Sunday, December 13, 2009

more deep thoughts, in quick succession

For some reason, I find it hard to write when my apartment is dirty. My apartment has been dirty recently, hence, little/no writing. Also, the general state of the country has me bummed. This fucking healthcare bill, man. It's like waiting to exhale, or something. This should have been done it August, and now it fucking December! Senators man. I hate them!

Anyways, I started cleaning up my apartment, lately. It's a several day affair. Even did some loads of laundry tonight, and you know I only do that once a blue moon. I read some more recently. That's good. I find it hard to be interested in writing when I haven't read recently. The whole enterprise seems beside the point somehow. Obsolete.

deep thought

Considering how much I enjoy doing it when I do it, I really don't understand why I don't write more often.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Identity

Have you ever just stared into a mirror, and looked at yourself? An almost sublime sense of selfhood emerges. A realization that you are really you, bound to this body, and to no one else. It is both incredibly limiting, and incredibly freeing, at the same time. Truly, truly sublime. I couldn't help but smile as I did it. I seemed so... unfamiliar... as I looked at myself. Yet who could I be, but the person staring back?

...

Consciousness, the existence of such, has, I think, always been the main source of my inspiration. I am just truly fascinated by what it is, what it means. Everything I have been trying to unwrap has boiled down to this very specific question. What does it mean to experience the world subjectively?

...

I have been thinking about Father, off and on, lately. He always comes back, it seems in waves, ebbing and flowing. More intense and more intense, then less so. Well, lately, Raymond Frederick Raven has played heavily upon my mind. I have been thinking about the normal person, how their conception of a distant parent differs so drastically from mine. How they see their absentee parent as at fault in some way. That is not the case for me. It is strange. I feel that I am constantly inundated with people whose stories of parental disconnect are so much worse than mine, yet so much better. Everyone is still alive. Sometimes, it feels exceedingly, fatalistically cruel, that I should unabashedly love my father so much, and yet be denied him. Everyone else seems so unaware how lucky they are, yet I can't help but feel that, given their blindness, that it is I who should be grateful, for I knew, Before, just how lucky I was, to have both of them. And though I feel sometimes, a resentment , born of my own stagnation, I know, KNOW, that without them, specifically, I would have been dead long ago.

Thank you.

Monday, October 26, 2009

bleh

Really too tired to write today. Between last post and this I worked sixteen and a half hours within a twenty-seven hour period, and though I have been off work for over six hours now, I am still exhausted. And I need to be up at nine tomorrow.

However, I did come to a realization about a major plot point that had been staring me in the face for a long time, and, I now that I have realized it, a whole bunch of other stuff has opened up. This means changes, but it also means excellant opportunities, and a chance to tighten up the major thematic elements, by laying out the cards sooner as to what it's about, which means I have more time to play around with them, instead of just letting them twist in the wind as I pile up incident after incident. This is one of those times where you change your mind about some prior choice you made, then only belatedly realize you had it right the first time. Funny how many of those you run into. Sigh. It's too bad, the change comes way, way farther down the line in the writing process. I really want to start working on it now, but I wouldn't know where to start, and I am surrendering more and more to just letting the story work itself out on the page(other than advance planning such as this, of course). If I tried to start it now, I wouldn't know where to start.

Also, Mad Men was super awesome tonight.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Faster, stronger

I have written for the last three days. I wrote about 800 words on Thursday, around 700 last night, and just these last 45 minutes I wrote about 450. I am not worried too much about word count, just that I am doing it, but the numbers are a nice way of thinking about progress. One thing I have found, is that as I write more frequently, the entire process becomes less precious. It is easier to dismiss what I have written as junk, and start over. So usually at any stopping point I reach I have practically on my second draft, because I have done so much editing. In fact, After finishing last nights work, I realized that a significant amount of it was not really necessary, and depending on how the rest goes, I might throw out everything from that session. And I didn't feel bad about it! It was just that I had to write it that way, in order to find the way that I actually wanted to write it. It wasn't a finished process, but getting my ideas out like that was a critical step along the way.

I think writing, and probably a lot of other artistic activities (like, say, drawing) is a lot like exercising. Doing it is hard, but it gets comes easier the more you do it, and the less you do, the more it goes back to being hard again. So just doing it often enough will help you work up to doing it longer, and vice versa. Really just doing it is making it easier for me to just sit down and write.

Anyways, here's the bit that I plan on junking, since it probably won't see the light of day anywhere else. Dig those long sentences.

Last night, he had not been out participating in the festivities of Samhain. Though he could hardly have stopped the men from joining, many of them being followers of the old gods themselves, and the others, though Christians, were not above a bit of fun and lechery, he knew that Varus, being not only a Christian, but a Roman Christian, was not amenable to the Celt's somewhat looser interpretation of scripture, (as if always seemed to find room for the old gods and their holy days) and thus he thought it wise to, as the chief negotiator involved in the dispute at hand, to maintain the proper decorum desired by his host. Thus, as his men, including his brother, were out drinking whiskey and wine and bedding the local women, Emrys sat the ready in his small apartment, by the light of a single candle, in his full Centurion uniform, waiting, on the off chance he might be called for.

Last night he had been alone in his room. He was dressed in his full military garb, with his sword at his side, and was sitting upon the only chair in the room, it's back placed against the wall by the doorway. He was sitting perfectly still, his legs side by side, his hands placed gently upon his legs, and his back as straight as a post. He had pushed the table to the other end of the small room, upon which sat a candle, the room's only source of light. Outside he could hear the distance sounds of revelry: whooping, shouting, laughter, and other that, further away, but cutting through the din, the clear melody and rhythm of pipes and drums. He wondered if the people outside could hear them.


Thursday, October 22, 2009

Work

I wrote for about 40, 45, 50 minutes today. And at least a half an hour of that time was spent writing precisely this:

The bridge was truly a most curious thing. In its way, it was more curious than the bodies and the wreckage. The Mount lay several thousand feet out to sea, where it rose out of the clear shallow water so quickly, it was as if some young gods or giants had piled up the earth while at play during some long-ago age. And then, just to make their sandcastle complete, they had added the Bridge. A single strip of raised earth running from the Mount to the far, sandy shore, just wide enough to support a traffic of carts (except at high tide, when it was all but underwater). Though the land bridge widened somewhat as it approached the Mount, suggesting that it was not, after all, the carefully planned work of tidy human hands, the convenience of placement and the precision of its height (rising just so above the water) were enough to imbue the bridge with a kind of mystical presence, as if some unseen, knowing force, perhaps gods, perhaps something greater, had seen fit to set such a thing deliberately upon the world.

Writing is hard.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Damned if you do...

So, I did some editing on an old story after writing that last post, just to be doing something. I am moving more and more towards the opinion that editing actually is writing, that it is so essential to the writing process, that good writing is so intrinsically connected to doing it, and doing it, and doing it, that it cannot really be separated from writing as a distinct act; it is as central to writing as the production of wholly new sentences.

So, I wrote today. Yay, me.

Except, by the time I got to where I left off, I was doubting almost the entirety of the procedure I had put forward. I realized that a good chunk, about 25%, of the story was unnecessary and besides the point, and maybe as much as 35%. Of course, what I had written after that was contingent on information that had been passed on before it, so If I was to excise that those sessions, I would have to completely re-write what had come after it. Then I realized, that the main thing that I liked about the story was those opening paragraphs (the 10% that I only maybe had to excise), that I had written the story basically as an excuse for that part, and that what came after, I wasn't sure I was interested in. I had just come up with that as a way to maybe bring the first part to some sort of conclusion or point. And I don't feel like the latter part is strong enough on it's own to bother shaping up, not unless I restart the whole thing form the beginning, and if that's the case then I simply have no idea what changes would have to be made to make it a self-contained, interesting story. So now I don't know what to do with the bloody thing, and until I come to some sort of decision, about what parts are worth keeping, I am either going to have to put it back on the backburner, or just abandon it as a failed experiment. Which is really too bad, because I really like my main character, and would kind of like to see her story get told. But I can't really justify to myself going through the bother of telling a story if I can't make it interesting. It's the creative equivalent of hearing nails on a blackboard, for hours on end.

Ugh. This is so degrading.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Where is my mind

Yes, so, no writing the last two days. Was working, and it was very tiring.

I've been thinking about my relationship to stimulants and depressants, namely caffeine and alcohol. I like both, but I have been, lately (as in within the last week) been cutting back on both, not out of any moral or self-improvement urge, but because, I think they might hamper my writing. I can't concentrate after a drink, and I can't fight through the cacaphony of voice when I have caffeine in me. (And now that I am cutting back, I can really tell when I have caffeine in me.) I need that calmness, that tranquility of untired reflection, in order to bring my mind to bear on writing. That's why I think in the past it has been easier to write in in the morning, at least morning when I'm not zonked out of my mind; I have no stimulants in my system. I have been sleeping. The most productive bout of writing I ever had was five days where I woke up at 5 and wrote until 11. I wrote an over 10,000 novella.

