Luminous Beings Are We, Not This Crude Matter

So, Irvin Kershner has just died. 

It's so odd.  Last night, I had just watched Empire again.  I had watched it too see what my normal DVD would look like on a  blue-ray player, since I had watched it earlier on my normal DVD player through my new LCD television, which I had bought after watching Star Wars and Empire on my old television and DVD player.  I had actually been pushed to buy the LCD TV and blue-ray player because of  the way Empire had looked, and watching it last night, on a forty-inch screen, in so much detail I felt like I was watching it for the first time, I spent the whole time analyzing all my favorite bits to it, like the now-famous "I love you"/"I know" exchange (due almost entirely to Kershner), reveling in the old school special effects, the performance of the actors, and I realized, after I had basically spent a thousand dollars so that I could watch this movie in higher quality, that it was probably my favorite movie.  So it's incredibly weird to read the next day that the man I saw at the time as most responsible for making it so had died literally within hours of that. 

Rest in Peace, Mr.  Kirshner.  And thank you. 

PAYPAL IS THE WORST COMPANY IN THE WORLD

Because I don't mind doing a favor for John Cole. 

Fragment for later

"Greetings to the last soul to speak to my father while living."

Jack looked up.  Floating out from the forest was a bowl of thorny horns, a stag's crown, growing out from a head almost human.  The face was furry, and ancient in a way beyond age, bearded and chiseled, everything a dark nutmeg in the pale moonlight, crossed by shadowbranches.  The face was bound to a body, the bulk of a bull in the mold of a man, massive and mighty.  The apparition passed from the forest, walking with a cadence of one entranced, but the beastman's eyes were as lucid as lakeripples. 

"He has rejoined us now, and is once more beyond us all."  The voice was whistle of wind through wood, breath across jugs.  Deep and warm and rich and soft.

This makes no sense, thought Jack.  He stared at the creature before him, rising up above like an ocean wave headed to shore, and felt a creeping sense of the familiar, and of the unreal. 

"Do I know you, sir?" asked Jack of the creature.  

"We have not met, though we know of each other.  You have been told of me, by journeymen across the sea.  I am the Horned One.  The Second One.  The Good One."

"I see," said Jack.  Suddenly he wished he had a weapon.  The party was close, but now oh so far away.  "Well then—hail, sir.  Well met."

Mnemopolis

I have no idea who, if anybody, still reads or has ever read this blog, but I figure it is a good move to point out that I have started a new blog.  It is called Mnemopolis, and it will be nothing but fiction, and one specific piece of fiction at that, told over a series of posts going up every Friday.  I will probably post here from time to time, too, if the mood moves me, but for the most part this is it.  I don't really have anything substantial to say on the internet that I don't say in the comments on Cogitamus, (whether it's on-topic or not) so why bother retyping anything over here?  The rest of the time I should just be writing fiction.

I like the idea of posting Mnemopolis on a blog too.  Of any of my various projects, it's the one that seems most suited.  Besides, the world needs more fiction.  There are plenty of essays, and memoirs out there, but fiction, I think we are starved for.  It's become so precious that we don't know that we aren't getting enough of it, because we get so much other writing—for free.  So, if people are going to give navel-gazing away on the internet, then by gum, someone needs to start giving away stories. 

I aim to start a movement.

The absence of art is the death of the soul

I have just gone through one of my longest fallow periods, both in terms of writing and in terms of this blog, and I have to say that I think not writing is legitimately dangerous for me.  Forget art, forget prestige, or notoriety, forget trying to ever make this my profession.  Going without writing actually makes me feel physically ill.  I think the accumulated anxiety that comes from feeling either that I am not moving forward with my life, or that I am not simply creating something is causing actual physiological harm.  So I need to get back in the swing of things, working on things, not because of some larger life-goal purpose, not because it will get me where I want to go, (such a destination has been seeming more and more distant lately, but that might in large part be the anxiety talking) but because I need to be doing it just to feel good about myself right now.  Otherwise, I start feeling bad, and then I don't want to write, and then I don't write, and then I feel worse, and then I go a month without posting or completing a story and I just feel awful, awful, awful, all the time.  And that needs to stop.

