they saw a certain piece of art or an event, and this continued in a sort of file system, so that you could easily search inside a work of art, interpreting not only specific lines in Ulysses or The Catcher in the Rye, but as a public, everything of which we are fans.
My lack of musical knowledge is something I’m probably always going to have to live with and that’s something of which I’ve grown to deal, because I did make a decision at some point in my life (not that I can recall the specific instant), to not pursue music of any sort. I don’t feel like I could’ve been a master musician—or a musician at all—but that I could at least understand it. Maybe read it as well. That might have been a different life to live. But whatever, enough about this. I offer this as just another annoying autobiographical pause, because I mean to explain why I analyze songs and albums fundamentally through their lyrics. We all have different ways of thinking about our favorite tunes, I would say, but it’s not something we really come across too much, because we leave it to reviewers to set a certain way of talking about music.
And maybe that’s not true; it was a simple slight that just slipped into my head, so I electronically jotted it down. The thought contained in those words could perhaps be expanded to say that I think it would be great if we got more writing from the common public on music, poetry, books, etc. I want people out there raising questions and postulating answers to the utmost extent—aiming for the impossible goal of asking every question you ever could about everything, which is obviously something that could only be reached if we stopped creating more things that expanded everything—because that’s what the internet is for. So I’ve written in a story about how a writer-character wants to write an article about what “Hotel California” means to him, but doesn’t end up doing it, similar in a way to the recent Warren Ellis tweet: “Things I’ll never have time to write: 10,000 words on the relationship between Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’ & Bo Diddley’s ‘Who Do You Love.’” I think I would enjoy reading that, but of course I find myself not having enough time to read as much of Ellis’s various running columns, as I should, so I can’t complain.
The point is that I don’t want to have to go to a book club to talk about a book and maybe I don’t want to dig through forums which generally seem to amount to people saying “liked it,” “didn’t it,” “this scene was cool.” But I guess I’m getting both off-track and stuck up, so I’ll pull it in a little—this is not that big of a fish, I’m just no expert out here in the waters; what I’ve learned is that I enjoy casting a lot more than the rest of this gig, but once you’ve got a bite, well you have to do something about it.
By now you are perhaps wondering what this has to do with sleep and death, and, kind reader, I am getting there. Quite quickly at this point, because in this very sentence I will present the case of the 2004 Modest Mouse album Good News for People Who Love Bad News. The various threads of this work present an interesting portrayal of the “sleep/death” line that I’ve been considering lately, not the least as I drearily picked through files at my summer job, my productivity level unfortunately dropping as the week drove on and the drowsiness mounted. (The previous sentence is hopefully not entirely true; I like to think that I keep a fairly regular activity level at work. I followed it out, because it is actually one of the fears that pops up into my head when I have about an hour or so left in the day.)
My abnormally large amount of introductory thoughts (which is quite the feat, considering that I generally do drone on and on before getting to the small, pitiful point) is due in part to the lack of strong evidence for my ideas in this post, but also due to the fact that I’m simply working with a small thought here and one I wanted to dress up to make it larger. About a third of the way into the aforementioned Modest Mouse album, we are treated with a creepy little 13 second rattle of a song—coincidentally the same length as the opening to Radiohead’s “The Bends”—where it is I would assume Isaac Brock who says to us “I’m already digging, I hope you’re dead,” which repeats once.
It is here that we are treated with the classic Poe scenario—the uncertain death which could potentially lead to premature burial (both the name of a Poe story as well as an important plot element to many, including “The Fall of the House of Usher”). This recurs with force and in a much more sinister way in the late track “Satin in a Coffin” which includes the refrain “Are you dead or are you sleepin’?” Apologies, dear readers, who thought I might be making an original point, but I’ve stolen this one directly from the lyrics book. Here, our premature burial situation becomes even more evident—taken in this light, and somewhat out of the context of both the song and the album, I will admit—the response of “God, I sure hope you are dead,” becomes somewhat understandable. We don’t want to be digging graves for living people now, do we? (An aside to this being that I once wanted to write a story about just and send it to a horror magazine to get the first rejection slip, but I never did. I’m so often a failure as a writer.)
This interesting connection between both songs broke into something more for me, when I listened to “Bukowski,” probably my favorite on the album, on a further time through the soundscape. In it, our singer/speaker, if you will, is reflecting on the boredom of listening to someone “talk, talk, talk in circles” (not quite the exact quote; and another thing, he wouldn’t like me much, would he?), and asks “when you get to the point, make sure I’m still awake, okay?”
And I thought, wow, sitting there being bored to death by this speaker, you could fall asleep and be seen as if you were dead (which is ironic, considering the hyperbole). We need to make sure that this person is still awake, because on this album, sleep ends up being death.
See that final conclusion? It didn’t pack much punch, now did it? But then again, it was an odd thing, having already conceived of these connections (but not completely of this blog post), to be watching the Larry King interview with Lady Gaga the other night (which I know I’ve already mentioned this week), and to see the question posed to her, “Why are you so fascinated with death at 24?” She answered that it haunts her dreams (though probably not with that exact cliché), and I thought that there was a connection there. Sleep being something we can explain scientifically, but death being something that many people would say transcends science and even dreams in a way. All these things were somehow worthy of noting to myself and in what better way than in a location that I can access from an internet connection anywhere.
It’s just too bad that I’ve bogged down that simple thought to be remembered in this long post. And consider the oddity that was me finding in Girlfriend in a Coma, a Douglas Coupland book that I read last semester, while leafing through it today, before writing this post, a chapter entitled “If it Sleeps It’s Alive.” If this were a story, I might have broken out in chills at that moment, like Bret Easton Ellis when he rereads his own books (and experiences revelations! How funny)in Lunar Park, but it wasn’t so I simply thought it was a cool coincidence.
And I’m just about quits now, but before I go let me get down an idea that came to me while writing this: What if something like Wikipedia ended up linking you, in the future, to various pages of people reflecting how they were affected and how they saw a certain piece of art or an event, and this continued in a sort of file system, so that you could easily search inside a work of art, interpreting not only specific lines in Ulysses or The Catcher in the Rye, but as a public, everything of which we are fans.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Losing it...
“I can never lose it,” sputters the inhuman voice that makes up with that one line all of the lyrics to Brand New’s untitled track on The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me, “I can never lose it.” And with that thought we are off on another train of thought. Remember my way of taking things out of context and creating a background of my own?
So what can we never lose? I made the connection here between the odd sort of optimism that one gets with the Flobots’ Fight with Tools, specifically a line in the song “We Are Winning” (see the half-full glass?) that states “resistance is victory/defeat is not an option,” the kind of lines that bring to mind one hand clapping. But Fight with Tools is a great album, the sort that I leave in my car stereo for weeks on end, even though the same compact disc player keeps spitting it back out almost every time I drive somewhere, telling me to check the CD. So what can we never lose? In this case, success, apparently. But what is success?
The Flobots’ sort of “we are the insurgency” talk is the kind that I totally support and praise, because we aren’t living in anything that you can even squint at and pretend you are looking at a utopia. I’ve begun to say in my mind that I’m not proud to be an American, because I didn’t do anything to be an American, I was born into it. And what I mean to say is that I’m happy to be in the position I’m in, but you don’t come by pride from doing nothing. And on top of that, I fully applaud the themes of America, but not the way that it has upheld those themes and values throughout time (and I’m not referring to every American value here…).
The problem with all of this rambling is that it amounts to nothing. I don’t mean to mock the band’s intentions (actually a whole lot of bands’ intentions, a whole lot of artists’ intentions), but what do we actually amount to in this line of work? It’s like whatever the percentage of bloggers who consider themselves “journalists,” which I can only grow immune to by exaggerating my awfulness. Vonnegut would agree with this sort of questioning. He lived through the answer: the quote, as I find it on Wikipedia, is:
“During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”
That’s a block-quote, above, in this Word file where I’m composing this piece, but I’m doubting that’ll transition to the blog, which is why I’m noting it here. I know that it should be indented a half-inch or something like that. I mean, I’ve been to college, even if I’m not through with it yet.
Following that digression, let’s get back to the point; Father Kurt here plays the exact opposite artistic field to the above noted optimism. And this is what you expect from perhaps the most well-known and (I would say) one of the most talented Pessimists, with a capital “P,” because that’s what he was more than an artist, really. I mean to say that I don’t know if he viewed himself as an artist. I mean to say that I don’t know what I mean to say.