On the other hand, I feel that is still a place for such things in my creative process. Though caffeine is a poor aid to dramatic thinking, it's quite helpful when brainstorming ideas for things. And drinking has, for whatever reason, always worked to strip away my layers of anxieties, as opposed to many people for whom it seems to let them out; the times when I feel something like a religious experience, or perhaps just bouts of zealous humanism, have usually occurred while my mind races around after having a few. And both those states of mind have a marked influence on the things I think about writing, and the things I want to write about, even if they move me away from the disciplined state I need to actually write.

Still, best to decrease their usage.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Things I have learned about setting up your drum kit

1. Don't Frankenstein your kit. Drums kits are tuned to themselves; you start using parts of other kits, the drums will make ringing sounds in odd places. Adding a new brand of drum is like detuning one string on a guitar. It throws everything out of whack. Likewise, use one brand of cymbals. That one cymbal from a different brand will stick out like a sore thumb every time you hit it. However, allowances can be made for hardware, since it doesn't really effect tone, so you can use Tama Iron Cobra Double Bass Drum Pedals with your Pearl bass drum.

2. Get a Tama Iron Cobra Double Bass Drum Pedal. They're sweet.

3. Make sure your legs are directly aligned with your foot pedals, so that your foot and leg bones are along the same axis. Don't sit bowlegged. If you do, you spend too much energy and time moving your thoughts down from your brain to your foot, navigating the twists of your body, and thus lose on not just speed and power, but finesse as well. This means you also are going to want to angle your hi-hat/double-bass pedals out from the bass drum slightly. Don't make your pedals parallel. Accommodate the natural triangle of your legs positions comfortably at rest and place your pedal(s) where your other foot happens to be. Speed, power, and finesse are just as important for your hi-hat foot as for your bass drum foot.

4. Keep the floor tom positioned low and flat. If you angle it, you lose the force from your stroke, and bounce strokes become almost impossible to keep up. The mounted toms, it's alright to angle, since you will be playing them at an angle, (unless you're really tall) but try to keep them as close to the angles of your sticks as you can.

5. Don't mount anything on top of your hi-hat, like cowbells or tambourines. The extra wight throws off the clasping mechanism, and whatever novel little sound you get out of it isn't worth the loss of finesse on what is probably your most-used instrument. Doohickeys, if desired, can be mounted from clasping mechanisms attached to cymbal stands and other drum hardware, just nothing where pressure and weight are essential to function.

6. If you're short-sighted enough to have become a left-handed player at a right-handed kit, the easiest way to use your ride cymbal is not by placing it behind the floor tom, as right-handers do, but in front of it, so that you can play it cross-armed, the way right-handers play their hi-hat. This is a lot easier than trying to reach diagonally across the floor tom whenever you want to play ride. you don't have to twist your back or extend your arm or anything. Of course, it does make it almost impossible to play the ride with your right hand, so it's harder to do super-fast sixteenth-note patterns on it. There's always learning to drum ambidextrously!

The Magician in the Grove

So, I just signed up onto Scribd, after editing that story I had mentioned writing in the last post. If you feel like reading it, tell me what you think in comments. Thanks!

The Magician in the Grove

Works in Progress, or, In Search of Lost Time

A couple years ago I had an idea for a story, set around Christmastime. I thought the idea was clever, but, for some reason or another, didn't write it. Either it came to me in an off-season, and I just didn't feel like thinking about Christmas, much as nobody likes hearing Christmas songs before, oh, Thanksgiving, or it came to me during Christmastime and I just didn't feel like writing it because I am lazy.

Then, every year around Christmastime I would remember the story again, and think, oh yeah, I should write that. But then Christmas would come and go, and I wouldn't write it, and I would forget about it until next year.

Well, last year, I finally started working on it around Christmastime, with the intention of finishing it, and then coming up with some way to present it to friends and family. Heck, maybe even post it on this blog! I was writing it out, and liking it, nailing a lot of the little elements that had come to me over seasons past.

Then I came what might have been, might be, the climax, and I got stuck. I had a whole bunch of paths to choose to get to the ending I wanted and wasn't sure which was the right one. So I sat on it, trying to figure that out. Then the Holiday came and went, and I didn't complete the story. It's still sitting, uncompleted, on my hard drive somewhere.

Now, it's late October. The Christmas lights are showing up in the stores. The candy will be here soon too, just as soon as the Halloween merchandise goes clearance. And so this story has reentered my mind, and I realize that I have been "working" on this story for almost a year, that if I finished it this year, it will be over a year in the making, and several years in development.

I have another story, that I celebrated knocking out the rough draft of on this blog, somewhat around the same time. I have never done another draft of it. I have several drafts of the beginning of a novel, maybe thirty pages of one, that I have spent two years working on. At this rate, I will finish it in my fifties. Recently I tried to write some essays recently for this blog, one a piece of criticism, one on politics (maybe philosophy), Just to write something. They are both a couple paragraphs in, saved onto blogger, abandoned after I lost track of where they were going, or didn't feel like spending the time and effort figuring out how to cut the path.

My relationship to writing is like having this large sack of pus growing on the inside of my skull. I go too long without doing it, and it swells up and the pressure on my brain hurts all over. Then I sit down to write, and it's like pounding a nail into my skull. Some of the pus leaks out, and the pain goes away enough to be bearable, and I think "Whew! Well, that's go for now!" And I stop writing and go about my day. But pretty soon the hole heals up, and that bag starts to re-inflate and I start walking around screaming at myself again.

I would like for the bag of pus inside my skull to go away. But the only way for that to happen is if I really commit to writing, and really get some things written, things I feel I have polished enough to show off a bit. And the only way I can do that is if I actually commit myself to writing, all the time, every day, and not just in my head while pacing, but while sitting and typing (or writing longhand in a notebook, either one, I don't mind). And I keep putting off doing that, thinking "Tomorrow!" or telling myself that work has me tired. And time keeps slipping by, and that sac pressing into my brain doesn't just pound harder, it grows, too, creeping slowly around the concavity of my skull.

I grow afraid, as time slips by, that even if I do ever get up off the ground, it will be so late all I manage to do is crash into those trees in the distance.

Whew! I feel better!

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Right, Irony

Uh, ok. To review:

The art of narrative is based exclusively upon ironic juxtapositions. The four types of irony, verbal, situational, dramatic, and cosmic, (and sometimes historical) are combined and arranged into a kind of ironic superstructure, which is the story within a work of narrative art. Such structures of irony underline both Comedy and Tragedy. If a work is not a Comedy or Tragedy, it is a History, which will use historical irony in place of some of the other forms.

Stories can be considered in terms of their ironic density and ironic height. Ironic Density is simply the frequency of the occurrence of ironic moments.

Ironic height is the degree which a particular irony shocks the audiences expectations. The greater height, the more power it to the work. The funnier the comedy, the sadder the tragedy, the greater sense of importance to the here and now granted to a history.

Note: all ironies, of whatever height, must ultimately make sense on some level. If the irony is not, ultimately, logical, it is not an irony, but an absurdity. Absurdities, are not ultimately interesting to the audience, although they can be used effectively as set-ups to irony. The way in which an irony ultimately makes sense could be called the ironic return. It is the way in which an irony subtly makes some broader point about the world. Any comment a work has to make, pertaining to politics, religion, culture, whatever, should be tied up in an ironic return. Otherwise the point is simply polemic, and times spent upon it dilutes the ironic density of the narrative.

The denser the ironies in a story, the better. The higher the ironies, the better. Multiply the density of the ironies (d, let's say) by the highest irony (h, let's say) and you get the "objective" quality of a narrative (N, let's say). So: d x h = N, or dh=N.

However, works of narrative art are not merely stories, but also the format in which the stories are relayed. Multiply objective quality of a narrative by the degree to which it's form accentuates it's ironies (F, let's say), and you get the "objective quality" of a a work of narrative art (A, let's say). So, NF=A.

Of course, irony is largely dependent on context both to be recognized and to be appreciated at a certain height. As context changes from person to person and culture to culture, the value of N, and thus A, fill fluctuate from person to person. Which account why have such a hard time agreeing upon which works of art are superior to which. However, within a defined time or place, the rough values of such should be calculable, so that you can say that, at least, Shakespeare is superior to Michael Bay. Or Shakespeare is superior to Marlow, or Tarantino is superior to Bay, if you want a more a focused time and place, and an identical artistic medium, for the purpose of your comparison.

But make no mistake, the value of a work of narrative art can be judged, and, though inaccurately, measured, by studying it as a structure of ironies.

Friday, July 24, 2009

The Stuff Stories Are Made Of, Part 1

When I decided to be an English major, one of the things I remember being disappointed by was when I learned that literary criticism didn't really concern itself with matters of what was good and bad. It was concerned with meaning. There would not really be an attempt to reason with what stories—novels or short stories—were good or bad. That was just subjective. And in the one and only creative writing class I took, we were told, when critiquing each others stories, not to suggest plot points to each other. Just tips on writing. There was one quite good reason for this, which is that if you told someone what should happen in a story, it stopped being their story, and started being your story. But on the other hand, often what was wrong with the stories was that the stories were just bad stories. Uninteresting. I didn't care what happened to the characters. By saying that the we couldn't critique the events in the story, the class was effectively saying, there are no bad stories, just badly told stories.

