"I think they're lying to you"

(quote: ATTN , video: snippet of a Cornel West interview)


I think the significance of an era grows in the years following. And I think that in 2009 we can start to see how this one sneaking out the door will be written in history. We'll look back on it as the time when technology really started to make us insane, extra-dimensional, and frenetic. And it will be remembered for violence in all hemispheres, just as each decade before it, but now we watch our craziness together in real-time and have to think about it and wonder what we can do before, alas, we realize nothing. And again we were fooled by hucksters and greedheads, and we'll never beat them because they work harder than us. And we remained enamored with silly contrivances and bad food and economic imbalances and ourselves, because that is all part of who we are. But there's a place for everything now, like there wasn't before, and our outliers and freaks and special people all get room on the crowded internet to seek their brethren. This is the year at which we might look back and see the beginning of technological saturation, not an end to further development of course, but a time when our telecommunications mojo became our over-arching human religion. How we came to solve problems and cause them.

This year is something biographical for me as well. I gained honorable discharge from another university, and having no classroom in the fall I'm poised to write more than I ever have in my life. This last month like 3 of my previous best combined. And I learned more about how to do it than in any class I could ever take. And if I could wrangle one piece of advice for a creative person, it would be 'work your ass off'. It will be so worth it.


Had a workshop for this story. Really good response and a worthwhile conversation about its problematic ending. The piece was filled with a few small experiments, techniques I had never really tried. One of these was an attempt to present expository information in as interesting a way as I could muster. Expository writing has always been problematic for me. It's a question of aesthetics more than anything, what is the perfect degree of information required for the story to have its effect? Clinical rehashing of past events is an overdose, it turns the work into some brief essay on a topic, makes the events impersonal and strategic-seeming. And flashbacks that are non-diegetic to the scene, segregated from the timeline, almost never work. They are clunky and out-sized and intrusive. But the information needs to be presented. And I think the only way to get it into the narrative without boring the reader to tears is to remember that everything is made up of narrative elements. 'It is stories all the way down'. More information can be packaged into sub-stories than a listing of details, and by conveying details through these smaller stories there are greater opportunities for characterization and development of an emotional disposition in the characters toward their circumstances. Anyway, interesting problem in the art of fiction.

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"Of course you see me . . .there's cameras everywhere"

(quote: Cage, video: Robert Sapolsky's Class Day Lecture 2009)

For anyone in corporate environs, remember that they can't eat you. Today I got screamed down to by this fascist underachiever because I'd stumbled upon her fuck-up. And she wrote an e-mail to my boss calling me "arrogant" and my move "uncalled for". She is some weighty entity in the department of purchasing for our biggest client, and I spent all day hoping that everyone else would see the absurdity in it that I did. But the important thing is that I've come to a point where I can't muster concern. And I feel sad for people that need to attack ad hominem to feel valuable somehow. If she had ever created a piece of art in her life (and I'm not saying she should be an artist) she would understand that there is nothing so petty as small dominations, that there's little important outside of how well we treat each other, that no one ever really wins an argument. So, she can have her ignorance and frustration, and she can get up in arms and yell about something she doesn't understand . . .but she can't escape this little tyranny of hers and with each passing day she'll crawl an inch deeper into her bunker, and mount more guns for cutting down passersby. But some day she'll wonder why no one loves her, and she'll say that it is somehow the fault of everyone else


I'm the last person you want raising a kid. But, the admin in our office has this son. They've been long-hauling it through this incredibly messy divorce and he's going to be a senior in high-school and at least one end of the tug-of-war is pulling petty entitlements that end up encroaching on him. The poor kid's got no freedom. And this is his first summer with a car and a job, and that battered Hyundai ought to be burning up McDonald's wages and it's driver should be making one bad decision per night. Not felonies mind you, but something that his mother wouldn't advise. But his dad won't let him have the car when he's at His house, and reluctantly as his mother might try to push him out into the world it's difficult when he spends every weekend playing family with a step-mother he hates. Our admin asks me for advice and I preface everything I say with the same thing I began this with, and I try to say something reasonable. All the while remembering what that age was like for me. And I have to say that I was reckless and up-late and going to bonfires and learning to be myself in a world I now supervised. I made bad decisions that had consequences and rode in the backs of police cars and snuck in after curfew and there was a party if the folks were gone. I tried to live it up. But I made good decisions too. And I came out the other end of it battered and a bit wiser and enriched. Most of all I learned how to take risks, because I tested them and either failed or succeeded. So, I'm not sure if I could give any advice to my co-worker, but I think I could muster some for her kid.