[It’s probably apparent, by this time, that I return to the same set of characters frequently, which it’s maybe a good idea to apologize for. You’re probably going to have to get used to Vonnegut’s name. Bret Easton Ellis’s in a few days, if I follow the schedule I have set for myself. King, Kundera (maybe, because I’m reading Life is Elsewhere), Borges (because I’m reading Aleph and Other Stories and am still stunned by Ficciones), maybe some more names. I’m not displaying my knowledge of a select few. This is simply a way of mine, limited by “knowledge” of a select few.]
So Kurt, right, let’s get back to him. In A Man without a Country—which I think I’ve already recently alluded to (shame, shame)—he talks about how you shouldn’t pursue a career in the arts. You should create art for your own good. And reading this, I was thrown off a bit, like you will be by Vonnegut: is he joking? (A question that he makes light of where else but in AMwaC) Maybe I’m right, then, in saying something about Vonnegut’s view of himself as an “artist.” Should I say “artiste” or would I be making light of someone?
And how many stations do we plan to have on this train of thought? How many stops do I still have left? You may wish to take note of the fact that the conductor is not in full control of this vehicle, it is moving, as humbly as can be said, on its own. I’m running with as little physical exertion as I can here or rather, a King-ism, I’m unearthing an artifact.
But that boring little pause, this train has taken a twist on the tracks; I do have a point here, so I’ll muscle it back. I’ve presented two sides to a coin when it comes to the artist’s presence in the world and how it affects our future (as well as what our future will be like, regardless of art). The position of the American poet in politics is set away for further discussion, a sequel of sorts to be presented when the present writer is more awake and more willing to create a response to an article by David Biespiel in the May issue of Poetry. Right now I’m working with a coin, as I’ve said, I’m simply flipping and watching it twist in the air.
Upton Sinclair is parodied relentlessly in Chris Bachelder’s U.S.! as a writer who maybe Stephen King would say couldn’t “write worth a darn,” but he’s also presented as this social activist who has the gumption to fight for his cause over any number of lifetimes (you’re going to have to read the book to understand that one). And one of the questions you ask yourself as an artist is what you are trying to do, what you want to be able to create, and leave behind. Not saying that anything I’m making will outlive me in any real sense (although with the internet some of my writing will physically be around after I’m gone, I’m sure), I’m stating the sort of questions that delve into that big stopper of the interview: Where do you get your ideas? Not where, in this case, but Why? and Why do you choose specific ideas to follow through on?
So what do you call whatever it is that I’ve been talking about here? The subject, well, when it comes to the subject, I hope “I can never lose it.” I hope that’s true. This auteur sometimes fears the opposite. You find yourself and then you have to find how you are going to express that person. I think I’m stuck between those steps at the moment.
So what can we never lose? I made the connection here between the odd sort of optimism that one gets with the Flobots’ Fight with Tools, specifically a line in the song “We Are Winning” (see the half-full glass?) that states “resistance is victory/defeat is not an option,” the kind of lines that bring to mind one hand clapping. But Fight with Tools is a great album, the sort that I leave in my car stereo for weeks on end, even though the same compact disc player keeps spitting it back out almost every time I drive somewhere, telling me to check the CD. So what can we never lose? In this case, success, apparently. But what is success?
The Flobots’ sort of “we are the insurgency” talk is the kind that I totally support and praise, because we aren’t living in anything that you can even squint at and pretend you are looking at a utopia. I’ve begun to say in my mind that I’m not proud to be an American, because I didn’t do anything to be an American, I was born into it. And what I mean to say is that I’m happy to be in the position I’m in, but you don’t come by pride from doing nothing. And on top of that, I fully applaud the themes of America, but not the way that it has upheld those themes and values throughout time (and I’m not referring to every American value here…).
The problem with all of this rambling is that it amounts to nothing. I don’t mean to mock the band’s intentions (actually a whole lot of bands’ intentions, a whole lot of artists’ intentions), but what do we actually amount to in this line of work? It’s like whatever the percentage of bloggers who consider themselves “journalists,” which I can only grow immune to by exaggerating my awfulness. Vonnegut would agree with this sort of questioning. He lived through the answer: the quote, as I find it on Wikipedia, is:
“During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”
That’s a block-quote, above, in this Word file where I’m composing this piece, but I’m doubting that’ll transition to the blog, which is why I’m noting it here. I know that it should be indented a half-inch or something like that. I mean, I’ve been to college, even if I’m not through with it yet.
Following that digression, let’s get back to the point; Father Kurt here plays the exact opposite artistic field to the above noted optimism. And this is what you expect from perhaps the most well-known and (I would say) one of the most talented Pessimists, with a capital “P,” because that’s what he was more than an artist, really. I mean to say that I don’t know if he viewed himself as an artist. I mean to say that I don’t know what I mean to say.
[It’s probably apparent, by this time, that I return to the same set of characters frequently, which it’s maybe a good idea to apologize for. You’re probably going to have to get used to Vonnegut’s name. Bret Easton Ellis’s in a few days, if I follow the schedule I have set for myself. King, Kundera (maybe, because I’m reading Life is Elsewhere), Borges (because I’m reading Aleph and Other Stories and am still stunned by Ficciones), maybe some more names. I’m not displaying my knowledge of a select few. This is simply a way of mine, limited by “knowledge” of a select few.]
So Kurt, right, let’s get back to him. In A Man without a Country—which I think I’ve already recently alluded to (shame, shame)—he talks about how you shouldn’t pursue a career in the arts. You should create art for your own good. And reading this, I was thrown off a bit, like you will be by Vonnegut: is he joking? (A question that he makes light of where else but in AMwaC) Maybe I’m right, then, in saying something about Vonnegut’s view of himself as an “artist.” Should I say “artiste” or would I be making light of someone?
And how many stations do we plan to have on this train of thought? How many stops do I still have left? You may wish to take note of the fact that the conductor is not in full control of this vehicle, it is moving, as humbly as can be said, on its own. I’m running with as little physical exertion as I can here or rather, a King-ism, I’m unearthing an artifact.
But that boring little pause, this train has taken a twist on the tracks; I do have a point here, so I’ll muscle it back. I’ve presented two sides to a coin when it comes to the artist’s presence in the world and how it affects our future (as well as what our future will be like, regardless of art). The position of the American poet in politics is set away for further discussion, a sequel of sorts to be presented when the present writer is more awake and more willing to create a response to an article by David Biespiel in the May issue of Poetry. Right now I’m working with a coin, as I’ve said, I’m simply flipping and watching it twist in the air.
Upton Sinclair is parodied relentlessly in Chris Bachelder’s U.S.! as a writer who maybe Stephen King would say couldn’t “write worth a darn,” but he’s also presented as this social activist who has the gumption to fight for his cause over any number of lifetimes (you’re going to have to read the book to understand that one). And one of the questions you ask yourself as an artist is what you are trying to do, what you want to be able to create, and leave behind. Not saying that anything I’m making will outlive me in any real sense (although with the internet some of my writing will physically be around after I’m gone, I’m sure), I’m stating the sort of questions that delve into that big stopper of the interview: Where do you get your ideas? Not where, in this case, but Why? and Why do you choose specific ideas to follow through on?
So what do you call whatever it is that I’ve been talking about here? The subject, well, when it comes to the subject, I hope “I can never lose it.” I hope that’s true. This auteur sometimes fears the opposite. You find yourself and then you have to find how you are going to express that person. I think I’m stuck between those steps at the moment.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Leaving them scratching their heads...
It was called the “Magic Bullet,” a name that would actually be coined during the World Series, by some would say “a disgruntled” Jose Canseco, who had obviously wished to see his team play in the Fall Classic, and with good reason, for Oakland appeared to without a doubt be a better team than Boston. The Athletics had in fact won fifteen more games than the Red Sox; Minnesota running behind Oakland had a better record than the BoSox and you had to give up the fact, no matter how much of a New Englander you were, that the Sox had benefited from being in the worse division in ’88.
Of course for Boston the talk of magic being on their side was ironic; dark, dark humor, and Canseco was slammed by many for attempting to upstage the games still to be played. This was a team that knew magic and knew it well, in the form of a seventy-year-old curse that had recently struck again. Just the mention of Buckner in an article still had the same sting in the hearts of most fans; the ball moved through the legs by none other than the Babe’s ghost simply forbidding Billy from getting down to make the play. These were not fans who took to being called lucky particularly well.