But I think there are such things as bad stories, and good stories, separate from the how they're conveyed to their audience. You can have a well made movie or a well written book, and they can still have good moments, well-cut action sequences or beautifully florid passages of description, but they still won't add up to much and most people won't enjoy seeing them or reading them.

So what makes for a good story? What elements make for stories that people want to read/watch? There are elements that people say they read things for, or go to movies, that are not related to form. Good characters. Lots of people talk about how important characters are. Or suspense. People read to see what happens next. Or conflict. Conflict is really important. Most plots center around some central conflict. People read on to see the conflict resolved. Mystery. Maybe there isn't some tension are work in the story any more—the killer has already killed, or something—but people want to know what actually happened. They want the unknown revealed. Little moments. Some stories ain't even all that great, but there are some moments in it that are really good. Little moments of quiet sadness, or uproarious comedy, or touching kindness, or shocking cruelty. Many comedies are comprised of really pointless plots that are just excuses to string along a series of funny bits on (Monty Python and the Holy Grail jumps to mind as a masterpiece of this format). And of course, in the big stories, they want some commentary, or insight, on the human condition, or life and the universe or something. In order for a story to be great, it usually needs to knock us around a bit and leave us thinking big thoughts.

But what makes these things interesting and meaningful. What makes for good characters? What makes something suspenseful? What makes us want to see a conflict concluded, or find out what we didn't know? What makes those little moments special? What makes comedy funny and tragedy cathartic. What makes a story great?

So this is what I thought about.

And the answer, I decided, is irony.

Now, when I say irony, I mean it in the broadest sense of the word. I don't mean it the way people mean it when they talk about people being ironic, or how they meant it when, after 9/11, everyone was talking about the Death of Irony. Usually when people use it in that sense they just mean either verbal irony, or base sarcasm, or something in between. And this misuse has lead to a lot of blather about how no one really knows what irony really means.

That's nonsense. Irony is a very simple concept; all it is the going against of expectations. And what stories need to be interesting is irony. In fact, I think you could say that stories are built out of ironies. Big ironies and little ironies.

Why irony? Well, any good story has to fulfill two somewhat contradictory things. They need to 1) justify why the story is unique enough to be told and 2) be relatable to the rest of human experience.

No one wants to hear a story where nothing interesting happens, like the last time you went grocery shopping. Nor do they want to hear a long string of pointlessly absurd events that have no relation or meaning to each other. Now, you could create art out of such situations. You could write a good poem about going to the supermarket, and the average episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus is basically an series of absurd and unrelated events. But that doesn't mean your poem about going to the supermarket is a good story, and no episode of Flying Circus has anything like a continuous plot (with the possible exception of the one about Scott of the Antarctic, but I think that one just has one really long sketch in it).

An ironic situation manages to fulfill both qualities. In fact, irony is inherent in the fulfillment of both qualities. Any ironic situation is more unique than most situations, since it goes against what is expected—that is, what usually happens. And of course, an implicit aspect of any ironic situation is that, though it goes against expectations, it's rooted in some logic, some sense that what doesn't seem to make sense actually does. Thus it's relatable. If the situation doesn't make sense, then it's just absurd, and absurdity isn't really interesting or relatable. (Although absurdities can be used quite well as a set up for ironies. They heighten the relevant factors by stripping out other, complicating factors, that would undermine the situation. Beckett and Python do this a lot.)

So in any ironic situation there is a kind of return. Let's call it the Ironic Return. The Return is the way in which the ironic moment offers some insight into the world, and thus makes some comment upon it.

More later.

The Urge

Did lots of cleaning today. Put away much of the stuff littering my "living room" floor, organized and re -shelved all the books on my bookcase, dusted a whole bunch of stuff, finally moved that old television sitting in the middle of the floor up onto my dresser (I got it back in June), though I haven't plugged it in yet. I still need to buy a longer tv cord to stretch across the room.

I have been thinking about this Yglesias post from earlier in the day. The part that really got me was this bit:

Before I owned an air card, half of my train or bus trips to and from New York would inevitably result in me starting a novel of some sort. Not because I want to write a novel, but just because it seemed inconceivable to sit for that long with a laptop in my bad [sic] without writing something. Before there were blogs, I was always writing in a journal and apparently my grandfather did the same thing for decades. Consequently, I find it to be a great privilege to have a job where I can just write all the time, about all kinds of stuff, more-or-less at random. For me writing-as-such has always been a necessary activity, and trying to find constructive venues in which to do it a bit problematic. The blog solves the problem.
One of the problems, I have realized, with writing, and this is partially linked to the to epiphany that I mentioned in the last post that I haven't gotten to writing yet, is that i don't really give a shit about writing. It's not something I like doing. What I like is coming up with stories. Making up characters and thinking of things to happen to them. If I could tell those stories in comics or movies to theatre, I would be just as happy to do that. But I can't draw that well, since I wasn't taught to hold a pencil correctly with the left hand which means everything smears. i don't a millions of dollars lying around to hire actors and cameramen and CGI artists. I don't have a theatre troupe lying around. Plus, I am antisocial and, due to reading polomic interviews from Dave Sim and Jeff Smith and Alan Moore and Frank Miller and all the guys from Image, I have a fierce desire to work with my own creations and own my own creations. Writing was just something I fell in with, the easiest means to an end. And of course, like any of those other forms, there is actually an element of craft to the medium that had to be mastered, and so I went about trying to master it, and failing at it, since I don't really care, in some way, about that. Somewhere along the way, probably when I decided to major in English, I forgot that, and consequently disappeared up my own ass. This made it hard to write things I liked, since it was hard to write stories I liked, since it is hard to do anything that makes any kind of sense when in a state of phyiscal impossibility.

I am not saying that I need to forsake good writing. Good writing in inseparable from good storytelling, so I do need to be a good writing in order to tell stories well, and to tell good stories. But not all aspects of good writing are , or things that can be considered good writing, are things that necesarily need to be in good storytelling, and I don't need to concern myself with doing such things. What I need to concentrate on, is making the stories good, knowing what makes them good, and putting that in there. If I can start doing that, maybe I can actually start enjoying this whole writing thing.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

As the nigh-endless absence (in blog-terms) from posting on this blogs, connotes, my late last attempt at getting energized about writing failed. Eventually it just ground to a halt. I just couldn't figure out who to write somehow, and I couldn't figure out why. So, I tried going in reverse; I went back to basics and just concentrated on reading, reading stuff I enjoyed. I felt like I had gotten so blocked up with pretensions and hopes and impatience that nothing could get out, and I just had to do something to detox my system, stop worrying about whether or not what i was doing was amounting to something or was important to some grand scheme and just take it easy, man.

And I think it has been helping. I don't know if I am done with it, but it has been nice to stop worrying about the future for a bit. I visited home to renew my driver's license, and while there I picked up all the paperback Redwall books I had, and I have been reading those. Just getting back in touch with some of the stories that originally made me be so interested in stories in the first place.

In fact, I have been giving some special attention to considering the topic of storytelling itself, and what makes for a good story. I have a theory on that, which I will outline in a later post. One of the problems I was having with writing is that I didn't feel like my stories meant anything, at least the ones I was working on. There were things happening, and characters having thoughts, but they didn't seem to matter to me, which made it impossible for me to really care to work on them. They didn't seem to have a purpose. They didn't seem necessary. Hopefully, going forward, if my theory is correct, it will make it easier to come up with stories that I actually want to complete, since they will have a purpose for existing. Another problem I was having is that I was trying to write about the things that I didn't really understand, places and situations I haven't been to or visited, or spent any time trying to visualize. This lead to a huge loss of confidence, since it's really hard to write a story about, say, a cop working in Chicago or landed gentry during the Regency when I don't acutally know anything about those places or people? Sure I have vague I ideas for stories, but without any sense of place of habits, trying to flesh those stories out into words is just impossible. In retrospect, trying to writes those stories is pretty dumb. Better to put work on something I know like, small-town Illinois (which I actually find insanely boring) or, ironically, cosmopolitan Rome. (I have some more research to do there, but its coming along. I really need to get to work on brushing up my Latin.)

Also, I have been fooling around on the guitar some more. The one I am using is a POS, and the second string just does not like to play, but it's enough to start learning. I finally learned by what the sequence of notes are. There are sharp/flat notes between all the normal notes except BC and EF, which I remember by thinking of the phrase "neolithic coitus". Or at least one that approximates it.

Friday, July 3, 2009

July 3rd

Happy birthday, Tom Cruise!

Update: Ooh, look, a present!

