It's official now, yo:

Click here to listen. Official first broadcast will be next week or the week after, depending on how fast I learn not to fail at using the studio. Score!


PS: The artwork here is by the brain-eatingly awesome Mia Makila.

"..."

An internet writing exercise I just thought of:

-Go to WikiQuote
-Click "random page"
-Paste the first quote on each page into a blank document, get about 3 or so
-Imagine the subject matter/story of the novel that these quotes could be an epigraph for.

Here are the ones that just came up for me:

"I got soul but I'm not a soldier "
- The Killers

"The limit to our growth is our ability to get the best talent on the planet and get them working on the toughest computing problems around."
-Wayne Rosing, Former Google VP of Engineering

"Wondering at your good fortune that all your children look like me?"
-Lancelot, King Arthur (2004)

So far as I can tell, this book would involve adultery, cockiness, overcoming cowardice, the internet, business expansion, trying to do really hard stuff. Maybe some cyberpunk would get mixed up in there too, I get the feeling that the novel would be like Neuromancer + Meet Bill. Sounds promising. I'll sell the idea to an agent and get a 99999999$ advance + movie tie-in rights, then start the much-awaited sequel, Son of Virtual Accountant Family Man Hero. Maybe make it a trilogy or quadrilogy.

Rhyming is not evil.

Crazy artists get the press
Lazy artists get to rest
Cheesy artists silver spoon
Sleazy artists paint the poon

Tortured artists drink the beers
Nurtured artists thank the peers
Weepy artists hark despair
Creepy artists grease the hair

Pomo artists hate the term
Homo artists get the perm
Prison artists poke the skin
Jizm artists get too thin

Healthy artists quite uncouth,
Wealthy artists ain't the truth
Modest artists play the fool
Every artist boasts the cool

Some thoughts on taste, Infinite Jest, and being wowed.

Been getting quite a few rejections lately, which is alright. I'm pretty sure it builds character. I sent out a load of submissions at the end of the semester that I'm still waiting to hear back on. Haven't been writing or editing daily as much as I should be. Damn being home, it's so great/lethargic. I think being at Syracuse is better for my productivity. There's just a greater sense of urgency about getting stuff done, both schoolwise and funwise. At home, I just want to walk around in the woods or vegetate.

Wandering around in the woods for a while is a great thing to do after finishing a book. If you've never done it, try sometime. Helps to create equilibrium, I think, balancing the mental voyage with a physical one. Bonus points if the book itself involves wandering and/or the woods and nature, etc. McCarthy is good for this.

My radio show, which has been in the works for a while, will initialize pretty soon, either at the end of this month or the beginning of next month. There'll be more word on that once the official times and dates are figured out, but I've been spending many hours getting together a tentative programming schedule for the spring, and it looks pretty sweet. I'm kind of anxious but mostly excited to see how it'll play out, and I'm hopeful that it will work in the creative interests of everyone involved with it.

More on that soon.

I started Hyperion by Dan Simmons the other day, which felt kind of typical sci-fi-ish at the very beginning, but grew into something surprising and entertaining a little ways in. It's not as language-oriented as all the other stuff I've been reading lately, which is alright, I think its important to of cleanse your mental reading-palate book by book so you're not careening headfirst through a clusterfuck of language that puts you at risk of burning out your literary fuse. Kind of like how they serve a palate-cleansing dish at fancy dinners. The same thing goes for books.

Finished Infinite Jest a few weeks ago. Damn,

The most rewarding part of Infinite Jest, after a month and a half of working through it, was the moment right after I read the last sentence and I sat and just stared at my fireplace for about half an hour, semi-catatonic with the sensation of having just finished a very long, exciting voyage that had stranded me at an unfamiliar location that was unsettling and astounding at the same time.

I would compare my state of mind after finishing Infinite Jest to the face that Dave from 2001 makes after traveling BEYOND THE INFINITE. (no bad pun intended).

My dad told me something hilarious after watching Inglourious Basterds for the second time. He had watched it on his laptop, with a media player that, unknown to him then, could alter the speed of the video playback. He told me he had loved the ending after the first time he watched it, but the second time, he wasn't as impressed and was confused – because the ending played at its normal speed. As it turned out, he had accidentally set the playback speed to half its normal rate during the climax of the movie. Everything that happened, from the theater scene until the end of the film, happened at half the speed it was meant to happen. The building burned down in slow motion. All character dialogue was completely incomprehensible in its comically monster-like lowness. He said that at the time, he had seriously thought Tarantino had made the ballsy choice to render the entire ending sequence of his film in slow motion. It wasn't until he watched it a second time that he realized he had seen it wrong. Guess which ending he was more blown away by.

