BooksBlades, BroadsBoys, BickeringBrains

The Senior 6

2009-05-06T20:59:00.000-07:00

“And then?”

The Senior stopped in front of the car. “Save that for another day, shall we?” He dug in his pocket and tossed the keys to a puzzled Kit. “The instructions are on the passenger seat.”

“Un-kink yourself, lad. Get going.”

Kit, still frozen, stared at the Senior.

“You can drive?”

Kit nodded glumly.

“Then I suggest you get to it. You're expected.” And the Senior promptly turned about and walked away.

***

A still-bewildered, and now moderately disheveled, Kit approached the building, glancing over each shoulder again and again, and opened the door.

“Not bad at all, boy. Not bad.”

Kit whirled about the empty lobby, and found the Senior sitting on a folding chair off to one side. He stalked towards him, and in doing so took in the room: beyond the plate glass door, heavy now that he came to think of it, the hall pulled a sharp left, with nothing left for the eye save an elevator, a stairway door, and the aforementioned man on a folding chair.

Now poised in front of the Senior, all of the curses and epithets Kit had collected for the man along his stressful drive all along the major and minor and dead end streets of the City failed him and the only word that could pass through his gritted teeth was “You!”

Kit drew himself up to his full height, took a deep breath, and at their finest moment together, or so Kit would retell the story, the elevator opened and a third figure joined the scene.

“Hello, Sir,” said a sharply dressed woman as she bent down to kiss the man on the cheek.

“Kathe,” said the Senior.

The Senior 5

2009-05-06T20:58:00.000-07:00

The Group was new then, it being formed a few years earlier. Work was not plentiful, as there was still much competition throughout the City, but again, the group was new then; there weren't many of us. Everyone got work, though it was not always as challenging or as profitable as we desired.

I was younger then, and as such, I was given the contract for a shadow job. The idea at the time, and today as well, for I still believe it to be a good one, was to give the young and the new ones jobs of this nature, such that they would learn to be attentive and patient, to follow and observe, to become part of their surroundings instead of the proverbial sore thumb.

This was not my first shadow job, but it was early enough for me, in my youthful impatience and misunderstanding, to take it almost as a personal insult, as many young people still do.

Despite my training, was I not experienced enough to receive an action ticket? I thought to myself, had I made an error with a previous job, had there been complaints about my efficacy quotient? But as we were trained to, I let this line of inquiry run internally while getting ready for the job: I was an insurance policy.

The client harbored suspicions about the loyalty of a man in their organization, and this man was heading a delicate merging project. I was there to assure all items in question were signed, dated and initialed, as the expression goes, and finally returned to the client safely.

The man was to meet his contact in one of the transfer bays in Terminus and it was there three days prior to the meeting I installed myself.

I passed as one of the many businessmen that circulate throughout the bays and on occasion spend a night waiting for a connection. After day one, I could walk that bay blind. I had set up a small surveillance net, as per the client's request, and ran it through the course of my stay.

Direct and remote tests checked out, I grew progressively less comfortable sleeping on chairs. Puts an odd cramp in your back and makes you walk kind of crooked, you know?

The meeting finally occurred. The man appeared on time, as did his contact. They sat down, discussed, drank and reminisced, then agreed to the terms: he was given a briefcase as he handed over an envelope. Smiles all around.

As they rose to toast, the man broke procedure. With one hand around his glass, he used his other to stab his companion just under his ribcage. The man put down his glass, and eased his companion back down to the chair as he sank. He took the envelope off the table, lifted the briefcase, and walked away.

I was thrilled.

The Senior 4

2009-04-22T10:15:00.000-07:00

The Station had been called many thing throughout the Senior's time. The Terminal. The Station. Last End.

When he spoke of it, he called it Terminus, "As did my elders," he often said, even though the word was outdated it recalled a time when everything wasn't run through proceessors and hard drives and transistors that now lived inside the body and leached its power from the nervous system's electricity. The tools had changed, he remarked to Kit on the boy's first arrival.

One of the Group's satellite crews had sent Kit over at the Senior's behest, though none including Kit learned this until later. All that Kit knew was that he'd been ordered to pack his belongings into one bag, given a ticket to the city, and told he was now the crew's ambassador to the main branch.

When he arrived at the Station, the Senior had been waiting for him.

"I believe you're to be my guide," Kit announced as he approached an older man, taller than he with white hair and a sharp suit. "My company must have sent you."

The older man led Kit around the Station.

"How do you like Terminus? First time around here, yes?"

"Yes it is. It's so full," replied Kit. "So many people, even in such a large space. It almost feels small."

"The first time I came here, the Terminus was still new. I was about your age then, and I spent two days here."

The Senior 3

2009-04-19T23:47:00.000-07:00

They rode the rest of the way in silence. The Senior focused on the lack of scenery flying past the windows: lights moving past fast enough to barely register as streaks in groups of two or three only to be replaced by a new group of lights and brief splashes of graffitti, none sharp enonugh to know anything about them other than the simple idea that they were there. The Senior's thoughts turned to permenance.

I shouldn't be here, he told himself. When I walked out it was the right thing, and she was a big girl. I didn't leave her, not just her, it wasn't personal.

He'd nearly jumped at his change to come back, he argued with himself, it was like being asked to come back home. And he'd left--

"Sir," said Kit, "We're here."

As the Senior stood, he glanced around the train. He could see to the other end of the train car and he had a view of the locked door near his end. His hands weren't in his pockets, one was, in fact, behind him, hanging at his back where his knife wasn't anymore, he realized. He hadn't carried since he left the group.

"Sir?" Kit asked, holding the door.