Sunday, May 3, 2009

Deadline FAIL

After that last post, I did some more writing last night. Then I did some more writing as soon as I woke up, and some more in this late evening. Now, I am a little burnt out at banging my head away at it. The opposite of feeling rusty (though no more productive). It's four pages long now, but I broke through my barrier. However, it is Saturday night, and I am not finished. Sigh. I guess I am going past deadline.

Luckily, the next story lined up in my mental queue consists of exactly one scene, and I know how how it begins and ends and who are the characters are. If I can just finish this first one after getting home from work tomorrow, then work on the next one a bit everyday, I should be easily back on schedule by next Saturday.

I also spent a lot of time today watching the latest episode of Dollhouse, and then reading various threads about it online. Holy Shit, that show is sweet. [Obligatory line about it being too bad that it will get canceled.]

Saturday, May 2, 2009

Procrastination makes the heart wilt

Ah, another two days wasted, and my deadline fast approaching. I have been trying for the last couple minutes to work on the story, but it is just not working. I don't know where to take the story from where it is at right now, and it is bother the hell out of me, not knowing what should happen next. Also, I have become incredibly self-conscious about the act of writing, which is just making it impossible to get anywhere in it. Sentences are just not flowing out, and when I try to force them I don't feel right about them. Ugh. It's an ugly business.

I think the problem is that I had kind of reached, without noticing it, the limits of the previous combustion of words, and now I am on to trying to game out what comes after that. I am having to make actual plot decisions, and before I was just setting up the, uh, setting, so to speak.

Now I am feeling ornery and stifled. This will learn me to put off the necessary. I am creating bad vibes solely out of my own impetus. Still, that's a good thing. I need to start working on creating some system of self-discipline, or else I will never get anywhere, with this or in any other context.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

What condition is my condition in?

No real writing was done today, or last night after getting off from work. At the moment I have a bit of a mental block about the idea of doing it, which typing this is meant somewhat to address. Also, I have just been reading about this Specter switch thing, which just comes completely out of left field to me and seems weirder and weirder the more I think about it. Also, listening to that Decembrist album, which I was able to exchange for a playable copy. The last song is quite good, though no "The Rake's Song."

Another source of blockage was an occurrence of what could be called "The Crossroads Dilemma," which is when presented with two things that both need to be done, I don't know which one to do, can't make up my mind and end up doing neither. Engorging on blog posts on Specter was probably a mechanism of that. Besides writing, the other path was doing my state taxes. Finally I broke down and did the taxes, just now. It took about 15 minutes. Everything had already been filled out; I just had to do the master copy. Now everything is signed, sealed and ready to be driven to the post office tomorrow. (I really need to stop procrastinating.)

...Today, when walking out of work, I had a strange feeling. I had felt rather all right at work that day, in control and, in a way, unconcerned with my mental state. And as I was walking, out the automatic doors and into the mundane air, I felt as if some switch was switching in my head, and something vaguely, for a split instant, a bit like euphoria, but more like normalcy, slipping through. And then the switch stuck, not fully completing its process. And I walked on, across the parking lot, feeling this odd phantom of gears in my head. It was, I suspected, the depression lifting, the way one of the patients described it in Against Depression (which I never finished). A singular moment when the depression lifted, before the gears stuck.

I think I was what jammed those gears in place. I think a part of me was frightened of the idea of being without it, like, well, it sounds crude to say it, but almost like a battered lover. I was going "No darling, come back, I didn't mean it, I would never leave you. I couldn't live without you. I don't know what I would do without you. Please, hit me again. I want you to."

That sounds gross, but really, this is quite a bit was it was like, I think. My apologies.

I don't feel like I have gone all the way back, though. I am still standing in the doorway. The gears haven't turned back around; they are still jammed in place. The Switch was thrown. It has not been thrown back; it is only that its process has been halted.

I don't know what will happen next. Maybe some vile shit will happen and I will go right back. Maybe I will hold in this pattern a while. Maybe I will pull out the brace, and things will just...change. I don't know.

There is a part in Against Depression where the patient whose depression lifted, like that, talks about how the depression is not her. That it is something else, but not who she is. I always thought that interesting, because of the stance such a statement implies on what is "You." What is the nature of consciousness. I mean, if you aren't the chemicals in your brain, what are you? Are you more you when unaided by chemicals, when on anti-depressants, when drunk, when sober, with raging with hormones or castrated? It seems that each of those is you, or a different shade of you, to me, but I am not that certain. But what defines you? If you strip away all those influences, the external, the innately biological, the pumping of blood and collections of neurons, would there still even be a you (are we more or equal to the sum of you physical parts? Is there a metaphysical level to reality?).

I think part of my reticence is, I have been depressed so long, I have been this unhappy, nervous, anxious, angry person for so long, I have been wearing this weight, this Albatross, for so long, that I don't know what I would be without it. I don't know how it would feel. I don't know if it would feel like me, if I would even be me. Is there anything to me, other then my depression? If I escaped i's temple, would I dash out into endless green fields, or find myself facing a trek through a barren Wasteland? "No Excuses." Would the sun outside of the cave be too bright?

I need to keep doing this...

Monday, April 27, 2009

Go with the flow

The story I am working on is kind of odd, because I don't know where it goes, quite. There is a faint flicker of an idea of an ending, but I don't know if I will use it. I am just writing the story, kind of one sentence in front of the next, trying to keep it along some pathway. A while back I wrote 800 words in a mad, late-night rush, but felt that I hadn't communicated all I wanted, hadn't set the mood as I wanted and pointed where the story was supposed to go. So I started over and have written about halfway through those words at much greater length and detail, and have written over 1100 words about those first four hundred or so words. Hmm, you know, it actually seems way more lopsided in terms of expansion than those numbers suggest. Single sentences have become paragraphs, or short scenes. Hopefully, writing it like this will give me a better idea of where it is going. I just write something, keeping the work in mind, (I have a deadline) and writing the next words whenever they come to me, whenever they do. I don't overthink it, or worry too much about whether I should be sitting there thinking, or taking a break. I just kind of feel my way through it. The real question, is just having the right sentence to put next, and writing that one down. Its a different approach for me, but I enjoy the exercise of it.

Laying Down the Gauntlet

I did a bit of writing last night, and it went a little better than previous recent efforts. Part of the problem I have, I think, it that I just didn't have a solid idea of what the story was that I was working on.

I have decided to commit once and for all, to a project which I have been thinking of, recently, which is that I should write one short story a week. Between Sunday and Saturday, I need to start and finish the rough draft of a story, or a chapter of some larger work. At the same time, I need to do a final edit on a different story, an set it up so it is presentable to other people.

I think I can do this, because I am always thinking up new ideas for stories, but I just never commit to writing them, or I push them off to the future, pledgint to start working on them at some later date. But my disinterest in political news is growing, and this seems like a excellent way to fill up my day.

Besides, in the past, The lack of another analytical approach to writing has allowed me to skirt by on actual output. By making some kind of formal declaration of my intentions in a public forum (to extent this blog is public) I hope to hold my feet to the fire. the the overhanging threat of analysis will force me to act, making have to be writing throughout the day, every day, because, if I am not, then I am sucking at life. There really is no other option.

So a short story a week it is. I figure, if I can keep that pace up, within, say, a year, I should enough actual writing under my belt, enough experience, to have the confidence to apply for a creative writing program again. Or do something else, I don't know. The main problem I have is just my performance anxiety and the preciousness with which I cling to every aspect of this activity, and I just have to jump into it uncaring, just revel in the act of doing it, like I did with drums, if I ever want to get better. This self-analytical tendency can be stifling, so I need to turn it into something constructive.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Mass produced junk

The last track on that Decembrists CD won't play. Straight out of the case, into the computer, it skips like a drug dealer's ten-year-old Metallica album. What the shit is that?

Throwback, Part 2; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Sweetness

OK. One thing I notice right off the bat it that it is less harsh. The carbonation doesn't seem to stick in throat as much. Sometimes I liked that.

There something in the taste of it, the tang as it hits the back of the throat and vibrates along the teeth, that brings me back instantly to the cobbled together memories of working with my dad on some outdoors project, then sitting down on the front stoop to share a Pepsi while taking a break. It reminds me of the sweetness of those Pepsi's. How recently did they replace sugar with corn syrup? I mean, I'm thinking back to ages, maybe 7 to 13, so 12 to 18 years ago? I haven't really had Pepsi since then. I remember Pepsi, in general, being very harsh, but in this collective memory*, it isn't.

Past the tang, it tastes about the same, but that difference in sweetener really alters the mixture, so in a sense it's all different. There is no harshness to the drink at all, although it does make my teeth buzz a little bit. It kind of makes me want to brush my teeth. Yet, somehow, the yet of my mouth doesn't feel all puckered up, all stained with chemicals, the way it does usually.

All in all it was more like I was drinking a carbonated beverage, and less like drinking a mixture of flavorful chemicals.

It was much easier to drink the whole can. It was done in minutes. Much smoother. Much more a continuous whole.

*This was kind of a ritual for us.

Throwback, Part 1; or, I can haz sugar?