And yet the name stuck, simply because the play was horrible and unbelievable, a mix that on a much smaller scale did in fact echo the Kennedy assassination. The 1988 ALCS started as was expected, with an early Canseco home run and some dominating pitching. Things wouldn’t become extraordinary until the bottom of the seventh inning when Dave Stewart pitched a ball to Jim Rice that came back rocketing off the bat. Rice would later say that he felt as if someone else was swinging the bat for him—perhaps a rationalization for all the pain he caused, perhaps not, stranger things have been accepted in the world of sports.
So this ball is absolutely scorched, comes off and Canseco is running up on it immediately, fearing it’ll get by McGwire, which it does, but it the worst way possible: it takes a bad hop and goes straight into his left foot and Mark goes down for the count, further damaging his leg on the fall. And the sparks aren’t over, as this ball keeps going. Rice pauses as he’s rounding first and the ball is scooting out to Canseco, but he has to play the game and it looks like the worst has been done. Of course, as we know, it hasn’t; the ball takes yet another bad hop and flies up on Canseco with speed it probably shouldn’t mathematically have.
José watches as the ball comes up to his face. He would later explain that somehow what he saw was a ball that was speeding up in the air, one that there was no way he could put a glove on, or even get out of the way of. The instantaneous velocity, he would say, appeared to have doubled, from the time he saw it scooting out past McGwire.
Canseco is not an overly reliable source here, though, as he has admitted, and as you most surely know, that ball smacked him so hard in the face that he fell down cold, scaring everyone on the field more than even McGwire’s topple. And with that, we had the “Magic Bullet,” which put out the Bash Brothers for the next two games. Canseco would attempt to come into game four of the series, but he was not the same man for that game.
Boston, able to pull off the win in Game One, a long blistering fourteen inning game, then gathered some steam. McGwire with some broken bones was clearly unheard from, Canseco came back to get a hit in the aforementioned game, but was basically nonexistent as well. And hence the Red Sox got called lucky forcing their way back to the World Series through a sweep of the big bad Athletics. A team that didn’t win ninety games in the regular season.
And if you are a fan of eighties baseball, a simple pop culture historian, or maybe even a physicist, you can tell that the story above isn’t what happened in 1988. In fact, the A’s, as they style their name, I hate the apostrophe myself, swept the Sox, went to the Series and lost to the Dodgers in five games. I was simply writing up an idea that I have for a story called “Stealing Home.” Vonnegut does a bit of this in A Man without a Country, but he isn’t talking about something he’s going to write, but rather something he’s failing to write. The book was called If God Were Alive Today and it would have had aliens from Mars who took over the old racial humor, in that they pee gasoline; Vonnegut jokingly says that they “only eat homeless men, women, and children of all colors,” which he’s saying is a good thing to make light of that viewpoint. It’s a very Vonnegut thing to do.
Of course Kurt, like always, he’s making jokes. I’m not, so perhaps I should place the context of my little attempted trick of history above in the light of a more accurate similarity. You find this in Stephen King’s Blockade Billy (or “Blockade Billy,” if you wish). Here, in this story/novella, King creates a team called the New Jersey Titans, and has them playing 1950s baseball. He’s twisting and tweaking the history of the major leagues. I read the beginning of this book and got a bit of a chill, because I already had my idea for my own changes to history in my story and found the King, the man who’s sold more books than anyone else, doing something along the same lines. That was enough to make the story fun for me.
From here on, if you know Red Sox history before 2004, you’ll probably be able to guess I somehow have them dropping the World Series in “Stealing Home.” And if you have a moderate knowledge of the game, you can probably figure out how I would have that happening. But what I’ve written here is backstory, even the World Series of 1988 as I’ve imagined it, even this is just the background for the story. It takes place in 1998ish, maybe later than that. Which is why I thought I could give you the tale above, which I might as well source to a journalist in my fictional universe: if it was good thank Paul Kuberg; if bad then always blame me. And sorry for boring you, if I have done that again.
Of course for Boston the talk of magic being on their side was ironic; dark, dark humor, and Canseco was slammed by many for attempting to upstage the games still to be played. This was a team that knew magic and knew it well, in the form of a seventy-year-old curse that had recently struck again. Just the mention of Buckner in an article still had the same sting in the hearts of most fans; the ball moved through the legs by none other than the Babe’s ghost simply forbidding Billy from getting down to make the play. These were not fans who took to being called lucky particularly well.
And yet the name stuck, simply because the play was horrible and unbelievable, a mix that on a much smaller scale did in fact echo the Kennedy assassination. The 1988 ALCS started as was expected, with an early Canseco home run and some dominating pitching. Things wouldn’t become extraordinary until the bottom of the seventh inning when Dave Stewart pitched a ball to Jim Rice that came back rocketing off the bat. Rice would later say that he felt as if someone else was swinging the bat for him—perhaps a rationalization for all the pain he caused, perhaps not, stranger things have been accepted in the world of sports.
So this ball is absolutely scorched, comes off and Canseco is running up on it immediately, fearing it’ll get by McGwire, which it does, but it the worst way possible: it takes a bad hop and goes straight into his left foot and Mark goes down for the count, further damaging his leg on the fall. And the sparks aren’t over, as this ball keeps going. Rice pauses as he’s rounding first and the ball is scooting out to Canseco, but he has to play the game and it looks like the worst has been done. Of course, as we know, it hasn’t; the ball takes yet another bad hop and flies up on Canseco with speed it probably shouldn’t mathematically have.
José watches as the ball comes up to his face. He would later explain that somehow what he saw was a ball that was speeding up in the air, one that there was no way he could put a glove on, or even get out of the way of. The instantaneous velocity, he would say, appeared to have doubled, from the time he saw it scooting out past McGwire.
Canseco is not an overly reliable source here, though, as he has admitted, and as you most surely know, that ball smacked him so hard in the face that he fell down cold, scaring everyone on the field more than even McGwire’s topple. And with that, we had the “Magic Bullet,” which put out the Bash Brothers for the next two games. Canseco would attempt to come into game four of the series, but he was not the same man for that game.
Boston, able to pull off the win in Game One, a long blistering fourteen inning game, then gathered some steam. McGwire with some broken bones was clearly unheard from, Canseco came back to get a hit in the aforementioned game, but was basically nonexistent as well. And hence the Red Sox got called lucky forcing their way back to the World Series through a sweep of the big bad Athletics. A team that didn’t win ninety games in the regular season.
And if you are a fan of eighties baseball, a simple pop culture historian, or maybe even a physicist, you can tell that the story above isn’t what happened in 1988. In fact, the A’s, as they style their name, I hate the apostrophe myself, swept the Sox, went to the Series and lost to the Dodgers in five games. I was simply writing up an idea that I have for a story called “Stealing Home.” Vonnegut does a bit of this in A Man without a Country, but he isn’t talking about something he’s going to write, but rather something he’s failing to write. The book was called If God Were Alive Today and it would have had aliens from Mars who took over the old racial humor, in that they pee gasoline; Vonnegut jokingly says that they “only eat homeless men, women, and children of all colors,” which he’s saying is a good thing to make light of that viewpoint. It’s a very Vonnegut thing to do.
Of course Kurt, like always, he’s making jokes. I’m not, so perhaps I should place the context of my little attempted trick of history above in the light of a more accurate similarity. You find this in Stephen King’s Blockade Billy (or “Blockade Billy,” if you wish). Here, in this story/novella, King creates a team called the New Jersey Titans, and has them playing 1950s baseball. He’s twisting and tweaking the history of the major leagues. I read the beginning of this book and got a bit of a chill, because I already had my idea for my own changes to history in my story and found the King, the man who’s sold more books than anyone else, doing something along the same lines. That was enough to make the story fun for me.
From here on, if you know Red Sox history before 2004, you’ll probably be able to guess I somehow have them dropping the World Series in “Stealing Home.” And if you have a moderate knowledge of the game, you can probably figure out how I would have that happening. But what I’ve written here is backstory, even the World Series of 1988 as I’ve imagined it, even this is just the background for the story. It takes place in 1998ish, maybe later than that. Which is why I thought I could give you the tale above, which I might as well source to a journalist in my fictional universe: if it was good thank Paul Kuberg; if bad then always blame me. And sorry for boring you, if I have done that again.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
"All these novels unwritten..."
I’ve written something like this before, I’ll admit, and it had virtually the same title, and I’m going to use it as a guide here, but since I wrote it out, a sort of outline on dead-ended plots, I’ve come up with some new ideas, and these are less tried and killed, but rather more insubstantial and uncertain, like a pitcher who does well in college, but has yet to show any big league talent.