The Senior said nothing and walked out of the train, heading for the stairs.

The station was as crowded as could be expected given the time of day.

"Let's go," he said over his shoulder.

The Senior 2

2009-04-17T14:26:00.000-07:00

As the door to the bar closed behind them, the Senior threw on his jacket then led Kit along the familiar route towards the train, and Kit hurried to keep abreast of the older man's quick stride.

"How long have the Foreigners been back in town," the Senior asked as he dodged pedestrians.

"They came back, Sir, about two years after you left. Until about three months back, they weren't taking any contracts in the City." Kit moved ahead to hold open the door to the station.

"That's why Ilse was sent in, I take it?"

"She hadn't been allowed to take on any solo work for some time. She was teamed with Kathe for this run, as well as the preceding two"

"Confrontation was expected." The Senior boarded the first available train with Kit in tow.

"No, Sir, I did not."

The Senior stopped. And stared hard.

"Things have become less stable within the group, Sir," Kit said as he moved past the Senior to take the seat next to him. Eyes front.

"She was incapable of solo work, Sir, shortly after you left."

The Senior deflated into his seat.

"Took it very poorly, Sir. She hadn't been sober since."

"She was never sober, boy," the Senior said quietly, looking out into space. "She was a fish."

"Yes Sir, until she swam to the bottom more times than she could handle."

They sat in silence as the train departed, and the silence continued as the Senior gazed out the window at the tunnels and lights.

The Senior 1

2009-04-15T21:13:00.000-07:00

"Well met, Kit."

"Well met, Senior. Is this seat taken?"

"Give the boy a drink," the Senior said to the bartender without looking up at the boy. "What does he want?"

"He wants you to come home, Sir. I've been told to impress upon you the group's need for you in this time of crisis."

"He hasn't moved past those days, has he? It's not going to work, his savior-from-the-bad-old-days bit. We were shocked that it worked the first time, but to try for twice..."

"Yes Sir, I agree that the group's morale might not take the same shine to it, but those are his orders.
"The group is restless, Sir. Now that the foreigners have come back, he feels that your presence is crucial. We lost two of the old guard, Sir, Ilse and Kathe. They were taken during the 238th street incident. The foreigners left markers, Sir. They want the old land back."

"The foreigners took out the two girls, did they?" He took a long, long pull off his drink. "Did we manage to get their weapons back to the Center?"

"Yes sir, two of the four blades will remain in the hold."

"The girls are gone..." he mused as he finished his drink, and reached over for Kit's. "You haven't even touched it, boy. Starting to wonder about you," and he finished the second drink. "Pay the man, and let's get going."

"Where to, Sir?" Kit said as he reached out his hand to scan-out the payment.

"To the ceremony."

"Sir, they'ven been--they passed almost six days back."

"And he'll have waited for me. He sent you after me, didn't he? With his sense of theatrics, the
Captain will have it all ready to go once he hears of our return."

"Yes sir." Kit slumped. Despite knowing that the Senior hadn't been a player for some time, it was still hard to believe his grasp on the man everyone just called "Captain."

I Surrender

2009-01-13T08:46:00.001-08:00

I cannot hold myself, because I lack discipline in the supreme, to my new rule.

I give in. I've been making excuses all day. And the day before, and before that, and before that.

I really hope to be able to re-start the project at some point soon. Not sure when yet, but, we'll see.

Good People

2009-01-08T12:34:00.000-08:00

First off, I’m a comic book geek. Every Wednesday, I try to make my way out to my comic store all the far-as-hell-away in Astoria (and sometimes I make it, sometimes not). But that's not what this is about. This is about Ronny.

Ronny is the nomadic comic book dealer who drives from coast to coast to sell, as he puts it, "Funny Books," but that's not all he is. He's a genuinely nice guy who really will give you the shirt off his back (I've seen it). He's a great guy to be around, life-of-party-type, can drink like a blessed reservoir, and is a great cook.

Yesterday, at the shop, he decided that he wanted to cook pasta. It turned out that he only had seven dollars on him, and since he was cooking not for himself, but for all of us, we gave him another $10 (really, we gave him more, but he only took the ten, saying that it was enough). Within an hour, he came back with a tray of pasta and sausage. And it was fucking delicious. And it cost him $13.73 all together.

This blows my mind. (Ronny's also been known to make a mean three-foot sandwich with about six bucks.) Every now and then, it's horrifically easy to forget, for me, at least, that 1) it's easier (though not for me) and cheaper to cook rather than to go out and buy food, and that 2) there are people who are nice enough to go out and work what is to me a miracle with $15 to cook up a delicious two pounds of pasta with four pounds of sausage.

The joys are in the small things and I know that it's all to easy to forget them too often.

The New Project

2009-01-06T22:46:00.000-08:00

So, here's the deal:
-For the last month, I've been exercising. Haha, but yes. I have started working out. Not too much, but enough to make me feel better. I figured I'd have to do something, because, you know, I've been drunk for the last...five months and counting. So yes, I exercise every morning.

-I read every day. Reading online just does not really count, not in this case, but I read print every day.

With these two things in mind, I decided that I'd start writing every day (work stuff does not count), and that I'd write about the city I live in. 300 words a day. And today's the first. So, here we go...

***

Today, I didn't go to work. Instead, I called in sick and spent most of the day sleeping. Once I'd gotten my shit together, and by together I mean drank my two cups of coffee and smoked myself some cigarettes, I went out into the world, because I had things to do.

I live by Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, and I walk it every single day in order to get to the train. Today, as I walked it, the sun was already down, as it happens because when it's after six o'clock in the evening it happens to be early January, the sun's gone.