So, Pepsi has released some new products called Pepsi Throwback, where they use sugar instead of corn syrup as the sweetener, just like back in ye olden tymes. It just came out today, and I bought some of the Mountain Dew version. It's chilling in the fridge as I type, and it will be tried shortly. I am kind of curious to see if the taste is noticeably different.

Also bought the Decembrists The Hazards of Love after listening to "The Rake's Song" over and over again after listening to it at Cogitamus. I just had to possess it. About halfway through it now, most of it is very...relaxing. Not like "The Rake's Song" at all, but still quite good. I think it made my headache go away.

Kristof is awesome sometimes.

Regardless of what I said here, this sounds really good.

Red Stripe

I have become quite the beer connoisseur of late, and having tried it before, and not really remembering it, I bought a six-pack of red stripe, a quite expensive import from Jamaica.

Ech. What a horrible excuse for an import. I might as well have been drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon. If that's the finest beer Jamaica has to offer no wonder everyone there is a stoner.

Stuck Here Again

After all this time not writing the writing is hard again. Which means I must get back to writing to make it easy again. Three days off and I write next to nothing. It's hard and annoying and now I have a slope to climb up all over again. It's very Sisyphean.

But I cleaned! I moved around all the junk, and swept, and then washed the floors. The place smelled like Ammonia all day. Before everything was covered in dust. Now everything is not covered in dust, which is much better. Tomorrow I need to get down to organizing things. The books are all out of order.

Oh. I need to finish my state taxes and send those in. They need the be postmarked by Thusday, and they are about half-done, I think, so no real worries, but I must spend some time working on them after work tomorrow, or I might start panicking about them.

I took all the tape off my drums. I didn't know drums are supposed to sound that good. I didn't know that that was what my ride cymbal really sounded like! It's beautiful.

Friday, April 24, 2009

The Banana Republic of America

So, I haven't really been writing about politics lately, though I have been keeping abreast of it. And it's for a simple reason, I think, which is the torture debate, and my general sense that the people on my side just don't get whats going on.

It's not that I think torture is right, or that things like waterboarding and walling aren't torture. They are. It's not that I think that the last President's men and women are war criminals. They are. And in an ideal world they would stand trial for war crimes. But I don't think that Obama is wrong in wanting to "look forward."

Yes, it's intellectually incoherent. Not upholding the rule of law will have a deleterious effect on our system of justice. And however important Obama's agenda is to me and others, the impediments that prosecutions might place in front of it are no reason not to do the right thing.

It's just that I think that prosecutions might bee even more dangerous than not having them, because of the response that I forsee coming from them.

I remember reading an article years ago that made the basic argument that what happened to Clinton was payback for Nixon. Nixon is the only modern president, really the only president, period, who is unequivocally placed in the historical record as a criminal. And he was a Republican. There is just no correspnding stain to the Democrat's honor to equal what Nixon says about the Republican party, and impeaching Clinton was about trying to even that score. And though it didn't really work, the Republicans were obviously willing to that far, to get that dirty, in the name of settling a score that existed in their own heads.

So, what would happen if Obama tried the last administration for war crimes? What would that do? That has never happened before. Take a moment to think about how big a deal it would be to try a president for crimes. It's never happened before, and we have had some presidents who have done some bad things. Andrew Jackson was pretty much solely responsible for the Trail of Tears, and he's on the fucking twenty. To do so would be unprecedented, in a way, and the Republicans sense of agrievement would know no bounds.

And so there is no doubt in my mind that if Obama brought prosecutions against Bush, Cheney, or any of their underlings—just, righteous prsecutions—that the next Republican president wouldn't turn right around and start trying to find any excuse to bring charges up against Obama and various members of his adminstration. Holder. Clinton. Biden. Dawn Johnsen. Any joke of a reason they can find, they will take. I mean, can you imagine what Sarah Palin, that vindictive freak, would do, if she was our next president, and Obama had brougth charges against Bush officials? And given the precarious state of the economy, and the madness infesting the entire Republican party, that situation isn't as unimaginable as it should be.

And when the whole Banana Republic meme started up, I felt like, "I'm right." Some people think this is an absurd argument, after the Clinton impeachment, after the last eight years. And it is. But it isn't funny. Implicit in that line of (faulty) reasoning is a threat. "You want to play like that, ok, we'll play like that." It doesn't matter whether Obama is turning us into a Banana Republic or not, just that it gives them the excuse to start turning us into a Banana Republic. An excuse is all they need to become completely fascistic.

So while I think the prosecutiongs for the Bush administration is the "right thing to do," I don't know that I think Obama should do it, at least not any time soon. Because if the Democrats lose power in either branch of government anytime soon, America as we know it will quickly cease to exist. We will start to torture again. There will be endless surveillance of citizens and political opponents. People will start disppearing.

Given this argument only makes sense if you think the Republicans are evil. So if you don't think the major polical party that is arguing in favor of war crimes is evil, by all means continue pushing for investigations.

I value the rule of law. I think we should live in a system that is ruled by the law. But when one of the two major political parties doesn't actually beleive in the rule of law, I am not sure we can acutally have it. Writing that makes me feel ill.

God, I hate them so fucking much.

So maybe Obama is doing the right thing. Maybe he can has a plan. I don't know. And I don't know if following an ideal, in a particular case, is the right thing to do if following that ideal will lead to other's destroying it once and for all. I don't know if insisting on the ideal, no matter how noble, is the right thing to do with it will lead to the death of innocents. I don't know.

Saturday, April 18, 2009

ugh 2

So, another week of work, another week of not writing. My apartment still isn't clean, though I got a bit of it done. The living room, at least, has lots of floor space, and the sink is mostly empty. I did get my federal taxes sent out, so that's good. The state taxes are still sitting around, but I have until the 30th for those, so no worries just yet.

I think this confirms to me that writing really is reliant on momentum. After I let it atrophy for a bit, it just went away, and didn't come back. Even if I don't write much, with this coming week of work I need to just write something everyday, no matter how short or pithy, just to keep the mental faculty working. Knowing that it needs a certain level of practice (and not just knowing it intellectually, but instinctively) is very helpful moving forward. I just need to get the momentum moving again.

Also, I have been reading Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson recently. For some reason reading fiction seems to crowd out the part of my brain that wants to write. It's like I can read, and I can write, but I can't do both, at least I can't feel a zest for doing both. It's very odd, and a predicament I need to find my way around.

In slightly better news, earlier this week, right before leaving for work the vague outline of the entire first book of SK came to me in a weird jump and I wrote the whole page or so down in a notebook. Which it a major step forwards because it gives me, if not the entirety of my story, the areas that I have to color within, which is very edifying.

Friday, April 10, 2009

ugh

Work seems to suck all the life out of me. I just have had no energy, after getting home form work, or waiting to go to work, to do any writing this week. Yesterday, my day off, I just say around all day, read, felt sorry for myself (for a variety of reasons), and read some more. I have been sleeping past noon lately. I think that's part of it. You just can't feel good and motivated when your circadian rhythms are that thrown off. Last night I read in bed until about three, then set my alarm for 10. I have been up a little over an hour now. Been cleaning my apartment, slowly, taking breaks. Everything is covered in a coarse layer of dust. It's very disgusting. No wonder I have been feeling depressed. It's been like renting the place out from someone who died last summer. Getting this place into a hospitable realm is probably the first step.

My taxes aren't done yet either, but they are getting there. The federal basically just needs to be filled out all officially, and the state? well the state is way more complex, and I am just trying to figure out what all the deductions and everything are.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

update

I woke up this morning and, feeling the need to do writing, as a cross between a duty and a necessity, I sat down and wrote the second half of a story I started several months ago. I just pulled up the document file and finished it off. I drank coffee while working on it. Then I had breakfast in the mid afternoon.

It's not done, by any means. There is a rather longish speech that takes up the center of the piece needs to be drastically reedited, just completely rewritten. I think the phrasing is not nearly precise enough, and it doesn't truly fit the character's personality. It should be a bit more rehearsed, and thus more literary. He has given speeches like this before; he has had practice. Right now, it's just kind of a grab bag of information. I was just trying to get down the facts he would say, so that they would be concrete and not floating around in my brain. Now they need to be beaten into shape.

Still, I feel that happy sense of accomplishment. I am particularly proud of the two epilogues to the story's main event, which I think do quite a nice job of commenting on the the main action without being explicit about it, and actually being quite casual in presentation and seemingly beside the point.

Overall, I feel like this forcing myself to write, and to write in my own voice, is doing me quite a bit of good. It's becoming part of my arsenal of activities, and I think I am slowly improving at expressing myself in words at will (slowly), giving myself an easier facility at controlling my meaning with language, because I am getting in touch with the process of engaging that speech faculty. There are still bumps along the way, and I am sure if I went back and read this stuff I would notice all kinds of mistakes and grammatical errors, but there's writing and there's editing and right now I am concentrating on the more essential of the two. It's a process. I need to build the foundation before I start worrying about the decorations.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Futurism, Part 5: Technology

The problem with forecasting in where technology where go is that you just never know where the scientific breakthrough of the future will be, or how they will change the game. Marx's theory of history, it seems to me, has been completely demolished because he could not account for the effects that electricity would have upon society, the creation of computer technology. Gibson managed to include a whole lot of possible future tech in Neuromancer, and even guessed correctly that computers would get smaller, but completely missed the boat on the concept with cell phones (whose existence would create a number of plot holes in the opening sequence). And it's possible, depending on what scientific breakthroughs come, on them radically restructuring society.