He told me he had known, even before the ending had happened, that he would find the finale amazing. The combination of critics talking about the ending, friends and colleagues talking about how great it was, and hell, just the enjoyable buildup of the movie itself, created a scenario: He would not simply enjoy the ending – he would refuse to let himself be disappointed by it. How many times have you read something by an author you're enjoyed before and given him benefit-of-the doubt for doing something that you would mock and criticize any other author for doing? There's really no such thing as uniquely individual taste, because everyone's taste is somehow influenced by outside forces, and while the things we love or hate do partially come from our own inner being, they are also just as much, if not more, influenced by the outside environmental factors that shape our tastes as well as our person in general.

All this made me think pretty intensely about books and movie I had been blown away by, but more importantly, things that I had been told in advance I would be blown away by, where there was maybe some subconscious incentive to be blown away sheerly because of the recommendation. This tends to be a pretty universal issue for anyone - the issue of how much of your taste is really your own individual taste, and how much of it is influenced by cultural tips that have potential to hotwire the way you come to be wowed by something.

This is especially easy to see in the information age, where an infinite sprawl of criticism sites, blogs, and all manner of arts journals have the potential to create tons of micro-niches in which any recommendation will be heeded by its audience as the absolute truth. Look at the latest series of albums that Pitchfork Media is harking as the Best New Music, then look at the Itunes page for each of those albums. If Pitchfork is recommending the most po-thuggin' hip-hop release alongside the whiniest indie-pop album, then iTunes will recommend the two albums alongside each other as if they shared an identical genre, all because a dedicated readership has aligned their own taste with anything Pitchfork recommends. We're all able to relate to this pattern in some way, and pretty much everyone is guilty of liking something largely because we were told to like it, or because we heard that we would like it. That's not to say we're all mindless sheep, we're just people, and in varying degrees, people can be influenced, some easier than others.

Pierre Bourdieu talksa bout all this on this in his essay The Aristocracy of Culture, talking about the role that taste plays in 'cultural capital,' that the discerning sensibility that a person acquires in distinguishing between 'good and bad art' is almost entirely based around environmental factors, and that class and the economic conditions of one's upbringing are perhaps the greatest influential factors on the types of taste a person acquires. The difference between your well-to-do friend making a thoughtful comment on the novel he just read and the maintenance guy telling you about the fine-ass titties he saw in Titanic has very little to do with a person's own personal preference, but rather with the conditions that created that preference.

If you find this interesting, I highly recommend reading the Aristocracy of Culture in its entirety. The translated prose is mighty dense and kind of hard to slog through at times, but it's worth it for the points Bourdieu makes. Hey, maybe you're like me and enjoy the challenge of a good slog.

Getting back to Infinite Jest now. Parts of the book hit me on a particularly personal level because I could relate to the situation of going to the same school that your family ran – my dad was head of the english dept. at my high school. There were a few points where I really connected with Hal because of that. But the fact that I had been born into a family in which this situation existed was completely beyond my control – hence, an outside factor that affected how I related to the work. Not to mention, being born into a family that's inherently prone to literature-devouring was also key to enjoying the book.

The factors that influence how you 'get into' something, how one particular thing piques your interests or how you discover what you enjoy doing, are owed in part to your own actions, temperament, etc. but they are also outside your control in a lot of ways. Has anyone, from childhood, consciously sought out a particular thing that will largely inspire the direction of what you do in life? Have you ever sat down and thought, “I am going find a random catalyst of an event that will unexpectedly inspire me to do things and pursue a thread of life I would be completely ignorant of otherwise?” Sure, you can consciously put yourself in a setting that may affect an aspect of your person, but who knows what completely random turn of events you may be missing by doing that? What bag of money falling from the sky did Thoreau dodge by going to write Walden out in the middle of nowhere?

This probably isn't the most original subject to post about, but hey, it's the information age. I'm also making up for all the posting I haven't been doing lately.

Old Stuff

As a result of a fun little digital attic-browsing adventure, I found “The Dead Man's Burden”, the first full length short story I ever wrote (after I had first seriously started 'writing stuff.'), and have since been going back over it. There's really not much that's made me cringe so far, since being 17 wasn't really that long ago, and the more uber-adolescent, fantasy-fulfillment type stories I had already written had been expunged via writing fanfiction (Shh, dark secret). Not that I'm in awe of it either, it's still full of the same issues that plague my current fiction writing, but still, reading it has been great fun, and I think I might try to go for the task of giving it a long overdue revision. Wouldn't the 17 year old me - who left junior prom early to finish writing the first draft of it - be proud? No, probably just horny.

