"There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy"

[quote: Henry Miller, video: Doug Stanhope - Excessin Moderation]




So the thing has a new format . . .which might abruptly change again soon. I'm not an expert at this, and I'm lazy. But I realized my blog was the ugliest webpage I visit, so something's got to give I suppose.

--
Since I graduated, I've been spending 5 out of 7 nights and most of the weekend by myself. Really trying to get something done right now and enjoying it, so no lament. But, on the growing list of lessons learned in solitude is a big fat one: learn to enjoy the memory instead of missing the thing. Also, have a pet and talk to it. Have your favorite drank on hand once in awhile. Have tiny elements of routine but recognize when they don't work anymore. Own a lot of music and put it on random once in a while. Remember to eat. Sing a bit. Get some sleep. Just use the goddamn air conditioning. Have landmarks on your calendar that you look forward to, plan to have something in particular done by then. Don't miss the really important, biographical shit. It's really been fantastic, but I realized the other day that I have an inside joke with myself. I'm not sure what that means.

--

I figured out how to sidestep cliche. See, by focusing on some aspect of the cliche (in my case, I'm working on a piece with an amnesic in a supporting role) and making it as realistic as possible, beneath the simplification and convenience the cliche wields as a notion, you make it new. You subvert the cliche, almost make a commentary in it's usage. So, for instance, Amnesia is a widespread trope in narrative (after I had my basic idea, I accidentally came across two books and one film with amnesics). IN researching how amnesia actually operates, I found that it has not, to my knowledge, been shown for what it is. In movies and books it almost always appears as a loss of memory starting at the moment of brain injury. However, most commonly appears in real-life as both a loss of access to previous experiential/declarative memory and an inability to create new long-term memories.This has interesting side-effects: 'muscle memory' is retained and can be learned, a memory function called priming works surprisingly without experiential memory of the thing being primed, cognitive skills (problem-solving, playing music) often remain. Most intriguing to me is that the amnesic is able to remember sequence of events for as long as they remain highly engaged in processing ongoing causality (i.e. when they're in the 'zone' they can remember back to the beginning of the 'zone').
Anyway. It seems such a rich ground for narrative, so many aspects of it grow plots.

--

»»  read more

under remodel

sorry if things look a little weird for awhile

»»  read more

"I work till this here little flat line closes the curtains"

(quote: Aesop Rock, video: finale speech from Generation Kill)

I climbed Thompson Peak yesterday. A sweaty foray out of the lab, all anxiety about the hours away from the word processor ameliorated in the things I relearned. 14 miles across scree and up hills and picking my way across icefields with pointy rocks in my hands so I don't slip to my death. Jumping from boulder to boulder at altitudes that remind me how weak my lungs are. Fending off the hot sun with willpower. Drinking blue water from enormous puddles where the snowmelt collects. Aches in my knees so pure, movement so stiff by the summit that I can feel by swollen tendons creak. And clambering up and over that last rock to look down on everything. Like the roof of the tallest building in the city, looking down on creation with all its perfections and its coincidences. At the summit there's a little metal box that has been bolted there to the rock since the 1960s. Notebooks full of jottings, a pack of rolling papers, a tiny empty bottle of Crown Royal. On the first page of one these someone has written an ode to a loved one that died on that mountain. The author returns every year on the anniversary to pay respects and write some tear-jerking update as to how her memory has survived. A more fitting tombstone than one you'll find in any cemetery.

--

Ancillary to this workshop I've been involved in I've been reading much of the fiction that's been published in The New Yorker for the last six weeks or so. This is the premier American publication to feature short works of fiction. Supposed luminaries such as Lorrie Moore and Tim Gatreux and Johnathan Franzen. The works all have in common a vast lack in imagination. Nothing worth noting happens, ordinary people going through somewhat ordinary things. My own impatient and stultified life strikes me as more moving and interesting than any passage from any of these. But despite my disdain, the whole thing is encouraging. There is so much room in literature: for fiction more interesting, more memorable, more urgent. Line-by-line more engaging and carefully wrought and mindful. Thematically more relevant to this weird world we find ourselves in. No disrespect to anyone that shares my craft, but I'm afraid modern American fiction is completely insubstantial (DFW RIP). We'll only be allowed to bitch and moan about depleted readership when we've written the next "On the Road", the next "Grapes of Wrath", the next "Blood Meridian". Writers, it's time to step your game up. The world is passing you by and you're pondering the rusty undercarriage as it scrapes off your dead skin.