When the last Harry Potter book came out, Rowling read the first two chapters at a sort of opening party for the book…I think it was the first two chapters. My father said that he’d rather she just sort of said, “Okay, here’s how the story goes…” and spewed on about it for a while, which I thought was a preposterous idea then and still think of as a preposterous idea now, but only because of situation. This was a book that was in a series, we knew the theme of it already, the style was nothing new. Now if it was a book she hadn’t finished writing yet or one that was just getting ready to be published, but was a stand alone kind of thing, then it would make more sense.
Not that what I’m doing here makes any sort sense.
“A papier-mâché Mephistopheles”
This is the novel that I’m writing in my head right now. It’s a female narrator and I’m looking at unlikely sources for ideas on how I can approach the concept of male writer writing in female voice—Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone, which has just a brilliant title; so far the first book of Lee Goldberg’s Monk series, original novels based on the characters of the USA show that’s now entering its last season, oddly enough, this book, Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse, has been since adapted into an episode of the show, presenting the sort of continuity issues that I find quite interesting; The Spy Who Loved Me, a book I haven’t gotten yet, Fleming’s only first person Bond novel. The plot of the story concerns a mid-2020s school reunion that reintroduces our heroine with the stock character “one who got away,” which I’ve been developing in my mind as some sort of self-pitying semi-successful novelist, autobiographical, only a better man than I am in virtually all ways. The first part of the story I see as the standard romantic comedy, with our narrator watching the now fifteen to twenty year old films The Holiday and Music and Lyrics among others, actually imagining herself attempting to stop her love from getting married, sort of a smart chick flick, as our narrator, her name being Samantha McGee, I believe (the writer named maybe something along the lines of Brad…something, I don’t know…maybe even three names), evaluating her life as it goes through all the little flutters and flights of such films. Then, after this, I’d liked to move onto a new genre, a sort of novel of ideas, about the two of them teaching each other their contrasting views of the world, learning new things, changing their minds. The backdrop of the last section is the presidential election of 2028, whose leading candidates present our couple with a dilemma, since Sam’s family is related by blood, however murkily, to one candidate, who bares their last name, but she is considering voting the other way. An idea I have, for her mother to be coming out of prison in the first section, for gauging how their relationship is changing, is also evaluated here. And then with a final concluding story that is vastly formless in my mind, but hopefully brings us into a new genre again, something, maybe ten to fifteen years later, and—an idea that occurs to me as I type—that could be built our protagonists looking forward, observing, and thinking about the effect of some future event along the lines of ‘69’s moon landing. Think of it as skiffy written with the style of yesteryear, our characters are older, and think differently, perhaps some juxtaposing sentences thrown in, like the carbon copies that Easton Ellis does in Less Than Zero and American Psycho.
“A Working Class Hero”
An epistolary novel between old friends who have grown out of touch; one is running for president, the other is only trying to make ends meet. A sort of rolling narrative might form, but I’d like to keep it in letters…I don’t think I’ll write this book until after I’ve read Dracula and The Gum Thief, and hopefully I’ll get more ideas about it from there. Eventually, the book would expand, and we’d get more letters written by different people to characters we already know, probably, that’s the idea anyway, when approaching an entire book as fragmentary as one made of letters, I think you can fall to breaking style quite quickly. The last story/letter/whatever would probably end on someone saying they were listening to the John Lennon song the other day and then slowly, mid sentence, our book ends. Maybe it starts out the same way, just half of a letter fragment, to we don’t know, from who knows where. And maybe I’d incorporate little articles from Paul Kuberg, my little fictional journalist into this one. Also, now that I think about it, in “paper-thin” the short hand I’d give to the book listed above (the one for this one would be “hero” or “working” probably depending on what I’m talking about exactly), we’d have a bit of this too, since our narrator would read from the books of the writer, Brad Something. I don’t know how well I could write an entire epistolary novel, though, this seems like something that could truly leak through my hands quickly and surely.
“roadkill”
This one is the most haphazard. I have the title, I have the immediate idea and then it goes haywire. The narrator might be a writer. He’s disconnected from his father, perhaps knows that his father had an affair, but never told his mother, perhaps not. Mother and wife both die in a car crash. What I want to stir up with the title is the same sense of “ick” that I got from first reading about Bag of Bones, and it being about a writer and his dead wife. Now, in King’s book, the bag of bones has nothing to do with his wife, is actually continuously referenced as all even the best characters can be. In mine, roadkill is meant to mean, sickeningly, the narrators lost wife and mother, and perhaps he would characterize their bodies as that in the book at some point. I want to write a book where our narrator begins to become unreliable, his writing goes crazy, and perhaps he becomes haunted by ghosts of his family that the narrative leaves to you to decide if they are real or not. And that’s probably all I’m willing to write about this one in the stone of the internet at the moment.
“All these novels unwritten…”
A placeholder title—This would be a book about a writer named Mike (I’ve started a few of the stories and figured that much out), somewhat my form of Mike Noonan, the main character of Bag of Bones, more so just a name I’ve picked, since I consider myself particularly bad at coming up with character names. The novel would actually be more of a short story collection with perhaps some framing involved, but I’m not too sure on that part. What it would consist of are these little vignettes that vary in style and more so in genre, since I do want to make it all in somewhat the same voice. These would be purposely in haphazard chronological order, and perhaps the full extent of an idea of come up with called “hiding a novel,” which I’m sure is not entirely new and created by me, is probably not even coined this for the first time by me, but is an interest of mine lately. The idea would be that the novel—defined somewhat as a singular work of length that is sometimes broken up into chapters and the like, but is still over all unified by more than just a common characters or setting—calling anything that doesn’t fit this as something akin to the concept album of books, rather than the rock opera, which would be the novel. The lead story to this would be called “The Ghost Story,” and although the rest would probably not have such vague, weak names, they probably all would start in the word “The,” linking them, as these are the specific work in this book, that represents the story with that title. “The Ghost Story” itself, which I’ve started, has a bit of a frame around a campfire and the campers look to Mike for a story, since he’s the novelist with the group. I think this would be a book like Bag of Bones or Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park, not in comparison as to skill, obviously, but as to theme, since neither of those are truly about plot, but more about writing than anything else. My own pseudo-writing-memoir, if I had the talent to write it as such, which I might not. Another story which I’ve started would be “The Great Novel Race,” and it might be a closer to the collection or just one somewhere stuck in the middle, slightly closer to the back. This story would take a look at writing that mirrors Junot Diaz’s speaker, Yunior, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, since there would be some distance between Mike and his subjects who are involved in, obviously, a race to finish writing novels. I would love to be able to capture the sort of commentary on writing that Chabon gets in Wonder Boys here. And then there would probably be at least half a dozen other stories there, each perhaps averaging thirty pages, with maybe thirty pages of frame spliced in.
“A Light in the Dark”
This would be a third person story, one I’ve written once, when I was in fifth grade, but one that derived into an alien invasion story. This, to me, is still a good title for it. Story about Jack Kraloni who’s a detective suffering black-outs and a series of killings going on, and Jack starts to wonder if someone isn’t doing them in his body while he’s decommissioned. Obviously written better than that was. Guest stars would be basically every character I’ve ever written with the thought of them being in more than one story.
And I call this “All these novels unwritten…” with a touch of my general pessimism, since I’ve never written a satisfactory novel, these will probably be forever never written.
8:04PM Wed 8/12/09
Def: 0.5pp
When the last Harry Potter book came out, Rowling read the first two chapters at a sort of opening party for the book…I think it was the first two chapters. My father said that he’d rather she just sort of said, “Okay, here’s how the story goes…” and spewed on about it for a while, which I thought was a preposterous idea then and still think of as a preposterous idea now, but only because of situation. This was a book that was in a series, we knew the theme of it already, the style was nothing new. Now if it was a book she hadn’t finished writing yet or one that was just getting ready to be published, but was a stand alone kind of thing, then it would make more sense.
Not that what I’m doing here makes any sort sense.