I walked down Eastern Parkway, and I realized how few people there actually were on it. Eastern Parkway is a two-way, three-lane (each) road that runs approximately from the eastern edge of Brooklyn to the western edge.

And what traverses down this road? Cars. Lots of cars. And only--for the overwhelming majority, despite the fact that everyone says that nobody drives in this city--cars. Long, long chains of cars; one ever-flowing string of white lights moving towards me, sometimes at alarmingly high speeds, and one string away, going god-knows-where, but never really stopping.

I don't have a license. I know how to drive, but the reality of the situation is that I drive like an old woman--I get scared when I have to make the car move faster than 25 miles per hour. That said, I've been on Eastern Parkway a few times in a car. It acts like a highway, never really slowing down for anyone, or anything, unless it has to, and if you're going to jay-walk, you'd better be careful, because, lord, they really don't give a shit about pedestrian right-of-way. They're out for blood. Watch it.

***

And there we go.

Mic-check

2008-11-26T21:45:00.000-08:00

So, I've been MIA here for damn near two months to the letter. The personal life's gotten the better of me in recent times, so yes, that's why I've been away.

I kept kicking something around re: Masaru Emoto and how he gives scientists a bad name, but then when I was doing a bit of research, I found the screed that I'd wanted to write, almost to the letter, as an excerpt from a review of Emoto's work that had been posted on Wikipedia. Yes, wiki counts as research.

I've got a lot of thinking to do, about what I know, about what I think I know, and especially about me and the world. Been reading. Not as much as I should be, and I think, well, I know I've got some serious issues to work on.

Right now, I'm sick. Been popping sudafed (pretty sure it was sudafed, the pink pills) and tylonol for the better part of today, so I'm not drinking, as much as I'd really like to be. My nose is stuffy, and my chest feels like there's a block of uncomfortably warm concrete sitting on top of it.

I'm rambling. I disappear into the ether for another long long while.

Oh yes, and I am to have two pieces published in the consumer mag that I work for in the winter issue. Yay!

9.26.08

2008-09-26T10:11:00.000-07:00

Boxes with flags down

continue to greet me at every turn.

I'm waiting for a postcard, I tell them.

"You've been waiting for a while.

"When was it written?

"Was it written at all?"

That's a better question;

I check again

hoping to be greeted by red flags,

warm words for winter—I thought there were no gaps in my armor.

There didn't used to be.

7.15.08

2008-07-15T14:24:00.000-07:00

I crane my neck backwards to see the grey.

It's as strong as it ever was, I'm told—

most of us, myself included, too young

to have ever known the lauded reverse ocean

that the men of yesterday grumbled of.

"It was so full," they said. "Above you, mile

after mile of crisp clear biting expanse

that always threatened to swallow you whole,

should you be caught unawares, as he was."

They grind to silence. All of them. Too much,

they mumble to each other in old-man-

speak. Not one will go back and relive it.

They return to their holes of hallowed ground

and wait for the next unsuspecting youth.

What do I really think of Herzog?

2008-07-01T13:12:00.000-07:00

First things first, I want to finish it. Secondly, it makes me think of ENDER'S GAME, specifically, Ender himself at the end of the novel, when he's carrying the ball of knowledge, going about the universe, and walking up and down upon it. Being a speaker for the dead. What, then, about speaking TO the dead?

There exists a certain amount of relative safety in writing a letter to a non-living entity: they cannot directly (we hope) refute your words. But what if they could? What would they say? That's getting off topic. What I really want to talk about, is why write a letter to the dead at all?

Those kinds of communications are, by default, one-way, as far as writing is concerned. When one writes a letter, there is absolutely NO implication that one will mail the letter. This is different than writing an email: emails were the pre-cursors to instant messages, they were the origin of modern high-speed communication, because delivery is nearly instant.

A letter is an email, but an email is NOT a letter; a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square.

There's a certain urgency, or lack thereof, in a letter that is/is not present in an email. When one writes a letter, there is the implicit knowledge (in this day and age) that a response, will take time to arrive, if it ever does, if it (the response) was ever written. With an email, however, there exists the general notion that, though a response is not required, if it (the response) is to occur, it will in the immediate future (also, unless one is junkmailed, or mailer-demon-ed, there is the implicit knowledge that the email was received). Such is the nature of the beast, and the beast, is modern communication and interaction.

Time, really, is the issue. Being participatory in a modern context/the modern world means that everything is acquired NOW. Not in twenty minutes, right-fucking-now; if it takes five, that's too long—you're fired. We get things done faster now.

Writing a letter to a non-living entity is hard (easy) enough, but to continue on the modern train, how do you write an email to the dead? This, is a problem of construction.

6.23.08

2008-06-26T09:21:00.000-07:00

Today, I sang myself, not into now

but out, with silence of the everyday.

Today, I stopped being real. Right now.

I will rewrite every kingdom's pathways,

and when the roulette wheel has chosen fate,

so too shall I. Once, all full with spirit,

I wandered through the enciphered system;

I found myself, with eyes still slit, reeling,

I could have sworn my future had arrived.

But all movement was beyond me—broken

limbs were for me to find, and only string

to attempt repairs. But all was not lost;

bring together bones and string, you can make

most anything, and thing I did, I thought

myself a new. Bones and string fused not with

breath, but space and time—then I made me mine.

At the slightest twitch of muscle, I built

a set of wings, like planetary plates

to carry me to where what's next is born.

Along the path, or something like it, I

coasted, with eyes in orbit all about,

always keen for the next big thing to come.

It happened upon me, I was ready:

face up with wings, now razor-like, sliding

through, hungry, and I met no resistance.