What are some areas of scientific interest? Well, the three areas of actual scientific concern are biology, chemistry, and physics, three fields that overlap in various ways. These result in various technological fields, like medicine, telecommunications, information technology, agriculture, robotics (nanotechnology?), genetics, energy production.... Biology and chemistry seem to be mostly applicable to medicine, genetic and agriculture. But physics branches out into a number of fields and possibilities.

Hmm. What are some fields of interest at the moment? Well, there is much investigation into the workings of the mind. Drugs for regulating behavior. There is robotics, our increasingly refined attempts at creating self-sufficient machines. Transportation.

It seems to me, as I outlined earlier, that communication and information devices seem to be centralizing with the help of the internet. We will probably see continuedcross-over between devices until the major difference between phones, laptops and televisions are what purpose they are mainly meant for (idle observance, active continuous physical engagement, audio engagement and casual physical engagement). Probably by midcentury we will see all such devices be completely interchangable in terms of ability, in possession of massive amounts of storage space (laptops with numerous terabytes) , capable of nearly instantaneous response to all commands, and with crystal-clear image quality (streaming video on your laptop with have the detail of shrunken-down 70mm film). Oh, broadband will be free and everywhere.

So take that as a given. Now, honestly, I can't see what unexpected advancements we could come up with in this area. Perhaps new forms of interface. gloves that allow you to manipulate screens. Holographic projections, both as screens and as interfaces (fake keyboards, volume knobs. Goggles/glasses that allow you access to information akin like you are a terminator or something. Tiny earpieces. Beyond that, you are talking implants: man/machine interfaces.

Medicine. Well, you have stem cell research. Gene therapy, for genetic diseases, birth defects, reversing cellular deterioration (slowing/halting aging). Organ cloning (including skin; better for burn victims). Cures for cancer. Better, safer vaccines? Genetic treatments seems to be where it will really be at, although keeping up with viruses will probably be an endless struggle.

Robotics. Man, there could be some freaky shit done with robots. But robots have always seemed like a kind of dead end to me. I mean, either we build robots that can perform a variety of complicated tasks, basically androids, or we don't bother, and just have machines that do things. I just wonder if there is any actually need for android robots. Why have one when you can get a human to do it? What's the economic incentive?

Energy production. Seems like it's the things lying around, right now. Solor panels, wind panels, and so on. Maybe a bit of nuclear power. It's just a question of getting the engineering down so the tools are more effective. Or we actually come up with cold fusion, or some completely different source of power.

Of course there's things like man/machine interface, AI, teleportation, time travel: things that are in science, fiction, but might not actually be possible (well, a lot of those other things might not be possible either).

I suppose you could base a science fiction story set in such a projected future world around the next scientific breakthrough that comes out of nowhere. Use that Clerk Maxwell line to Queen Victoria about how someday you will be able to tax it as the epitaph.

Futurism, Part 4: Economics

Here's an idea.

Assume we have widespread, nigh-universal unionization, and companies are still run by executives. But executives still have a tendency to fuck up. So what happens if a company goes under? Or, what happens if a company violently violates the terms of it's labor contracts?

Suppose a bill is passed where in this case, the government takes control of the company, wipes out the shareholders, and takes the company into receivership. It becomes an adjunct of the government. At this point, the government gives the union the option of buying back the company at some fair price (actual price of assets, cost of wiping out shareholders, I don't know) with the offering of a loan to facilitate the transaction. If the union declines, the company simply continues on nationalized, and then the government either runs the business, breaks it up and sells parts or sells it whole as it sees fit. This creates a heavy impetus for the union to buy back the company.

If the union agrees to buy it back, the corporation is reorganized as a cooperative. Instead of a board made up of chief shareholders or whatever, they are elected by the unions to termed periods (probably without term limits) . The CEO, or president, or what have you is either selected by the board as an employee or is also an elected official. This figure makes all other hiring decisions on down. Or the board does. I don't know quite how they do it up there.

Within this system, every employee down to mail clerk is assigned a certain share or number of shares of the company, which is the degree to which their position grants them ownership of the company. The employees own the company, and the are sole owners. After this point, compensation will probably differ from cooperative to cooperative, but likely each employee with be assigned a base salary adjustable in terms of the relative worth of their work (some jobs are more important than others), or seniority, or other concerns, then a "bonus," which is their share of profits, determined by the percentage their shares constitute within the company. Shares may be added with seniority or importance of position, but they are not allowed to be traded for capital. Different companies will probably come to their own decision about how much of profits will go into bonuses, or advertising or expansion, or if they will even bother with a base salary or just pay everyone from some percentage of income. Different companies and union cultures will dictate different things.

The existence of these cooperatives will lead to the encouragement for the creation of outside cooperatives, where workers or even people creating a start-up, albeit people loyal to socialist principles, will make their new ventures nascent cooperatives. Government loans in starting up new ventures will be more generous to such institutions.

Also, after the next financial crisis, or whichever one comes after Single Payer, we'll just nationalize all the major financial institutions, and run them like cooperatives, as an effective part of the national government. Thus will credit flow without need for a profit margin. It will be like the postal service.

Now, how to account for and continue innovation? One, we will boost funding for public universities, making them capable of shouldering a larger portion of the innovation pool. Systems will be set up to make sure that individuals are rewarded for their contributions to various fields, though with the government, instead of corporations, controlling the patents, it will be easier for useful drugs to inexpensively aid those in need. There will also be a large variety of grants offered to private individuals to encourage the pursuit of possibly idiosyncratic topics not directly covered by the larger university systems.

There will be a full time welfare unemployment wage, set at what is determined as subsistence level. That is, you can eat and afford somewhere to sleep on it, but not much more, so you should probably get a job if you want to live comfortably. And of course to do so would be frowned upon, though many burgeoning artists begin their careers is such a state, arting all day in hovels with the bare essential devices of their trades.

You will still have to get car insurance in order to buy a car, and you will still have to pay for it out of pocket. It's your toy.

By the way, this will all occur in the U.S., where power will, obviously, reside more and more with the Federal government, though decentralized across it's various webs of agencies. Europe will stay quite decentralized, akin to America under the Articles of Confederation. The various countries will either stay much as they are now or undergo widespread nationalization and hence rationing. Or maybe that's just in the eastern bloc. I don't really know the nature of Europe well enough to really think where they will go. A part of we suspects many of them will stay in the social democracies they have now, seeing no need to change, while ironically America will have become more socialistic, while still being more individualistic (personally I don't see these values as in conflict in any way). While Europe focuses on something like redistribution, the system America arrives at will be based on making sure individuals received just compensation for the actual value of their work. America might even have a flat tax, at least for the range of incomes possible within government or cooperative work, based on such reasoning (or it might be better to say, because the system is accurate). Collectivism vs. individual equality. Or something.

The American Cooperative Act will be passed sometime in the last quarter of the twenty-first century.

What do you mean "we," white man?

So I saw this link to a discussion of the political decline of the white male and, truth be told, I felt a little bit of a twinge of loss, then felt guilty about it. I guess no one wants to feel that they are losing something, even if it's something they don't really think they should have. Or maybe I just have issues.

Anyways, I clicked on the link, and read this. After some talk about all the people in power who are either not white or not male, it states:
Missing from their powerful ranks is the benevolent, yet stern retrosexual white guy prototype, someone at home in a country club locker room, but with enough self-confidence to get out and ask for directions in the ‘hood. He enjoys nigiri sushi, but he’s still comfortable with his own chest hair. By day, he feels his way through an Eastern bazaar like Simon LeBon, and by night he takes a nightcap with the ladies like a randy Bruce Campbell.
But I am not that guy. I have never been in a country club, nor it's locker room, nor would I have felt comfortable there. I am not some manly, upperclass badass. When people talk about white men, it seems like they are always talking about some other person, someone I don't know and don't even see. Some phantom.

It seems like it is always the case that when people start talking about white men, they immediately think of someone completely different. I am getting tired of being lumped in with people I have nothing in common with.

But then, maybe I shouldn't take it too hard. Maybe, next time someone talks about the downfall of the white male, I should just think, "Good. Fuck that asshole."

Futurism, Part 3

Where was I? So, I was rambling on and on about societal changes, and which way I thought they would go, specifically, the question of whether what seem from the modern perspective to be categorical cases of wrongdoing could be, through future changes in societal assumptions, be considered acceptable, or part of a new civil rights struggle. I kind of want to sidestep that question at the moment and focus on some other issues. I think that any possibility of such changes would have to be predicated on long-term societal shifts. there would probably be, in the near future, some kind of Golden Age, or calm period, where the basic reforms in civil rights and sexual equality are codified before any such issues become the topic of actual societal interest (as opposed to sources of prurient sensationalism).