“A papier-mâché Mephistopheles”
This is the novel that I’m writing in my head right now. It’s a female narrator and I’m looking at unlikely sources for ideas on how I can approach the concept of male writer writing in female voice—Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone, which has just a brilliant title; so far the first book of Lee Goldberg’s Monk series, original novels based on the characters of the USA show that’s now entering its last season, oddly enough, this book, Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse, has been since adapted into an episode of the show, presenting the sort of continuity issues that I find quite interesting; The Spy Who Loved Me, a book I haven’t gotten yet, Fleming’s only first person Bond novel. The plot of the story concerns a mid-2020s school reunion that reintroduces our heroine with the stock character “one who got away,” which I’ve been developing in my mind as some sort of self-pitying semi-successful novelist, autobiographical, only a better man than I am in virtually all ways. The first part of the story I see as the standard romantic comedy, with our narrator watching the now fifteen to twenty year old films The Holiday and Music and Lyrics among others, actually imagining herself attempting to stop her love from getting married, sort of a smart chick flick, as our narrator, her name being Samantha McGee, I believe (the writer named maybe something along the lines of Brad…something, I don’t know…maybe even three names), evaluating her life as it goes through all the little flutters and flights of such films. Then, after this, I’d liked to move onto a new genre, a sort of novel of ideas, about the two of them teaching each other their contrasting views of the world, learning new things, changing their minds. The backdrop of the last section is the presidential election of 2028, whose leading candidates present our couple with a dilemma, since Sam’s family is related by blood, however murkily, to one candidate, who bares their last name, but she is considering voting the other way. An idea I have, for her mother to be coming out of prison in the first section, for gauging how their relationship is changing, is also evaluated here. And then with a final concluding story that is vastly formless in my mind, but hopefully brings us into a new genre again, something, maybe ten to fifteen years later, and—an idea that occurs to me as I type—that could be built our protagonists looking forward, observing, and thinking about the effect of some future event along the lines of ‘69’s moon landing. Think of it as skiffy written with the style of yesteryear, our characters are older, and think differently, perhaps some juxtaposing sentences thrown in, like the carbon copies that Easton Ellis does in Less Than Zero and American Psycho.
“A Working Class Hero”
An epistolary novel between old friends who have grown out of touch; one is running for president, the other is only trying to make ends meet. A sort of rolling narrative might form, but I’d like to keep it in letters…I don’t think I’ll write this book until after I’ve read Dracula and The Gum Thief, and hopefully I’ll get more ideas about it from there. Eventually, the book would expand, and we’d get more letters written by different people to characters we already know, probably, that’s the idea anyway, when approaching an entire book as fragmentary as one made of letters, I think you can fall to breaking style quite quickly. The last story/letter/whatever would probably end on someone saying they were listening to the John Lennon song the other day and then slowly, mid sentence, our book ends. Maybe it starts out the same way, just half of a letter fragment, to we don’t know, from who knows where. And maybe I’d incorporate little articles from Paul Kuberg, my little fictional journalist into this one. Also, now that I think about it, in “paper-thin” the short hand I’d give to the book listed above (the one for this one would be “hero” or “working” probably depending on what I’m talking about exactly), we’d have a bit of this too, since our narrator would read from the books of the writer, Brad Something. I don’t know how well I could write an entire epistolary novel, though, this seems like something that could truly leak through my hands quickly and surely.
“roadkill”
This one is the most haphazard. I have the title, I have the immediate idea and then it goes haywire. The narrator might be a writer. He’s disconnected from his father, perhaps knows that his father had an affair, but never told his mother, perhaps not. Mother and wife both die in a car crash. What I want to stir up with the title is the same sense of “ick” that I got from first reading about Bag of Bones, and it being about a writer and his dead wife. Now, in King’s book, the bag of bones has nothing to do with his wife, is actually continuously referenced as all even the best characters can be. In mine, roadkill is meant to mean, sickeningly, the narrators lost wife and mother, and perhaps he would characterize their bodies as that in the book at some point. I want to write a book where our narrator begins to become unreliable, his writing goes crazy, and perhaps he becomes haunted by ghosts of his family that the narrative leaves to you to decide if they are real or not. And that’s probably all I’m willing to write about this one in the stone of the internet at the moment.
“All these novels unwritten…”
A placeholder title—This would be a book about a writer named Mike (I’ve started a few of the stories and figured that much out), somewhat my form of Mike Noonan, the main character of Bag of Bones, more so just a name I’ve picked, since I consider myself particularly bad at coming up with character names. The novel would actually be more of a short story collection with perhaps some framing involved, but I’m not too sure on that part. What it would consist of are these little vignettes that vary in style and more so in genre, since I do want to make it all in somewhat the same voice. These would be purposely in haphazard chronological order, and perhaps the full extent of an idea of come up with called “hiding a novel,” which I’m sure is not entirely new and created by me, is probably not even coined this for the first time by me, but is an interest of mine lately. The idea would be that the novel—defined somewhat as a singular work of length that is sometimes broken up into chapters and the like, but is still over all unified by more than just a common characters or setting—calling anything that doesn’t fit this as something akin to the concept album of books, rather than the rock opera, which would be the novel. The lead story to this would be called “The Ghost Story,” and although the rest would probably not have such vague, weak names, they probably all would start in the word “The,” linking them, as these are the specific work in this book, that represents the story with that title. “The Ghost Story” itself, which I’ve started, has a bit of a frame around a campfire and the campers look to Mike for a story, since he’s the novelist with the group. I think this would be a book like Bag of Bones or Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park, not in comparison as to skill, obviously, but as to theme, since neither of those are truly about plot, but more about writing than anything else. My own pseudo-writing-memoir, if I had the talent to write it as such, which I might not. Another story which I’ve started would be “The Great Novel Race,” and it might be a closer to the collection or just one somewhere stuck in the middle, slightly closer to the back. This story would take a look at writing that mirrors Junot Diaz’s speaker, Yunior, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, since there would be some distance between Mike and his subjects who are involved in, obviously, a race to finish writing novels. I would love to be able to capture the sort of commentary on writing that Chabon gets in Wonder Boys here. And then there would probably be at least half a dozen other stories there, each perhaps averaging thirty pages, with maybe thirty pages of frame spliced in.
“A Light in the Dark”
This would be a third person story, one I’ve written once, when I was in fifth grade, but one that derived into an alien invasion story. This, to me, is still a good title for it. Story about Jack Kraloni who’s a detective suffering black-outs and a series of killings going on, and Jack starts to wonder if someone isn’t doing them in his body while he’s decommissioned. Obviously written better than that was. Guest stars would be basically every character I’ve ever written with the thought of them being in more than one story.
And I call this “All these novels unwritten…” with a touch of my general pessimism, since I’ve never written a satisfactory novel, these will probably be forever never written.
8:04PM Wed 8/12/09
Def: 0.5pp
Friday, August 7, 2009
You can force it but it will not come...
is the opening line to "Planet Telex," and no matter what I've already said on this blog about writing no matter whether you can or not, forcing fiction is a very hard thing for me to do without ideas. I intend to do something of a "Fiction Friday," at least for the month. I did get an idea on Friday for a story to write, but as Warren Ellis once said, writing is something that can take a while. His actual quote was something along the lines of staring at a "project" (I think that was the word) from the 2PM to 2AM (as I've already said, I think that was the quote, so please don't quote me quoting him...) I plan on editing in my fiction piece for Friday once it's done and hopefully I can get a little bit ahead on this thing and be able to write these things to post live at the time I've stated. Hopefully. I've already somewhat amazed myself here and felt like I was writing quite badly (and sometimes at the same time), so we'll see. Rays won tonight/last night/Saturday in Seattle. I liked watching the Seattle games last year, perhaps the only series I can distinctly remember watching, due to the late start times. So, until I update here with a story, I guess that's about it. See I would try to run it out right now, but I think I should do today's/yesterday's/(from the perspective of the last finished piece) tomorrow's little rant, which I'm thinking is going to be about throwing baseballs at batters.
And on that matter I think I'll note that I know a lot of my ... metaphors? ... tangents, I guess, are actually these weird little ruts I get into, like always quoting from the same person or referencing baseball (which I would right now blame on the fact that it is the only major American team sport to be in season), and I guess I apologize for that. And out--
1:48AM EST 8/09/09
LEVERAGE [heh heh, the title of the show I'm listening to as I stare at the computer while typing this]
I am spreading the peanut butter out on your sandwich for today, something I never foresaw for myself, and something that might continue now for some time. I know that when I was a little girl going to school, I never really knew where my lunches were coming from. This was early on, maybe the first three years of classes, and I don’t really recall most of my thoughts back then, they’ve become as insubstantial as ghosts or dreams, but I’ve talked to Martin about what we expect from your first day. Neither of us could really say anything authoritatively about today’s schools, shucks, we’ve spent how many hours just seeing where you should head off to kindergarten and so our conversation soon derived into stories of our own first few years’ worth of school experience. It wouldn’t be the first time that Martin and I have talked about times like this—I’m sure if you ever read this that you’ll know what it’s like to have a spouse, sometimes you just assume you know everything about a person, even though you have nothing to back up this belief. I think that conversation helped to break this assumption in ourselves, became somewhat a turning point in our marriage. Of course I don’t know anything about the future right now…I probably shouldn’t predict. And, right, back to the fragment I’ve left, Martin and I had talked about our childhoods before, but only rarely and brokenly, we both came from…not bad homes, but places we wanted to leave behind. I would hope that although you may be able to understand this thought, that, if you do read this, you wouldn’t have experienced the same as us, but sometimes I fear that our parents had similar wishes. Sometimes I think that are no bad people in the world, there are only mistakes, misunderstandings, and that bloody thing called mortality, and this scares me as well. But right now I’d assume you don’t think anything can scare me, scare us, Martin and I, your daddy and mum, your godly parents. I haven’t really put an enormous amount of studying into this whole thing, I don’t know when the average child learns that his (or her as it could’ve been if your father’s genes went differently) parents aren’t infallible. I’m deep in these thoughts when I reach in the refrigerator for the jelly.