I was valiant. I smote the world. I spoke—

it shattering, and I with it fell down

landing, like a nightmare in circuitry.

More and more books

2008-04-28T18:50:00.000-07:00

Finished Kadrey's BUTCHER BIRD today. It's about damn time. Only took me a few years. Or something like that.

Started reading in back when it was still entitled BLIND SHRIEK in CC (creative commons) form only. It felt good to finally finish it.

Finished THE COMPASS ROSE stories too. BUTCHER BIRD is better.

Just picked up ACCELERANDO by Charles Stross and THE RAW SHARK TEXTS by Steven Hall, and started to read the latter.

I keep buying more and more books, and I hope I never finish all the books I own. Though it seems like a nice goal, to have read everything I own, I feel like if I ever reached that point, then I'd have nothing left to read.

I remember talking to Adam Lawrence a while ago, we started to talk about books. He told me that whenever he went on vacation, he'd bring three, or even four books, just in case he managed to finish his current read as well as his back-up.

I feel like that need for material is something that not that many people understand.

Right now, my main read is GOLD by Asimov (currently taking up space in my jacket pocket)

The new ebook-thing on the slate is GREY by Jon Armstrong. Gonna start that at work sometime tomorrow. (Got another one sitting on the desk top there, but I can't remember what it is.)

For some reason, I haven't been writing. I mean here, elsewhere, at all, really. Since I'm not doing much writing on the job (been mostly revisions for the last few weeks), maybe that's effecting it? Not sure.

Finally got to discuss love in writing (my writing, anyway), and maybe I'll type it up and post it here.

We'll see.

Books

2008-04-13T19:15:00.000-07:00

Most recent literary happenings in the world of Max:

- Finished STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND finally. Very good book. Critiques most things, while managing to set up characters used later in the world of Heinlein as well as adding depth to the history of that same world.
- Finished ENDER'S GAME. Also good. Interesting thoughts re: war and children.
- Read and finished HIGH FIDELITY by Nick Hornsby. Not as good as either ENDER'S GAME or STRANGER, but decent all in all.
- Currently reading: THE COMPASS ROSE by Ursula K. Le Guin. So far, difficult in terms of style. We'll see what happens.

Soon, I'll be meeting with Em and Miguel to talk about HIGH FIDELITY. Wonder how that'll go. I wrote notes for discussion!

Probably going to start reading GOLD by Asimov (coll. of short stories and essays) tonight, so I figure that way I'll have a good set of three to be working through.

Quick Update

2008-04-06T11:39:00.000-07:00

Been a little busy, so I haven't been updating.

Closed my comic store on Monday, and it broke my heart.

Finished The Difference Engine on Thursday. Not so hot. Not quite sure why I picked it up in the first place, but whatever.

Started Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, and I'm really enjoying it.

Saw Sasha and John Digweed spin at Webster Hall on Friday night. Absolutely amazing.

Off to read more of Ender's Game.

Bah. I miss my store.

God only knows...

2008-03-24T20:34:00.000-07:00

This weekend was interesting... I spent the vast majority of my Sunday at work writing, or trying to write. I had a 600-700 word piece due today, and it was a bitch.

The longest I was able to make it was almost 600, even after I went back and stretched each sentence.

Long story short, I was supposed to write a profile/ description of this guy, his product and his company, trying to focus on the product, and if shit got tight, use him and the company...

I talked to him, did a little BS-kind-of interview, because originally, it was going to be a brief note, kind of a hey-check-this-out thing, and all I was able to get was about 150 words. These were a good 150 words, though. Nice, short and sweet.

**fuck the "Harvard Comma"**
"That's how Dad did it, that's how America does it, and it's worked out pretty well so far."~ Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark

Then I found out I had to stretch it. Exhausting. Bah.

begin/

No matter now many times you sit down to write, you always face the same dilemma. Or at least, the same one for me. Come to think of it, it's a little worse now that paper isn't around anymore. The only place you can really find it is on the shelves of really rich people, or in the treasure chests of the rest of us, under our pillows, hoping dearly that one day we'll be able to hold the physical form of our work, hold it in our hands and say "this! all of this! it's mine! you cannot take it from me! you can take my body! my clothes, my family, my future! but you can never take away the fact that this is mine! for ever and ever, in my mind and now, once if never again, it exists in form, to be handed off from person to person like back when I was a child!"

Things are so different now. I remember when I was young, I was fortunate enough to live next to a thrift-shop. People were always coming by, dropping books and clothes and broken toasters (but they looked like new!) in front of the door, even though they had a sign in the window that said "closed Sunday." Things were different then, right?

You could even think things were getting better. People weren't dying against their will (as much anyway), and they were living on and longer and longer, but this was still before that got to be a problem.

Where did all of this start? I think it started with paper.

With paper, you kind of have a limit. On a screen, however, you really don't; it doesn't work the same. You can have the approximation of what used to be the standard, back before stories were called "books" in honor only, and give a guess as to how many words you could fit on a page, and most of the word-processors will give you a barely-visible dotted line to show you, you've make a dent.

Dent in what, though, that's the issue. With screens, there really is no end. The only clear end occurs when the power run

/end

Not very long ago, 5 days, actually, I started reading THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. It's odd to me... Only done the alternate history thing knowingly a few times before...

In the immortal words of The West Wing, "What's Next?"

Only 28?

2008-03-20T11:32:00.000-07:00

Blogger says I've only got 28 (soon to be 29) posts. This feels wrong. I feel like I must have written more than that. by the by, firefox sucks ass on mac's.

So, now that I'm using safari (much better, minus the copy/paste problem) back to talking.