»»  read more

"La tierra vive ahora tranquilizando su interrogatorio"

(quote: Pablo Neruda, video: The Pied Piper of Hutzovina

Dreamt of Africa while in Vegas and woke up to look out my hotel window at its exact opposite. A weary, misplaced feeling. Spent the night before drinking Jameson's in a casino bar with the pachinko sounds of Pavlovian triggers chinkboingbanking around me and I could take in fourteen different kinds of ESPN. Thinking that as we become a service culture, kindness becomes a commodity. And the artifice of it becomes profitable. Try to appreciate your fellow man when you know that. Driving Las Vegas Blvd with a tallboy of Colt .45 in the cupholder because sometimes the best drink is an ironic one. Traffic jammed amongst the construction of new leering casinos like the whole country is not biting its nails at its short-term prospects. The lights of Vegas famous, sure, but each one of them is an advertisement. The entire city an experiential commercial for itself. Back in the casino watching people tote their new luggage to their hotel room with their addled children, weaving between the drink girls in their soft-porn costumes. The median age staggering, and old men and woman with their walkers and their tracheotomy-control devices poking their fingers at video screens. The hotel I stayed in unexpectedly posh and enormous and glinty. And I guess I don't do well with grandiosity because the shinier things are the more I feel has been wasted, and I cringe seeing retirement funds roll into slot machines just as I balk at the Hummers in the parking lot and roll my eyes at twelve billion lights. It makes me admire religion, in the old days of grand devotional art and architecture those people at least created their monuments to something they believed in. True or not, the things they made in that vein were full of passion and meaning. And in turn they came out beautiful and touching. Our current iteration builds monstrosities with high ROI . . . Mandalay Bay glistens in its grease, the lion in front of MGM Grand weighs more than everything I will ever own and it looks like the boredom of an untalented child. In the morning I drove out into the desert, it starts to gradually get beautiful.

--

Heavily researching Artificial Intelligence and Memory. Ostensibly for the purpose of understanding a character/plotline of this big writing project I'm working on, but also because I'm fascinated by it. I suppose that's how it works. Putting the two together makes me doubt the Singularity.
There's a theory being somewhat scoffed at (but not disproved by any means) that the human brain makes computations that fit into the mysterious depths of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. And further, that the brain accomplishes this by the manipulations of and shifts in the quantum state of nanoscale elements within the neuron. I don't understand this on a deep-level, and I suppose it doesn't undermine the notion that we can make an artificial brain. Hopefully someone can straighten me out on this.

Also . . .did you know that the ability to remember nonsense words is a strong indicator of intelligence? Lots of probably uninteresting reasons as to why.
--

»»  read more

"I want you to know that I'm deeply interested in what people remember"

(quote: William Saroyan, video: Jeffrey Archer's Advice for Writers)

I think I could live in Norway. Or Scandinavia anyway. Finland or Sweden is fine too. Mountains and snow and cold and surreal long days in the summer and weird churches built when the Vikings mellowed out. And no concern for meddling in the world though Norway has more money than they know what to do with. Content to have what one has and share it if someone needs. Ever since I read Hunger I've wanted to starve in the streets of Oslo. Write in rooms I'm not welcome in. Admire statues from a history I've never heard. Disappear up there at the top of the world.


Going to Michigan in a few weeks to tap into this annual lovefest that my tribe has there out in the woods. I missed it last year, recovering PTO and funds from my trip to Africa. It will be a fragmented group, and there are new children around, and people have all new jobs and romantic interests and dispositions. My friend since kindergarten will be there, and our crux was almost a decade ago and he doesn't understand me anymore but I love him to death. And homeboy from Boston will be there and he and I will immediately get into the shit and both learn something. And hopefully Alyssa makes it so we can catch up instantaneously like we always do, and after an hour nod at each other and know. And Anton Belia will be there and I'll try to drink some sense into him. Neal who I spent those days out in the desert with and can't help but smile at. Dan and Beth who seem like the best parents anyone could hope to have. Sidharth Sakuj who I can't wait to smoke and watch a sunset with.

I'm going to spend some time with my parents too. My dad talks a lot about how he wishes he lived near his boys, getting sentimental and reflective somehow in his retirement. You have to listen to what people say, and then know there's something underneath it. And I'm going to spend some time in my city and try to soak up that urgency I felt when I lived there. I need to do some research for this piece I'm working on, but I also just need to get my soul realigned. I've gone all clean and conservative and naive out here in the mountains.



I'm reading this story at the downtown Java on Friday. 5pm. I haven't really read much out loud like this. Looking forward to it. There's bars nearby and it's a friday, I have my work cut out for me.

»»  read more