God, I feel like I am disappearing up my own asshole. It this really the way I talk?

...Anyways, I think I lot of other events unrelated fields will happen before society might reach the point of legalizing pedophilia, so it's probably best to figure out what else might be going on in the meantime. That might determine whether or not we actually get at a point where such things are considered. (Although perhaps it should be assumed that during this cooling-off period there are clandestine pedophile and polygamous subcultures growing up in secret? Maybe that's your point of contention in a story set in the "good" future: that there is no final frontier. Also, I forgot about nudists.) I think we can pin about 2050 to the beginning of such a period, probably at the latest, and such a period will last at least until around 2100, and probably beyond that.

So, let's turn back to economics. I see two planes to this issue; there's national economics and there's global economics. On the global front, I think you are going to see a gradual rise in the standard of living as the local cultures adopt technological and organizational concepts first developed by the West. This will go on onto these countries reach some type of internal equilibrium and are able to start feeding back into the system (contributing scientists, art, academic institutions, technological breakthrough, etc.).

On the local front, like I said earlier, I think that there will come increased unionization, which will lead to higher wages, and in turn a higher level of civic engagement. Health Care will become socialized. These things seem certain, on some level, to me.

But the question is, what comes next?

More Futurism

So one thing i have been thinking about is how no science fiction stories imagine a pleasant future. Well, I have really been giving that much thought, since the reason for that is obvious—pleasant futures don't really lend themselves well to conflict—as to what such a pleasant future might entail. What would be a conceivable future world that we could look forward to living in? That wouldn't just be a sci-fi setting, but that could be an accurate projection of the future, to some degree? Assuming the world will actually get better, which I kind of do, and that there is an actual direction to history, what kind of future society are we looking at? What would be a conceivable endpoint, or at least goal, in terms of a future society.

I don't mean far future either. One of my feelings is that any possible future that could be arrived at, that is, any society, would have encoded in it mechanism to ensure scientific and artistic advancement. We will not get an End of History scenario, where we settle down to one, stable, form of society, and then we never budge from that, ever again. (It's funny, how when you think about it, how conservative Marx's vision really is.) However, it seems to me that there is a certain trajectory in terms of terms of economic and societal reforms, that something like the the "Liberal Agenda" will come about in the end, it's just that the Liberal Agenda keeps mutating, so it's hard to keep track of what it actually might be. Of course, any possible future, in order to be realistic along these lines, would need to be believably based upon a foreseeable trajectory from the present (otherwise you are dealing in Fantasy).

I mean, let's start out with some simple things shall we? I assume that eventually we are just going to have to have some kind single payer healthcare. Medical cost will just be so expensive, that some attempt will be made to eliminate the cost, and cutting out the profit margin seems a good way to do that. And of course, there will be increased, nearly universal unionization, leading to higher wages for all (at least in America). This, in turn, will cut into the profit margin. (God, I wish I knew more about economics.) Kind of hard to figure out what the step it after that.

Then there is social issues. The problem I have is that I feel like you can always fail to take something into account. Part of me thinks that We have almost reached the endpoint in terms of civil rights causes. Just where is there to go from here? But I bet the Romans thought the same thing, right. But if there is still some social just causes unturned, which ones? Who is there really left out there being oppressed? What additional dimensions of human experience have not been noticed? There's race, gender, religion, and sexual proclivities, right? Race, or nationalism, will probably be a continuing source of discord until everyone is brown, but I think in many countries it will soon fade to non-importance in day to day interaction. The President of the United States is a black guy. Talking about post-racialism is bullshit, but that doesn't mean our conception of our relationship with the concept of race isn't going to go under an overhaul over the next 4-8 years. Religion, who fucking cares. sexual proclivities? I just doubt that furies are going to be the next GLBT. Fetishes in general be become kind of humdrum and not important. Lot of taboos and peoples' interest in caring about or stigmatizing certain taboos will just go away. Once gay relationships are normalized, that shit will open like floodgates, and no one will care about fetishes, whether we're talking Furries or S&M. It will be like caring about a person's favorite ice cream flavor (mine is vanilla, natch). By 2050, no one gives a fuck what you do in bed. Probably the only sexual habits I see keeping a stigmatization are things like pedophilia, bestiality, and polygamy. Basically anything that could be read as an imposition onasnother conciousness that is unable to give valid consent. Though I wonder how long such things could hold on, especially if concepts such as gender start to fall apart and sex comes to be less loaded with meaning or value. Bestiality will always be a somewhat nasty violation of animals, but polgamy? Just a way to ratify polyamorous relationships, the way we are now ratifying same-sex ones. Pedophilia is a bit more fucked up, but, the ancient Greeks did it, right? Could we concievably return to a state so sexually lax that it became acceptable. Is NAMBLA the next gay rights movement? Allen Ginsburg seemed to think so. On the other hand, that might actually be a moral aberration that has actually been corrected for by Western Individual Liberty, not something harmless that has been supressed by intolerant mores. Still, if Socrates fucked Plato... (did he? could people confirm that, or am I just imagining that shit from stuff I read and heard? Man the Greeks sure were odd.)

More later.

Blah

Yeah, well work took a lot out of me this week. Everyday I got home and didn't feel like thinking or creating or anything. I just sat around and zoned out, drank a whiskey or a beer, or both, or several of both. Wednesday night I had a borderline psychotic episode after being in a freezer for over half an hour. I still wasn't really over the bad vibes from that for the rest of the next day, and then I sleep schedule got extra special messed up. Which, in general, I sleep schedule has been of late. maybe I need to get on a schedule. A set time to go to bed and wake up might be me some good.

Today I tuned my drums for the first time in ages. I even put the heads back on the bottom of the toms. They sound much better now. The resonances are in tune with one another, each tom tightened 360 degrees past finger tight. I left the back off the bass drum, since I keep having to take pieces off the back to use on the front back the front tighteners get jammed. I wonder why that keeps happening. Perhaps I have to loosen the drumheads peicemeal, instead of completel detuning one before the next? Actually, all my top drum heads are getting hard to turn. I wonder if I can order some more down at the local music shop. Maybe tomorrow I will go down to the music shop, then go sit in the library and read books. It is unfortunate that there are no big comfy chairs at the library.

I also need to buy garbage bag tags.

Another thing I did today. I cooked fish. I got out the broiler, which I have never used before, and mixed lemon salt in olive oil and slathered in on the fish, then cooked it at 315 for about 14 minutes. I also made about a pound of mash potatoes, which I will be eating all week. I put so much butter and pepper into those bad boys that you don't even need gravy or bean juice with them, they are so delicious on their own.

I have been making a lot of sandwiches lately. They are surprisingly easy to make, tasty, and filling. Now I know why mom was always pushing them. I get Pepperidge Farm whole grain bread, which is just the most flavorful stuff you could imagine, just incredibly hearty. You feel like are are really eating a loave. I use organic lettuce. I need to start buying freshly sliced meat, though. The recent On-Sale packaged stuff I bought is terrible.

...There is now gay marriage in the state I live in. That is just so fucking weird to me.

Monday, March 30, 2009

Commas

If you are writing a sentence with a lot of commas, a lot of defendant clauses, a lot of lists, maybe a lot just a lot or steps or sections, and for whatever reason you do not feel it useful to cross over into using semi-colons as a part of sentence construction, I would hang back on the use of commas, because the using of commas to divide up each, particular, phrase, is just headache-inducing, and brevity and clarity would be greatly enhanced by fluency.

Sunday, March 29, 2009

bits

Been doing lots of random writing today. Working on bits and parts of stories, mostly in outline form, trying to summarize and rework old legends. Has been slow going, as I haven't wanted to put steps down unless they fit, so lots of pacing about and circling around and typing when the spirit moves me. Also much reading of the sources and sublimating that information.

Also been doing laundry and reading The Left Hand of Darkness. It's much better than I remember it. Not really slow like I felt it was before. I think maybe I was just still miffed about the Doctorow kerfluffle, and the rhetorical device she begins with (the narrator explains why they are writing the story), still a pet peeve of mine, is less obnoxious then I remember it being. It's funny, the book is most often sighted for it's treatment of gender, but the wintry setting and alien and pangalactic cultures seem to play a much larger role in my impression of the book than the biology of the "aliens." Also, Le Guin really does seem to have a thing for making her characters not white. Not bad, of course, but quite uncommon.

Living Robot

Apropos this post, this is fucking awesome.