Just finished reading REQUIEM. It's good. I like it because of the way it uses language, more than the story. There's no way for the book to be not-sad; it's not about that. It feels like a decent into human depravity, more like the different holes that people dig for themselves.

That aside, the language, the way it's written is much much MUCH more interesting than what happens. I'd need to take a very close look to see if Aronofsky managed to portray the speed and crushed-together-ness of the words in the book onto the screen. I know that part of it is achieved through his so-called "hip-hop" cut sequences, but that's really a cop-out.

The language is one long strung-together scene, and if a carriage-return is finally used, it's a scene change/the camera cuts from one place to the next, instead of a black/white-out, or something to that degree.

The full carriage-return is used in the following way: two-line, not one-line separation to indicate that there is a significant change in scene. not just characters, or time, but location location location! back in real estate, which actually matters in book design.

The breaks in the way words look in a page, called "rivers" if i remember correctly, are something that, in general, are to be avoided. My friend Em showed me a book where the author uses these "rivers" to make, you guessed it, rivers, white/negative space throughout the page. Interesting.

Another real estate thing (more graphics-oriented): it's difficult to keep visual attention when turning pages, so the last image (in the bottom right corner, if you read left-to-right) and the first image on the next page (top-left) are crucial to maintaining a sense of coherence and cohesive-ness. The situations need to be kept either constant, or deliberately kept inconsistent, depending on what effect one's attempting to achieve.

Rambling over now.

What will I pick up next, you ask? I don't know. I really don't. Tell you what though: you will when I do.

Brief thoughts on sentences

2008-03-09T13:01:00.000-07:00

Been thinking recently about the way Selby Jr. (REQUIEM) and Mitchell (NUMBER9DREAM) use words to make sentences.

The most remarkable thing about the way that both of them write is the way they use adjectives.

I don't have Mitchell on hand, but I do have Selby.
"...grinding with their laughter..."

Both of these authors combine words to make descriptions that are not antithetical, so much as unexpected, but perfectly correct. Marion and Harry are "grinding with their laughter," and in retrospect it seems like there's nothing else they should be doing at that exact moment besides grinding with laughter.

Not really sure if this makes sense to anyone that isn't in my head. Bah.

Selby is a slow read for me. I started it nearly four days ago, and I've only read forty pages. Part of this is due to the way that Selby writes (no shit), but literally, the way he forms the text. He doesn't use apostrophes and uses carriage returns as little as humanly possible. I know that part of it comes from the mechanics of the typewriter, but this irks me regardless. I'm a bit of a stickler when it comes to grammar things like that, but with him it does not seem unreasonable.

All of this aside, I'm not sure what I have to work through in order to get a re-start on the script-thing...

Reading and Religion

2008-03-06T20:33:00.000-08:00

I've just finished reading ARCHANGEL, and I enjoyed it.

Religion, in so far as Shinn deals with it, works in (what seems to me) an odd fashion. Basically, there is a god, more like there is THE god, but it's never God, it's always god. Huh.

More interesting than this, at least at this moment, is that it was published by Ace Science Fiction. The most advanced technology available to any of the characters in the novel is precious-metal-working...

This book contains nothing scientific, uses all the god as an explanation for why those around are struck down, and that's kind of it...

Does it follow, then, that religion is not fantastic, but scientific? What kind of sense does that make?

It amuses me to no end that this text which, in my eyes, has nothing to do with science is classified as science fiction; the alternative is labeling it as... fantasy. And that cannot be done, or can it? Can the world of publishing put forth into the continuum (that can't be spelled right, but it checks out with firefox) a mind-blowing industry based on the equitable distribution of knowledge really call a fantasic (in the literal sense) fiction "science fiction"?

I don't know. Went a tidbit off the deep end in that last paragraph.

What's next on the list? REQUIEM FOR A DREAM by Hubert Selby Jr. Seen the movie, dig the movie, now it's time for the book. I've never read anything by Selby before.

But first, my comics from yesterday:
LOGAN #1 (Vaughan and Rizzo)
PAX ROMANA #2 (Brian Hickman)
ZOMBIES VS. ROBOTS #2 (Ashley Wood and Chris Ryall)

Good night.

Working Product

2008-03-06T13:08:00.001-08:00

I don't know what this is, and that's all I have to say about that for now.

/BEGIN/

Somehow, I've got to start using my sleep. Every now and then, things don't clock correctly and I end up crashing instead of doing real work. What that means doesn't matter; what does is that crashing is entirely useless.

It came to me that if, instead of ignoring my body (as I have been very prone to do on many occasions) and crashing, I could set myself up to an audiobook, or the new album from Whatever-They're-Called-Today, then crashing would start to be productive and therefore, so too could I (hopefully) be.

Sounded great. Still does, when I say it to myself at night — all jacked-in before I shut down for an entirely arbitrary amount of time — it was good. It was better than good, it was brilliant.

Then I started to see information.

I started to process information when I was off (though that was the point) but it became unbearable. Even when I was working and moving and fucking and drinking there was always information: glasses with their ingredients scrolling down the side then proceeding to marquee the tale of their origins from sand, what beach they'd come from, what they remembered about the fish, if there really were giant squids after all; the book I was trying to read would tell me about the gentle strokes of the printer as it moved from one side to the next with movements so fluid that it felt like it was the water printed on its pages — some told me about the trees, while others told me how they'd at one point been a chemistry text book, way back when recycled paper did not exist, and how from there they'd been a drug store novel, some graduate student's doctorate, the fifth revision of last year's Webster's — cigarettes would regale me with the lives of tobacco farmers taking them from their families (if leafs had anything closer to blood than sap) and marauders taking the farmer's family apart then selling the leafs to an antiseptic old woman called Aunite-Kay only to be burned, reverse-sky-dive, un-reverse-sky-dive, grow again and eventually live in my chest until the next time I was retro-fitted (neo-fitted is a much better term), speaking —

/END/

What I'm Reading Today...