At the time of the story's writing, I was still pretty fanatical about my two earliest influences - China Mieville and George R.R. Martin – and I hadn't really read much outside of them. I was more or less balls-to-the-wall set on writing speculative fiction. I had written a few things outside of that story, early chapters of a novel set in the same universe, a few miscellaneous short stories, and an endless volume of notes on the world I wanted to create. Really, it was Mieville and Martin's skill in shaping their own universes that really got me into writing. They weren't worlds that I fantasized about or worlds that I wanted to escape into, they were worlds that were boundless in their imagination but still confined within a very real, comprehensive sort of internal logic. The fact that a person could do something that convincingly with language, and not be confined to making a halfassed Tolkein-ripoff, was what really melted my brain with amazement, and got me into the idea that I might actually want to create the same sort of thing.

Speculative fiction truly rules. It's my old flame, I guess. I'd still like to write that novel I first started someday, if I ever get a grip on world-creation, which is a hell of a skill.

Getting back to the story itself, what's interesting to me is that I've found the same problems in both it and my more recent work. The one universal issue I've been having is fleshing out the characters, making them actual relatable humans instead of bland mechanisms that are just an excuse for the plot to happen. I realize that my thinking process about new stories tends to be more plot oriented, I get more excited about what happens or how to describe what happens, instead of who it happens to.

I'll amend that problem eventually, by jebus.

Guess I'll get to working on it. It's a lot longer than anything I've written recently, around 4200 words or so. The long haul. Bring it.

Learning to learn

I logged about 6 hours of work today in the library, getting waist-deep into research for a paper about Robert Browning and the emergence of the dramatic monologue, which made for an interesting romp with analysis. While slogging through various academic tomes, a cool point that stuck out to me was this whole notion of personal internal division in monologues – the dramatic monologue is considered to be the first notable example of psychological, character-driven fiction. One scholar wrote about how authors of these monologues created them by taking elements from both lyrical poetry and stage plays. And how the synthesis of these two forms was well suited to expressing characters torn between multiple, contradicting states of mind.

So basically, different modes of creative expression harmonize well in a way that better communicates a sense of disharmony. Headfuck, huh?

When getting genuinely excited about stuff like this, I have a semi-joking fear that I'm somehow selling my soul to a geeky satan who's welcoming me into insular academic hell. When you're young and a veteran of compulsory education, there seems to be a sense of minor shame towards educational enthusiasm. But in wondering on this whole tangent, and about the teachers and professors I've had who've made or broken my educational experience in the past, I find myself thinking about what exactly makes a good teacher, especially when being taught is something that many people are involuntarily taught by routine to dislike.

A good teacher can make you genuinely enjoy something you're used to hating. Maybe the teacher knows how to navigate an assigned essay within the boundaries of your own interests, or put an interesting flare on lecture material, even when the ideas involved seem dull on their own. A good teacher more or less gets you enthused about learning, or tricks you into learning something even if you're resistant to it. Because a truly good teacher realizes that learning is not force-feeding freeze dried ideas for the singular purpose of a grade. Because part of learning is figuring out what kind of things you want to learn, the areas of knowledge that get you excited, and maybe, jokingly questioning whether it's a bad thing to be excited about.

Freshmaker

A guy screamed
“The whole world's gone chiah
all of it, it's too late
if you spill water on any surface it'll
sprout a green fro of foliage, but
there's no stone animal beneath it, or no
stone head beneath it, the hair thing
won't be implied or funny, it'll just be a plant, fuck.”
The newspaper man grunted while petting his dog
He said “I lived through worse.
When the whole world was Wooly Willy,
When everything was magnetized
and the iron filings stuck to it all
like evil fur. The beard image wasn't funny,
even the few surfaces
with the image of a face on it
lost their novelty.” And the newspaper man
looked down for a second,
his dog was drooling asleep,
with the drool making greens grow
from the sidewalk right there
The guy who yelled at first said,
“Well, there's a pet right there.
And you could technically shave the plant off the sidewalk
and put it on his head or something
and it'd look relevant.
An actual pet
for the chiah.
Hehe.”
Reply: “Don't gimme that shit.”