Ordinarily my daydreams are not spawned by such direct thought processes as these, but the glass I pull from the fridge makes me remember how I first saw your father, probably something like you see the man that greets you whenever he can, whenever his schedule permits. I surely thought he was a man who could not make any mistakes. I surely thought he was the perfect gentleman, but not the one for me.
We were out at the beach for the weekend before school started up again in the fall, I was going to be a senior, can you believe it?, I would whisper to myself time and time again, because, I for one, could not believe it. I still felt like the freshman I’d been three years before. Still gawky, still unnoticeable to the majority of students, the sort of character in a novel that gets named once every hundred pages for the readers to say in their heads, who?
Still, somehow, I’d gotten myself amongst a group of kids for the summer that year, we’d all worked together at the drive-in, and we were all happy to be rid of our jobs for the time being. It was a Sunday, I remember that because I’d skipped church, knowing my mother wouldn’t be happy about it, but also knowing that since I’d gotten my own car, there was very little chance of a terrible reaction from the woman. I’d driven down with two girls, Jenny and Lacy weren’t their names, but in the years past, I can only really recall their likenesses, names just won’t come, and I must’ve left my yearbooks behind in one of the house I’ve moved out of in the years since.
Lacy’s brother was named Spencer and we always called him a square, but I think we knew this was a misnomer, since we were the ones who never really got high, tried to skirt that ecosystem as we jogged through adolescence, or at least I did. It occurs to me now how much of what I remember is colored by who I am now, and so much of what I characterize as the three of us, a tight little trio for one summer, maybe even a little ways into September. Well, Spencer’s girlfriend used to be with your father, and we all knew this from junior, when I’d played a part in spreading a rumor, that she would spread them for any man, much like the peanut butter I just spread on this bread.
The first time I’d ever been introduced to your father, I was walking away from my friends, up the beach, my eyes on the surf, thinking about all the time I’d wasted idling, doing absolutely nothing, and how little time I could have left. Your…great-uncle…I guess, Nathan, he’d just passed at the age of forty, in a car accident, and automobiles were still a new thing to me then, something both dangerous and exciting, deadly, but soon enough I couldn’t get through life without a car. When I look over it now, it was like my thought process was what summed him up from all the inequalities that had formed my relationships with boys, with men as they were becoming ever so quickly, in those years.
He was sitting on a rock and looking out at the sun as if he’d stared at since it had come up and planned to see it down. I stopped and looked to him and he said, “You’re Doris, aren’t you?” which I guess somewhat floored me, that someone like him—like anyone really, since he didn’t have extreme social status or anything, but was someone I’d never spoken to—could know my name, and I momentarily lost my train of thought, which he took for lack of recognition. “I’m Martin,” he said, and hopped down from the rock to take my hand. “I used to be Natalie’s boyfriend, I guess maybe we never directly met…?” I think I smiled dumbly and he continued, “If you were planning on walking down the rest of the way, I’d have to caution you to turn around. This is jellyfish country and they can sting out water too, the sand up there is peppered with them and here you are, walking off alone and barefoot.” I looked down at my feet as if I was surprised to find them naked, mumbled a thank you and turned around.
As I walked off, he called my name again and I turned around. “Hey, Doris, look,” he started, looking me in the face again, searching for my eyes behind sunglasses I’d just bought the week before, “it must be weird to see me here…I’d assume you came with your friend…whatsername, Lacy? And her brother’s here. I…Natalie calls me and invites me out here just to show me how much of a bitch she is. First person I see here is her new man, Spencer without Fear and I started running back here to get away. Climbed yonder cliff,” here he pointed off to the point that I think we both knew was the highest in town and also the local version of lover’s lane. I wondered vaguely if he’d ever taken Natalie up there, or if Spencer had ever been there, before I caught myself and looked back at him. “And then I chickened out and came back here and sat this here rock.”
When he’d finished with that, he scooted off the level place where he’d been and left what was effectively a seat for me to sit in. He took a few more steps and picked a rock up off the boulder and tossed it into the water. As I sat down I watched it skip in the water once, twice, three times, and then I looked into the water where it went in and I saw a jellyfish.
Now, opening my eyes, I’d squeezed them shut in concentration, I look down at the jelly side of your sandwich as an almost afterimage of that water jelly in my past. And as for how your father and I became anything more than that one afternoon’s worth of acquaintances, well, Fred, I think you’ll have to ask him about any of that.
Heh, you know what the funny thing is? Other than seeing what I thought was one in the water, I have no more evidence that anything Martin said to me that day—about jellyfish and about anything else—was even close to true. Sometimes life is like that, I think. Truth is perhaps the most elusive thing there ever was.
11:20PM EST Wed 8/12/09 Back on track, seriously?!
And on that matter I think I'll note that I know a lot of my ... metaphors? ... tangents, I guess, are actually these weird little ruts I get into, like always quoting from the same person or referencing baseball (which I would right now blame on the fact that it is the only major American team sport to be in season), and I guess I apologize for that. And out--
1:48AM EST 8/09/09
LEVERAGE [heh heh, the title of the show I'm listening to as I stare at the computer while typing this]
I am spreading the peanut butter out on your sandwich for today, something I never foresaw for myself, and something that might continue now for some time. I know that when I was a little girl going to school, I never really knew where my lunches were coming from. This was early on, maybe the first three years of classes, and I don’t really recall most of my thoughts back then, they’ve become as insubstantial as ghosts or dreams, but I’ve talked to Martin about what we expect from your first day. Neither of us could really say anything authoritatively about today’s schools, shucks, we’ve spent how many hours just seeing where you should head off to kindergarten and so our conversation soon derived into stories of our own first few years’ worth of school experience. It wouldn’t be the first time that Martin and I have talked about times like this—I’m sure if you ever read this that you’ll know what it’s like to have a spouse, sometimes you just assume you know everything about a person, even though you have nothing to back up this belief. I think that conversation helped to break this assumption in ourselves, became somewhat a turning point in our marriage. Of course I don’t know anything about the future right now…I probably shouldn’t predict. And, right, back to the fragment I’ve left, Martin and I had talked about our childhoods before, but only rarely and brokenly, we both came from…not bad homes, but places we wanted to leave behind. I would hope that although you may be able to understand this thought, that, if you do read this, you wouldn’t have experienced the same as us, but sometimes I fear that our parents had similar wishes. Sometimes I think that are no bad people in the world, there are only mistakes, misunderstandings, and that bloody thing called mortality, and this scares me as well. But right now I’d assume you don’t think anything can scare me, scare us, Martin and I, your daddy and mum, your godly parents. I haven’t really put an enormous amount of studying into this whole thing, I don’t know when the average child learns that his (or her as it could’ve been if your father’s genes went differently) parents aren’t infallible. I’m deep in these thoughts when I reach in the refrigerator for the jelly.
Ordinarily my daydreams are not spawned by such direct thought processes as these, but the glass I pull from the fridge makes me remember how I first saw your father, probably something like you see the man that greets you whenever he can, whenever his schedule permits. I surely thought he was a man who could not make any mistakes. I surely thought he was the perfect gentleman, but not the one for me.
We were out at the beach for the weekend before school started up again in the fall, I was going to be a senior, can you believe it?, I would whisper to myself time and time again, because, I for one, could not believe it. I still felt like the freshman I’d been three years before. Still gawky, still unnoticeable to the majority of students, the sort of character in a novel that gets named once every hundred pages for the readers to say in their heads, who?