--

Writers have a reputation for drinking. There are theories about this, how they set their own schedules or how they don't have the same kinds of responsibilities as others. Both of these are bunk, though they might help. I have neither of these luxuries, I work all week and hit the keyboard at 6pm every night after. Yet, I drink my fair share. And have for a long time. On my mother's yard stick, probably too much. There must be other reasons. There is maybe some slightly higher sensitivity in creative types, one that gives itself to anxiety and joy (the twin advocates of whiskey and beer), and there is maybe a desired dissociation from the myriad failures and tedium of perfectionism. In the last few weeks, however, I've become convinced that a writer mostly drinks so that they can maintain the absurdity that they are in fact writing. That they spend hour after hour sprinkling dust into the void. It is not unlike when in a movie theatre you watch two hours of imagination and buy every line, but this suspension does not end and it runs on booze.

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"The worker. . .only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. "

(quote: Marx, video: Instruction Manual for Life)

On New Year's Eve the police force of the United States showed their true colors. In Oakland, Houston, N'awlins police used excessive force on minorities that were ostensibly guilty of nothing. Two of them are dead. One has been shot in the liver. Oakland rioted. Police cars were burned, windows were smashed, the local police force was overwhelmed. And the blogosphere chided the rioters for destroying property. See, when it's in another country people say "why doesn't 'merikuh react that way!?", but when they see fire in the streets, and people bleeding from massive headwounds they call it senseless violence. And sure, the violence itself may be regrettable. We shouldn't destroy things like children when we get frustrated. But the police are leaving the city of Oakland no choice. The bullies that chose to join the police force, in particular those that fire on noncriminals and the pigs that protect them, have abdicated their claim to righteousness. The police force exists to protect and serve their community. Police themselves are not above the law. But this sanctioned and tax-funded gang behaves as though they are subject to some separate set of laws. Cops that kill people undeserving are not hauled off to jail, they are asked to resign pending investigation. The bureaucracy protects them. If Oscar Grant, or You, had killed someone in the course of work, you would not be given the luxury of resigning. You would rot in jail. You would scrape together whatever meagre savings you could to hire the greasiest lawyer in the phonebook and you would pray. A police officer is not subject to that set of circumstances in our great nation. And if that is the case, if they claim to be beyond the reach of our common agreement of laws, our response to them must also be outside of the law. The authoritarians set up this cycle of action and response, they have required from us violent retribution. The riots serve to prove the maxim that "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." (thx JFK). I wish it could be some other way.


I have been having dreams about Antarctica. A frozen landscape that does not blink or punctuate its days. Dreams of ice and mud and wind and alien creatures, alien feelings. It is close to another planet as one could hope to find on Earth and still breathe oxygen. The people drawn to it are of a scattered tribe that seek hardship, purity, proof of their existence, expansion of their narrow and tawdry experience. I've found a way to go there. After I complete my MFA (btw, all apps in. Waiting on responses. Smoking, drinking too much, crossing fingers, making claims, feeling superhumanly confident one moment and childishly uncertain the next), I plan to submit a grant proposal to the Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. This will require of me a longish work that is set in the Antarctic and deals with the landscape and the lives of those who live there. The largest boon is that I get to live rent free on the most insane patch of the world I could imagine for several months, and get some choice in what my activities would be while there. Luckily, I have a story idea already . . over the next couple years I can let it gestate and be ready to crank out a massive anti-historiographic metafiction about loneliness, near-death experiences, fossils, and the end-times. All of this, for me, is a perfect opportunity and suggests a possible lifestyle. This grant is only one of many, many funding opportunities for writers. Ideally, I would bounce from one to the next. thank you taxpayers.


I just finished tweaking a short-story. I find that my stories fall into approximately 4 categories: painful and clear, irreal, pseudo-biographical, and hyper/ludicrous. This story falls into the last. I wrote the first draft, all of it, from a hotel room in Santa Ana, CA last year and only this week got around to editing it for mass consumption. If you get around to reading it, let me know what you think. Also, this story, like all of my work that I like is linked to here and in the sidebar under "short stories".

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"The artist is engaged in writing a detailed history of the future"

(quote: Marshall McLuhan)

I added a new story to the Short Story page.

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