2008-03-04T21:04:00.000-08:00

After another conversation with the friend of mine who continues to hassle me time and again to make use of my blog, I have officially been talked into writing another entry. Subject matter? Books.

I read a lot. By a lot, I mean I read more now than I did while I was in college -- I always felt that I spent so much time reading for class, I never had time to read for myself, so I read as much as I could when I was on vacation, on the train (assuming I was not reading for class then as well), waiting for the train, the bus, the doctor's office, etc.

My friend thinks I read about a book every two weeks or so. I think it takes a little longer, but I digress.

When a creator I respect recommends a book, I'm likely to take a look at it or, sometimes just buy it on pure recommendation alone. That's what I did with this book: Christy Lijewski, a favorite comic creator of mine, mentioned it at one point on her website (lost to me now, will edit when I find the URL) and I figured, as I have done in the past, why not?

Today, I'm reading ARCHANGEL by Sharon Shinn.

ARCHANGEL (also the name of an amazing cut by dubstep genius BURIAL) is about angels. I like my angels much less futz-ed with, more classic; no genitalia because they are not bound by form; more Miltonic than anything else, and maybe even a tad biblical.

But these are not your garden variety angels: they exist after a world, i.e., not in the pre-human sense, they are the product of an explicitly post-human universe, and this intrigues me to no end. In this universe, the angels come from the union of an angel and a mortal, therefore the number of so-called full blood angels is negligible, since they are all long dead at the time this book starts.

Angels in a post-human world... how about that? And humans in a post-human world too! What's up with that? Really, though. What's up?

Angels and humans, the ultimate extremities of the divine spectrum (supposing that the divine itself does not enter into the spectrum) mixing together NOT to form a middle ground, but to propagate either extremity. Ah, the strangeness of bloodlines.

By the by, the angels in this book do not really stick all too close to the judeo-christian standard mythos, so don't let that be a prohibition.

I'm off to read some more, and I have to be up for work in six hours. I'm not tired. Bah humbug.

It's been a while...

2008-03-02T11:34:00.000-08:00

Well, let's see:

I have a new computer, a laptop in fact, and it makes me very happy. I'm even using it now! Amazing, no?

small keyboard, so it'll take some getting used to. meh.

fuck caps etc. for the time being.

I have a new job; I now work for Lockwood Publications as the Editorial Assistant for Smoke, Smokeshop and Tobacco International, all magazines. I finally have a real publishing job!

Trying to save enough money to get a place of my own, and by my own I mean a place to share with two of my friends. Money. More like this:

"Business or Pleasure?"
"Business. Always business."
~The Greek

From The Wire, Season 2 Episode 12 (the last one, think it's 12)

Love the show.

This post marks the beginning of a much more personal tone for this blog. I've been catching shit from a friend of mine for not updating, and as such this is going to be a tad more personal. I'll make sure the "whiney-bitchy" garbage is kept to a minimum, because I have a livejournal for crap like that.

Problems that are worth addressing here:
- Writer's block

So:
I have a story that I've been working on since I went to Germany and England during the summer, and I've been poking at it here and there, but not enough to amount to anything significant (or so I feel), and it's irking my nerves.

I know his name, and his basic job, but every time I try to figure out where he's going, shit falls apart.

on a complete side note: the closing to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is a peek into the future of rock and roll...

and on another note, i have a math problem to play with, so i'm off to do that.

2007-10-30T13:47:00.000-07:00

Onboard memory… ENGAGE!

Dexter does not work the way I want him to. He does not work for the following reasons:

What I need, for this to work my way, is a character who is conscious of the violence they enact and doing so willfully, thereby making a literature of violence, making a language of it, using it to communicate, to tell stories.

If it’s used to satisfy an urge, then it has a possibility of working, just because it can be conceptually construed as having no other outlet than the violence: the story cannot be correctly told.

Dexter does not work. Yes, he is conscious of the violence he enacts, but the part of him that does the work itself is dissociated from him, from the narrator, from the character. It becomes the Dark Passenger telling a story and using Dexter to do so—which is exactly NOT what I want or need for this to stand a chance of happening.

I need violence to be a mode of communication of the self, self expression. Dexter is interesting because it IS expression, but not of him—it’s the Dark Passenger’s expression, the Dark Passenger using Dexter to tell these stories, to somehow communicate with the outside world that he only gets to reach when this violence occurs.

The Dexter of the novels is very much two personas: Dexter himself, and the Dark Passenger. In the show it seemed, for a moment or so (more like a season), that the man who killed was all there was. There was nothing making him do it; he did it because it was the way things HAD to work, for things to get done.

BOOK
With the Dark Passenger so deeply involved in these interactions, there is no longer any self: Dexter surrenders to the Dark Passenger: The narration is generally first person and the Dark Passenger is referred to as it, never giving it much physical effect. When the Dark Passenger “takes the wheel”, it becomes “we” instead of an “it” and an “I”.
/BOOK

For all of this to work for me and on my terms, the one who violences needs to be an “I”—it has to be present and aggressive and active. It CANNOT be passive and passenger-like.

What would work is the following: if Dexter and the Dark Passenger switched places—if Dexter was the presence in the head of the Dark Passenger, then all of the action would have no other choice except to be active and aggressive. One cannot tell a story by doing nothing!

Quick Thoughts

2007-10-30T11:03:00.001-07:00

What is it to be bound by the power and magic of names?