Still, somehow, I’d gotten myself amongst a group of kids for the summer that year, we’d all worked together at the drive-in, and we were all happy to be rid of our jobs for the time being. It was a Sunday, I remember that because I’d skipped church, knowing my mother wouldn’t be happy about it, but also knowing that since I’d gotten my own car, there was very little chance of a terrible reaction from the woman. I’d driven down with two girls, Jenny and Lacy weren’t their names, but in the years past, I can only really recall their likenesses, names just won’t come, and I must’ve left my yearbooks behind in one of the house I’ve moved out of in the years since.
Lacy’s brother was named Spencer and we always called him a square, but I think we knew this was a misnomer, since we were the ones who never really got high, tried to skirt that ecosystem as we jogged through adolescence, or at least I did. It occurs to me now how much of what I remember is colored by who I am now, and so much of what I characterize as the three of us, a tight little trio for one summer, maybe even a little ways into September. Well, Spencer’s girlfriend used to be with your father, and we all knew this from junior, when I’d played a part in spreading a rumor, that she would spread them for any man, much like the peanut butter I just spread on this bread.
The first time I’d ever been introduced to your father, I was walking away from my friends, up the beach, my eyes on the surf, thinking about all the time I’d wasted idling, doing absolutely nothing, and how little time I could have left. Your…great-uncle…I guess, Nathan, he’d just passed at the age of forty, in a car accident, and automobiles were still a new thing to me then, something both dangerous and exciting, deadly, but soon enough I couldn’t get through life without a car. When I look over it now, it was like my thought process was what summed him up from all the inequalities that had formed my relationships with boys, with men as they were becoming ever so quickly, in those years.
He was sitting on a rock and looking out at the sun as if he’d stared at since it had come up and planned to see it down. I stopped and looked to him and he said, “You’re Doris, aren’t you?” which I guess somewhat floored me, that someone like him—like anyone really, since he didn’t have extreme social status or anything, but was someone I’d never spoken to—could know my name, and I momentarily lost my train of thought, which he took for lack of recognition. “I’m Martin,” he said, and hopped down from the rock to take my hand. “I used to be Natalie’s boyfriend, I guess maybe we never directly met…?” I think I smiled dumbly and he continued, “If you were planning on walking down the rest of the way, I’d have to caution you to turn around. This is jellyfish country and they can sting out water too, the sand up there is peppered with them and here you are, walking off alone and barefoot.” I looked down at my feet as if I was surprised to find them naked, mumbled a thank you and turned around.
As I walked off, he called my name again and I turned around. “Hey, Doris, look,” he started, looking me in the face again, searching for my eyes behind sunglasses I’d just bought the week before, “it must be weird to see me here…I’d assume you came with your friend…whatsername, Lacy? And her brother’s here. I…Natalie calls me and invites me out here just to show me how much of a bitch she is. First person I see here is her new man, Spencer without Fear and I started running back here to get away. Climbed yonder cliff,” here he pointed off to the point that I think we both knew was the highest in town and also the local version of lover’s lane. I wondered vaguely if he’d ever taken Natalie up there, or if Spencer had ever been there, before I caught myself and looked back at him. “And then I chickened out and came back here and sat this here rock.”
When he’d finished with that, he scooted off the level place where he’d been and left what was effectively a seat for me to sit in. He took a few more steps and picked a rock up off the boulder and tossed it into the water. As I sat down I watched it skip in the water once, twice, three times, and then I looked into the water where it went in and I saw a jellyfish.
Now, opening my eyes, I’d squeezed them shut in concentration, I look down at the jelly side of your sandwich as an almost afterimage of that water jelly in my past. And as for how your father and I became anything more than that one afternoon’s worth of acquaintances, well, Fred, I think you’ll have to ask him about any of that.
Heh, you know what the funny thing is? Other than seeing what I thought was one in the water, I have no more evidence that anything Martin said to me that day—about jellyfish and about anything else—was even close to true. Sometimes life is like that, I think. Truth is perhaps the most elusive thing there ever was.
11:20PM EST Wed 8/12/09 Back on track, seriously?!
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
"Smash my head to make it spin"
Starting it off with a title taken from “Thrashing Days” by The Notwist, what might be apparent from the tag I’ve put on today’s post is that I see this one as little snippets, clips, like a news update, bite-sized little morsels. Think of each new title as a headline or better yet, as the cards they show before the scenes in episodes of Frasier.
“Print as the Phoenix”
There’s been much debate about how much longer paper publishing is going to be able to hold on and not enough insight into which way it is really heading. We are not approaching so much an end to books, but a specialization of them. As Jay Leno talks about how electric cars will allow gasoline vehicles to become niche items, the same is going to grow true for paper. When it comes down to it, people are going to have to want to read books, and not screens that replicate books to near exactness (and believe me, they aren’t that far away from getting there).
The great thing about paper, though, is its versatility. The free newspaper is generally well received and considered unmenacing, has an approval rating leaps and bounds above junk email. Warren Ellis has an idea of a company that takes a set number of blogs that you like, collects a word count or an entry count, page count, whatever would work best in this case, and spits you out a paper every now and then. I’m not sure how developed his idea is, and I don’t have his blog post handy at the moment (I know, I know, I’m playing this one close to the chest), so I guess I’ll just have to assume that I’m adding to his thoughts, but if not, his idea is brilliant enough in its own to be spread. How I would tweak this is through mail delivery and ad space. Suddenly you have regionalized ads floating around, perhaps even better than TV. You have a publishing company making a newspaper out of individual blogs that all they have to do is get a minor profile on, and I would expect advertisers to go wild. The best kind of commercial is the one that’s selling something the customer is likely to want, doncha know?
So I’m also thinking, how hard would it be to take this and streamline it a little bit, make the paper something you just write off, send out to everyone in a certain area, perhaps collect profile posts of different bloggers, the like, would this sort of thing have a market? And if so, suddenly money and advertising can come from all sides. Bloggers hoping to boost their credit to companies and thus sell more ad space could pay this company to publish them and then you have the same process. Or you can piggyback this into the first idea; add a new blogger to each copy sent to a perspective reader, sort of like TiVo suggesting new shows I might like.
The reason that the newspaper is going out of style definitely has nothing to do with the newsprint itself, but with the fact that television news and the internet make your regular newspaper obsolete. But think about a collection of different people’s minds, made manifest in your hands to open and read their thoughts. And whether or not this is a group that you have chosen for yourself, I seriously doubt that there’s anyway that clicking between tabs is going to be seen as a cooler thing than just turning pages.
“Baseball as the Human Sport”
In Futurama, of course, if I remember correctly, there is some humor poked at baseball’s history. As America’s pastime, it is easy to foresee that most of the problems that the country might face would be mirrored in its ballgame, its relaxing night on the couch with a beer and the son watching the country stage little city versus city or league versus league rivalries. From 9/11’s delaying the season into October (its notorious play off month) and pushing the World Series into November, baseball and the country have sure come a long way. But when we go back, we have a time when baseball would actually make the first move, like watching your mirror reflection part your hair a different way, before you begin to do so yourself. What I am talking about is the story of Jackie Robinson, which is one I’ll assume you know moderately well. Although conditions were not as they should’ve been, baseball did take steps towards integration before the country, as a whole, under Johnson, would begin to resolve this growing problem of second-class citizenry. Tracing back from number 42’s unprecedented career, we are led to the silver lining of baseball’s segregation: the Negro Leagues. Supplying a new think tank on baseball and a new experimentation process, these independent baseball leagues would help form some of today’s endearing concepts in the majors—fan voting in the All-Star Game, inter-league play, etc. And it is this era that Futurama parodies. Bender is of course a fan of the robot blernsball (an evolved form of baseball played in the 3000s) players who are not allowed to play in the big leagues. This paragraph thus serves as a caution that I do not mean to point out that baseball is a sport without robots with the title to this section.
What I do mean to portray here is that baseball is a sport that will always come down to someone calling the game. Replays should not ever be allowed outside of their current use in home run calls, and balls and strikes should vary from umpire to umpire. This is an idea that baseball itself even upholds in its uneven ball parks, that once they stretch past the infield diamond, can become completely different affairs, perhaps built to suit particular stars of the team playing there at the time or only incidentally brought up to cause certain peculiarities and differences. From turf to grass, even, baseball fields have their own characteristics, like people in their own ways. From the baggie in right field of the Metrodome to Tal’s Hill in deep center of Minute Maid Park in Houston, baseball presents its venues as each a little different, each needing a little time to get used to.