Seek and ye shall find.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Running

I think I may have been over thinking this writing thing or perhaps I am right about getting the faucet running. For awhile, I have been convinced that writing needs to work orally, but this means I have tried to write slow and deliberately, thinking carefully over words. But if good writing sounds like good speech, then perhaps my best voice is the voice in my head, and that means that the best voice to write towards is the voice in my head. Worry about things like perfect punctuation later, for now I need to get the raw sound of me when I speak, or more purely, the sound, the cadence, of me when I think, the tumbling snickering of my mind unwinding. Perhaps that is what I need, what I should unleash. Perhaps that is how it should sound, should read. I don't know. But it is nice not to overthink it for a bit, and to write something down, because I don't think I can do writing as careful arbitration. I don't have a mind for contracts and stipulations, but for spontaneity and effulgence. Or not, I don't know. Maybe I will end up somehwere else, somewhere that seems careful and deliberate. It is new to try to write steadily. I hope it holds up. I hope I keep it up.

I know it makes me happy though. I know it is easier, and that makes it better. The progress makes it better.

I can't believe

that it is snowing today. It's March! Hare's are supposed to out! I have been hot when out driving around wearing my spring jacket! I rode my bike comfortably to work earlier this month!

Weather.

Futurism

So one thing I was thinking about lately was electronic devices and the effect they would have on society, and really what approach we as humans would have to information, what tools we would use to access information.

It seems to me like there are maybe three sets of devices that aren't going way. There is the large of screen, such as your television or a really large computer monitor or set of monitors. Perhaps large projection mechanisms such as movie screens. We are always going to want screens to view certain bits of information in a very large format, because sometimes we will just want that type of immersion experience. So that's not going anywhere. Then there are laptop devices, basically small portable screens with access to a variety of functions. And then the small handheld device, which is increasing taking on a whole plethora of functions, from phones to music storage to accessing the Internet. In ways it's more functional than a laptop, just be virtue of being smaller, and it can provide for most of the functions of a laptop. But pressing small buttons on a tiny screen would get maddening for any long-term, serious work. I can't imagine someone writing a novel or short story or computer code or term paper for hours on end on a tiny handheld device, or even watching certain types of videos with any degree of comfort. A laptop device with always be a necessity for a certain type of professional, although I can actually see certain classes opting to go without them for only the iphone device. And of course there might be some type of desire for a midsized device, like a kindle, something for the reading of long-format works, but that might just be a stop-gap device until people get over their cultural attachment to the codex form, and I can't see anyone opting for such a size when the other options allow for a greater variety of function and ease, especially if the mid-size device, like the kindle, remains confined to only a narrow range of uses. (Computers could be turned into cellphones as easily as cellphones have been turned into computers.)

So I think that those devices will remain around for quite some time. What I am curious about, though, it what the further advances will be made in terms of information access. I saw some video somewhere about some kind of wearable device that would give access to a whole array of information through the use of a camera around the neck. And what would happen if we finally developed technology that would allow a direct electronic chip, brain interface, like the kind of technology we see Neuromancer or the Matrix? Would we be able to download information, surf the Internet, write documents, answer phone calls, all inside our heads? How would this change our culture, the way we interact with information?

This would obviously require some form of surgery. So would our culture split between those who have access to external devices and those who have direct mental access to electronic processors, creating an additional class, capable of affording the elective surgery, creating a third class of technology users. William Gibson has said that the future is here, it just isn't spread out evenly. Right now there are those with access to electronic devices, and those too destitute to afford them. Then of course there are those that are that live without access to any form of electronic technology at all, your present day hunter-gatherers. I wonder how long they are for this world. I wonder, perhaps, if technology developed that allowed for such electronic/organic interfaces, if such technology is even possible (does the nature of human consciousness really allow for such a thing?) there might be some type of socio-political movement to make it widespread available, maybe to enforce government subsidization of the surgical process, so that it's existence doesn't lead the creation of an impermeable overclass, and not of political/economic movers and shakers, your Bush's, Clinton's, Senators, World Leaders and Businessmen, but an actual, leisure class in possession of advanced wealth and capabilities, more like Metropolis than any cyberpunk setting. I suppose it depends on how far along in social democratization we are. And I don't just mean in terms of the U.S., although it's possible we could have such split occur here too, especially if the technology occurs in a setting without Single Payer Healthcare or strong unionization, but in First World/Third World terms, too. I mean, I could see us having a West hardwired into the Internet at all times, completely against an East and South America that exists without such trappings, and thus getting continually outpaced in technology by leaps and bounds. What would such distance in wealth and information bring about? Is such a thing not already, happening? Would we see the widespread rejection of materialism, a move towards spiritual concerns? Contentment of being left out? Surely there would be those who would see the injustice of the situation, if not wanting to be hardwired, at least in terms of the material comfort such technologies, allowed (I can also see a rejection of such elective surgeries occurring among religious conservatives and animal rights activists, environmentalist, and the anti-corporate movement on the left*) and would respond with violence and terrorism, perhaps causing some kind of environmental, biological or nuclear catastrophe. That would set up your post-apocalyptic setting right there.

*I think Gibson actually portrayed such characters in "Johnny Mnemonic." And Neuromancer features evangelicals as terrorists.

Faucet

My biggest problem with writing, I think, it that I treat it too much like a sacrosanct endeavor, like some holy quest or ritual that must be set aside to be undertaken only at set times. I write something, and the whole time I am pushing towards conclusion, to bring the ritual to a solemn close, so I can cease the tension and breath easy.

It is like, I thought last night, like a faucet. I want to turn it on, and then turn it off, and do something else. But when I turn it off, it all just goes down the drain, and I have nothing left, and then I come back, and I have to turn it back on again, so I think, no, I will not use the water right now, wait for when the time is right. The water must be saved for when absolutely necessary. This is what I think especially with blog posts. They must be neat and orderly and when finished, I have done my job, and should do something else. But if I don't leave the water running, then it can't overflow, and I can't find my current, or carve my riverbed. I can't be a faucet, I need to be a gushing spring.

The Real Me

I can't write. I don't know how to write. When I'm writing, I feel like I have to trick myself. I have to pretend to be doing other things, like taking notes or making things up in my head, or just typing randomly whatever pops in there. When I like something that spins around in my head for a bit, whenever I try to set it down, it feels wrong, like a copy, and the real one exists somewhere else of in the ether. Notes just need to keep being refined and refined, and I never know when they are done. Whatever pops up as I type similarly lacks polish. When I try to writes something well, like sit down and really commit to writing something well, the first time, it is like trying to sigh-read a symphony for performance in front of 200 bodies. And they are all invisible. How nerve-racking is it to play for invisible people?

Last night, I was lying in bed and feeling blue, up late in the early morning after napping in the middle evening, and I had a head buzzing full of ideas and words that I was too tired to take down (besides the computer was off) and I was working on a story and liking it and feeling good before finally forcing myself to sleep, and then I woke up and my dream-mind was gone and it was boring old immobile me to greet me again, and I tried to write the words the way I thought they had to be written and it didn't work and I felt disheartened again, all over, just like I knew, while laying there on the other side, just as I knew I would be. The real me, or false me that sits in for me when I am awake and rested, just cannot do it. He is paralyzed and fearful. Perhaps the me that fades in in early morning waking hours when my body pulls towards sleep, perhaps he is only a phantom. Perhaps he is not as clever as he thinks he is, as he has convinced the rested mind to think he is. Perhaps what he thinks he thinks is clever just just a result of absent critical faculties, eaten up by dream logic. Perhaps there is no me that knows how to do this. But the glimpses, the feelings of fluency, they make me so happy, but the endless arid plains to wander through to reach the mirages, they are unbearable.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Dollhouse

So, I just watched the first episode on Hulu. It was quite good. Bullet points!
  • The show seems to be set up for an overarching narrative, what with the leaking memories, and FBI agent on the agencies tail. Oh, and the naked dude at the end. This all seems to entail some kind of endpoint, like Lost or Prison Break, and that puts the show on shaky ground. Either the show reaches it's conclusion, and then can't end and sputters out, or the show continuously puts off it's conclusion, diluting the narrative. Does Whedon have a set number of years in mind. Does have an idea what cna happen after those years are done? Then again, maybe Whedon is just throwing in enough steps that he can pull the show towards a first-season conclusion, if it gets cancelled (a likely possibility). And he's good enough with U-turns that he can keep this thing going for longer than he originally planned. that FBI agent is as likely to get shot in the head as bust open the Dollhouse. Actually, probably more likely.
  • It's great to see Eliza Dushku in something again. And Amy Acker. In fact, the cast in general seems really strong. I really like Olivia Williams, who seems to have found her character the fastest.
  • The writing still seems a little off. Way to much vague ruminations concerning the show's themes. Let that stuff rise up naturally. Also, not enough quips. Although "Dude, it's like Five!" was pretty good.
  • I am glad they didn't have echo kill someone in the first episode. They need to milk that when it happens.
  • Long term questions: What is the deal with the scars on Acker's face, and does it have anything to do with the tech guy? What's the deal with the naked guy? Was that Echo's family? What did she join the Dollhouse to avoid? Will the FBI agent find them (yeah, probably)? How soon, and what happens when he does? Where will the flashes of memories come into play? Are they unique to Echo, or the result of a glitch in their system? If the FBI guy gets shot, will Echo be the one who does it?