Warren Ellis makes a very interesting point through his character Don Bastardos aka Fidel Castro in the second issue of Doktor Sleepless. Bastardos brings up the point that a drug fell out of pop culture favor when it became known that said drug had a different name which was much less palatable. With the name more sterile and medical than, say, adventurous or wanderlust evocative, the drug disappeared.

From what I’ve observed, western magical tradition is most involved with having the right name to call a deity or spirit or some other such being. If one has the right name, one controls the not-human.

And to think that the not-human was, you know, NOT human, right? To not be bound by the same set of problems and workings as we are, what would that be like, how much magic could one make of all this, this stuff, unformed and just waiting to be wrought into a thing so beauteous that… words just fail.

BUT!

“To be in any form, what is that?”

Violence

2007-10-07T12:28:00.000-07:00

It's back. And it's possible. I can feel it.

Dexter is the crux, I just have to work it right.

It's time for the second run.

And this time around, it might just work.

***side note***
This is going to turn into a digital note pad for the violence business.
You're just going to have to deal with it, aren't you?

Some Words on SciFi

2007-08-11T16:22:00.000-07:00

I've found that there are an overwhelming amount of people who do not respect science fiction. I was, in fact, laughed at (no bullshit) for saying that I liked to read science fiction.

I remember talking to one of my professors in school, and I was shocked when he told me that SF and Fantasy are not respected as genres, by and large, by the academic community. This seems absolutely ridiculous to me for many reasons, not the least of which is that the genre called "Magical Realism" or "Slipstream" (of which Jorge Luis Borges reigns supreme and Haruki Murakami figures promenently) is legitimate in academia. This is fine, but I feel as though it is a branch of SF, just like Steampunk and Cyberpunk.

Main point being, books like The Lord of the Rings and Dune and authors like Philip K. Dick and Philip Pullman are thrown to the wayside with incredible speed. There is a large difference between not liking SF and laughing at it. I, as a fan, have issues with it: it's phenonmenally difficult to write SF well, to write it in a compelling manner such that your reader does not drop it for either lack of ability to understand all of the new information being thrown at them, or simple disinterest. To write SF well, one needs to create a universe, and that is NOTHING to scoff at. Look at the biographies of Tolkien and Frank Herbert, and from there it's easy a fraction of the work put into these worlds.

One point, though it is not fair to make as much as it is worth considering, is that good SF is more difficult to write than good regular fiction, whatever that means. One has to create a world that is potentially based on the one we inhabit, and make new languages, hierarchies, never before thought of systems of operation (including, but not limited to, computers, lifestyles, occupations, etc.)... essentially a whole new everything, and very few people understand this.

Imagination at its finest, I believe, is embodied in creation. And what better way to showcase it, than writing a new place to exist and function?

Warren Ellis and His Work

2007-08-05T10:50:00.000-07:00

Warren Ellis is a writer who has rocked various genres. Visit his homepage to find out what's in his brain. Search for him on amazon to find a bibliography. .

Anyway, two weeks ago, the week of July 23rd, was a big week for him. His first novel, Crooked Little Vein, hit the stands, and the next day the first issues of two new comic books he's writing hit the stands as well. These two new comics are Doktor Sleepless, and Black Summer.

For those who have not read Transmetropolitan yet, I highly recommend it. A brilliant critique of the future of America. A future that's not so distant that one cannot see the relations between now and the later/present presented. It is not for the weak or feeble minded, so if you think yourself among them, run now.

I came to tell that Ellis knows his audience incredibly well. After all, he built it from the ground up. People like me have been worked over by the meme that is Warren Ellis' persona.

All three of these books are filled to the brim (overflowing, in the case of Doktor Sleepless) with the Strange and the Weird. Ellis' love for these is immense.

Anyway, I was going to say more, but I decided to go and read Doktor Sleepless and Black Summer again. So good-bye.

Where I'm From...

2007-07-29T16:29:00.000-07:00

I've just spent the last couple of hours reading up on Warren Ellis' Second Life columns at Reuters (which can be found here). One of these focused on where SL came from, and this got me to thinking... where am I from? So let's find out. It'll be an adventure for both of us.

I was born in NYC, and have lived here damn near my entire life (I don't remember the parts that didn't happen here, so they don't really count to me), and I intend to keep it that way. City boy born and bred, concrete in the blood. Really. I'm not at home until I curse out somebody for what is probably a bad reason, but it makes me feel better.

But this isn't about the City that I love with every fiber of my being; this is about my mind.
The first book I remember reading is a book about a fox who was hunted year after year, and always escaped.

This was his game. After this, I got heavily into David Eddings' fantasy novels. I read them furiously. I still read them.

Then I got into comics. I read Archie comics when I was younger, as most did. I abandoned them for manga (japanese comics) not long after, and it was there that I found Sanctuary, a manga about the total overhaul of Japan from the political and yakuza (japanese mafia) perspectives. This was when I realized that comics could move people, that they could do the same work as books, as "high" literature, and so on. They were a legitimate medium, and (though I couldn't articulate it as such at the time) this is a conviction I hold to this day.

Next came Blade of the Immortal, a comic about life, violence and the consequences of both. Heart-stopping-ly illustrated and powerfully written, it still amazes me.

Books had kind of drifted off into the background at this point. It was all about comics for me. I got a job at my comics store, and I tore the place apart looking for new things to read. I read PREACHER, SANDMAN, the X-MEN, many other things. A kid who I knew years ago came through one day, and told me about a great book by Haruki Murakami called Hardboiled Wonderland and The End of the World. (I'm gonna stop with the links. Do the damn work yourself.) I read it, was thrilled, and while looking for more books of his, found another author with the same last name, Ryu Murakami, and figured I'd give him a try. I bought Coin Locker Babies, and it was odd as all hell, kind of beautiful in the way that blood-splatter can leave one in awe.