And that’s really what makes the game what it is. Because everything is a little bit different, a little bit more left to chance, in a baseball game. And with 162 games per team per year for the regular season, each game is like meeting someone new.
“My Novel as a Movie Franchise”
The book that I have mainly in my head right now is growing in its own way, little bits of plot, tiny shards of knowledge forming in my mind that will hopefully be able to be pieced back together into a worthwhile mirror once again at the end of the day. It’s an odd thing, because I think I’m so used to short stories, things that have beginnings, middles, and ends, whereas a book can obviously have those as well, but the middle generally becomes its own set of crests and troughs, that are, in their own right, new beginnings, and new ends.
What is interesting to me at the moment is how I’ve been basing all my stories in the same sort of universe for a while now, basically our own, but with a hazy illustrator who leaves key differences here and there, as well as major ones that could in themselves be written of in stories (one of which I have begun writing), and now this book has somewhat spiraled forward and planted itself into this world that I had already begun to create.
This is what Tolkien did, definitely, and what Alan Moore suggests. Sort of like starting with the setting of a picture before you paint any people in it. And, even though this isn’t generally the way I write things, I like the way my mind is thinking right now.
The original Casino Royale film was actually a satirical James Bond film in 1967, and even though this film may not have been greatly well received, I think it does go somewhere we rarely see, which is a film franchise that not only switches leads or minor characters or canon, but actually genre as well. My novel I see as something along the same lines as this. Mayhap in three parts, the first presenting one genre and then perhaps even an interlude allowing time for our actors to get backstage to change their clothes into the costumes for the next part, making sure that this time they have the right mask. And even if that might seem more like a play than a movie to you, I just say that the way I see my novel now is like waves lapping the beach, one comes in and has a certain majesty to it, something that can’t be truly replicated, and then the next comes down on us, and no matter if the water looks exactly the same in either image, both waves hit in completely different styles. Equally original, and equally as hard to surf.
And that’s the only three of any value in writing that I can pluck off the top of my head at the moment. (Value in my opinion, as self-evaluation, or as Vonnegut put it, comparing “myself with myself.”) Another idea I may try out on another Tuesday could actually be a form of non-fiction symmetrina, but for now I’m quite whipped.
“Print as the Phoenix”
There’s been much debate about how much longer paper publishing is going to be able to hold on and not enough insight into which way it is really heading. We are not approaching so much an end to books, but a specialization of them. As Jay Leno talks about how electric cars will allow gasoline vehicles to become niche items, the same is going to grow true for paper. When it comes down to it, people are going to have to want to read books, and not screens that replicate books to near exactness (and believe me, they aren’t that far away from getting there).
The great thing about paper, though, is its versatility. The free newspaper is generally well received and considered unmenacing, has an approval rating leaps and bounds above junk email. Warren Ellis has an idea of a company that takes a set number of blogs that you like, collects a word count or an entry count, page count, whatever would work best in this case, and spits you out a paper every now and then. I’m not sure how developed his idea is, and I don’t have his blog post handy at the moment (I know, I know, I’m playing this one close to the chest), so I guess I’ll just have to assume that I’m adding to his thoughts, but if not, his idea is brilliant enough in its own to be spread. How I would tweak this is through mail delivery and ad space. Suddenly you have regionalized ads floating around, perhaps even better than TV. You have a publishing company making a newspaper out of individual blogs that all they have to do is get a minor profile on, and I would expect advertisers to go wild. The best kind of commercial is the one that’s selling something the customer is likely to want, doncha know?
So I’m also thinking, how hard would it be to take this and streamline it a little bit, make the paper something you just write off, send out to everyone in a certain area, perhaps collect profile posts of different bloggers, the like, would this sort of thing have a market? And if so, suddenly money and advertising can come from all sides. Bloggers hoping to boost their credit to companies and thus sell more ad space could pay this company to publish them and then you have the same process. Or you can piggyback this into the first idea; add a new blogger to each copy sent to a perspective reader, sort of like TiVo suggesting new shows I might like.
The reason that the newspaper is going out of style definitely has nothing to do with the newsprint itself, but with the fact that television news and the internet make your regular newspaper obsolete. But think about a collection of different people’s minds, made manifest in your hands to open and read their thoughts. And whether or not this is a group that you have chosen for yourself, I seriously doubt that there’s anyway that clicking between tabs is going to be seen as a cooler thing than just turning pages.
“Baseball as the Human Sport”
In Futurama, of course, if I remember correctly, there is some humor poked at baseball’s history. As America’s pastime, it is easy to foresee that most of the problems that the country might face would be mirrored in its ballgame, its relaxing night on the couch with a beer and the son watching the country stage little city versus city or league versus league rivalries. From 9/11’s delaying the season into October (its notorious play off month) and pushing the World Series into November, baseball and the country have sure come a long way. But when we go back, we have a time when baseball would actually make the first move, like watching your mirror reflection part your hair a different way, before you begin to do so yourself. What I am talking about is the story of Jackie Robinson, which is one I’ll assume you know moderately well. Although conditions were not as they should’ve been, baseball did take steps towards integration before the country, as a whole, under Johnson, would begin to resolve this growing problem of second-class citizenry. Tracing back from number 42’s unprecedented career, we are led to the silver lining of baseball’s segregation: the Negro Leagues. Supplying a new think tank on baseball and a new experimentation process, these independent baseball leagues would help form some of today’s endearing concepts in the majors—fan voting in the All-Star Game, inter-league play, etc. And it is this era that Futurama parodies. Bender is of course a fan of the robot blernsball (an evolved form of baseball played in the 3000s) players who are not allowed to play in the big leagues. This paragraph thus serves as a caution that I do not mean to point out that baseball is a sport without robots with the title to this section.
What I do mean to portray here is that baseball is a sport that will always come down to someone calling the game. Replays should not ever be allowed outside of their current use in home run calls, and balls and strikes should vary from umpire to umpire. This is an idea that baseball itself even upholds in its uneven ball parks, that once they stretch past the infield diamond, can become completely different affairs, perhaps built to suit particular stars of the team playing there at the time or only incidentally brought up to cause certain peculiarities and differences. From turf to grass, even, baseball fields have their own characteristics, like people in their own ways. From the baggie in right field of the Metrodome to Tal’s Hill in deep center of Minute Maid Park in Houston, baseball presents its venues as each a little different, each needing a little time to get used to.
And that’s really what makes the game what it is. Because everything is a little bit different, a little bit more left to chance, in a baseball game. And with 162 games per team per year for the regular season, each game is like meeting someone new.
“My Novel as a Movie Franchise”
The book that I have mainly in my head right now is growing in its own way, little bits of plot, tiny shards of knowledge forming in my mind that will hopefully be able to be pieced back together into a worthwhile mirror once again at the end of the day. It’s an odd thing, because I think I’m so used to short stories, things that have beginnings, middles, and ends, whereas a book can obviously have those as well, but the middle generally becomes its own set of crests and troughs, that are, in their own right, new beginnings, and new ends.
What is interesting to me at the moment is how I’ve been basing all my stories in the same sort of universe for a while now, basically our own, but with a hazy illustrator who leaves key differences here and there, as well as major ones that could in themselves be written of in stories (one of which I have begun writing), and now this book has somewhat spiraled forward and planted itself into this world that I had already begun to create.
This is what Tolkien did, definitely, and what Alan Moore suggests. Sort of like starting with the setting of a picture before you paint any people in it. And, even though this isn’t generally the way I write things, I like the way my mind is thinking right now.
The original Casino Royale film was actually a satirical James Bond film in 1967, and even though this film may not have been greatly well received, I think it does go somewhere we rarely see, which is a film franchise that not only switches leads or minor characters or canon, but actually genre as well. My novel I see as something along the same lines as this. Mayhap in three parts, the first presenting one genre and then perhaps even an interlude allowing time for our actors to get backstage to change their clothes into the costumes for the next part, making sure that this time they have the right mask. And even if that might seem more like a play than a movie to you, I just say that the way I see my novel now is like waves lapping the beach, one comes in and has a certain majesty to it, something that can’t be truly replicated, and then the next comes down on us, and no matter if the water looks exactly the same in either image, both waves hit in completely different styles. Equally original, and equally as hard to surf.
And that’s the only three of any value in writing that I can pluck off the top of my head at the moment. (Value in my opinion, as self-evaluation, or as Vonnegut put it, comparing “myself with myself.”) Another idea I may try out on another Tuesday could actually be a form of non-fiction symmetrina, but for now I’m quite whipped.
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