So, what have I done in the meantime? 

Well, I have been cleaning my apartment.  Deep cleaning.  Like, selecting a four foot square section or and just getting all the dust and junk out of there and organizing everything and putting things away.  I have done most of the apartment now, like that, basically everything except the bathroom (which is thus now a real mess) but of course there has been some decay in earlier parts that needs to be addressed, and I still have tons of papers and mail and manuscript pages just shoved in boxes and shoved up against my bed (which I didn't clean under, at least not all the way).  But in all the apartment it much cleaner and friendlier and spacious to reside in, and I am starting to learn some good habits in terms of picking up after myself.  It has been much more pleasant to live around here after starting that project (which I have been tending to on days when I can blast my music and leave my door open and let the spring air in). 

Also, I have made a resolution to start eating less meat.  Not for any political reasons, just health.  I always feel out of sorts in my own skin, and my youthful metabolism is bound to slow down.  Plus I have just been feeling sort of undone, in some way.  So, I have been eating more grains, more salads.  Hopefully, eventually, I can cut out other unhealthy types of food, but I am taking this in a gradual manner.  My weakness is strong.  (So much of my time out here in Iowa has felt like this very gradual, three steps forwards, two steps back kind of building myself back together into some kind of complete person that I have never been before but might have been in some better version of the world.  Moving more and more towards the vegetarian side of omnivorism seems like a part of that.  I have always, in my heart of hearts, admired vegetarianism, while disdaining it, since it has seemed like something that existed outside of the bound of my own willpower.  But it would be nice to move towards it, even if I am only able to decrease the distance by half each time.)  I have also been trying to eat more fish instead of mammal, but fish is expensive and so that hasn't been going so well. 

In terms of music listening, one neat thing is that I bought a new speaker system.  With a subwoofer.  My first subwoofer!  It's great.  I love bass.  That's what I was referring to when I was talking about blasting my music: just turning on my new stereo system after hooking it up to my computer, finding a comfortable volume and just luxuriating in the crystal clarity of the sound while doing something else.  Black Sabbath never sounded better. 

In terms of new stuff, I have been listening to a lot of Amanda Palmer, both solo and past and present projects.  The Dresden Dolls.  Evelyn Evelyn.  I have both the DD albums (still need to get the EP) and the EE disc, but Who Killed Amanda Palmer? is still (I hope) in the mail.  Often I just find a playlist on Youtube and put that on, since almost all her solo stuff has a video made for it, and a lot of her live performances have their own unique charm.  I am sad that she has replaced the Pogues as my music act of the moment, and I don't feel like I was quite done with them, but that's life.  I like her voice.  I like her piano playing.  In fact, I think she had become my personal favorite piano player.  She is not as esoteric as Tori Amos.  There is more of an interests in "riffs" or what the piano equivalent would be, but there is still a lot of improvisation.  She plays piano a lot like Hendrix plays guitar (although I wouldn't go so far as to say she is the greatest ever, like I insist Hendrix is, but their approach has certain similarities.  The products of committed lovers of their instrument who just love doing whatever they can with it.  It's not dissimilar from how I like to play drums).  Also, she's engaged to Neil Gaiman, who I have always felt an odd connection to, ever since he turned my name into my favorite Sandman character, so there's that.  There is a theatricality to her approach to things, and she certainly has a love of the dramatic, but, like the Decemberists, its the kind of theatricality that is adopted so as to seek a deeper emotional level.  Through the veil of drama, something more powerful than the immediate and raw can be viewed.  Though it is veiled, it is still present, and the exactitude of the dimmed meaning is often stronger than the truths that others try to arrive at through authenticity.  Whatever that is.