Around this time, I was introduced to TRANSMETROPOLITAN, Warren Ellis' masterpiece. It blew my mind. It made me think, it made me want to write, it made me want to work. If you know me at all, I've talked to you about TRANSMET already, so I won't do that here. It's damn good. If all comics were to be purged by god, and was I told that I had to choose one, and only one comic to save, it'd be TRANSMET in a heartbeat.
So, through this journey, I think we've learned something. I was not born of fire and piss and vinegar, and all that other bullshit. I was born of anger at stagnation, violence, and strange-ness, all of which can be found in all of the books that I've mentioned as important to my growth.

And because someone's said it before me, and it better than I can, I leave you with this:

"Change or die."~Warren Ellis

[originally posted 4/1/07]

Body Mods, Art and the Modern

2007-07-29T16:28:00.000-07:00

this is a responce to this. please read it.

we live in america, a country founded by people so uptight, the british kicked them out. most of the uptight-ness that came with the territory (forgive the expression) has been exorcized, and one of the things we're left with is a community of artists who think everything is art. this claim is most utterly false.

it should be known that i have a very serious bias against what is called "modern" and "post-modern/ contemporary" art. throwing paint at a wall does not make you an artist in the exact same way that sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken. modification is not art by default. to say it is, is to say that the kid who crushes chain links into his face is an artist. i don't think we want this.

i think tattoos and piercings are pretty damn interesting. these are traditions that have existed for generations upon generations, and for good reason: they can mean something. the canvas of the body modification artist is the flesh. this is not a piece of paper on which one can erase mistakes, or even throw out if everything goes to hell. because of this exact fact, the body mod artist CANNOT claim the same creative affluence that, say a painter, could. if they screw up, it's for life. there are no second chances.

the discipline of body modification should be taken more seriously due to its permanence. the body mod'er is more than just an artist, he/ she is the artwork and the artist all in one!

this is what i believe to be the next step in "art," making one's self the subject of experiments and curiosity and potential beauty, moving the canvas off the frame/ whatever and on to the body. again, this is not new, but it is being re-discovered on a much larger scale then ever before. there's a reason tribal tattoos and piercings and scarifications are called tribal.

body mods are treated as though they are art, like paintings and sculpture. they are not. they are more.

[originally posted 3/25/07]

photography

2007-07-29T16:26:00.000-07:00

photography is a new discipline for me. i know basically how words work on a page, and how pictures work in panels, and how they both work together, but putting something in a frame to stand all on its own is something new.

for what seemed at the time too long, i was always asking my photographer friends, "what's the difference between a picture, and a picture of a thing?" their answer, most of the time, would be "what?" it is a strangely worded question, and still one that makes me think. to rephrase it, "what makes a good picture/ what makes a good picture different?"

a friend of mine told me that there were two schools of thought: one that focused on the moment captured, and the other on composition. he used the soldiers raising the flag at iwo jima as an example of "the moment," but we never got around to settling on a good example of composition.

the way i look through the lens is a combination of both moment and composition, however most of my photos fall more under the composition section; i was told about the way the frame is/ can be split into thirds, and this being the main compositional technique available to me at this time, is the one i find myself using most often. there is also the matter of the angle of the photo, which i've been playing with recently. it's a strange thing to set up the frame (sorry, can't think of a better word) in such a way that the geometry of the surroundings play an interesting role in the end result.

i know the concept of looking at the world through the crosshairs of a gun (the way audubon did) which sort of works with static energies and finality, and i know the concept of looking at the world with the intent to open it up and spread its workings around, and now i'm learning about looking at the world through a lens of something like reproduction and exact communication. all this is strange to me, this trying to adapt myself to work with the camera, or vice versa. i feel the burden of objectivity in a whole new light. it feels oddly empowering, i suppose.

[originally posted 3/19/07]

responce to column 3 - journalism

2007-07-29T16:14:00.000-07:00

this entry is a responce to this.

journalists have a very special place in the world we live in. they are the ones out there watching the world change minute by minute, day by day, they are our lens to the world. remember, this is a voluntary position.
as such, they should be responsible for their writings, and despite the efforts of any organization, they should tell the truth.

most of us cannot go about the world, learning and asking questions about its workings and goings on. this task is given to journalists. it is their job to tell the rest of us what's happening. i do not think that it is too much to ask that their findings be reported objectively; they have chosen to write about the world, and spread its guts all over the newsprint, so they should do so with a certain decorum.

if a news item contains a horrific tale of death and dismemberment, then it should be told. i, as a reader, do not care how it made you feel when you had to watch the body parts collected off the side of the road. i want to
know why the collision was so terrible, "what went wrong?"

if there is an achievement, i do not want to know how you, the journalist failed at the same task, or how you admire Ma Kent for cooking the world's best apple pie, because, after all, America made apple pie great and Ma Kent follows a grand tradition of pie makers, from her great great etc. etc. i want to know what makes her apple pie so good that i should run from all the way across this country, kick down her door, and hold a gun to her head in order to insure the pie's freshness.

when telling the world what the world is doing, truth and objectivity should be paramount endeavors, right next to making sure the paycheck comes.

[originally posted 3/14/07]

heads up

2007-07-29T16:12:00.000-07:00

here's what's gonna happen:
my girlfriend and I have decided to do a writing exercise such that one of us writes a column, and the other has to write a response. the initial columns rotate, and she had the first. my response is forthcoming.
links will be provided.
her column

[originally posted 3/12/07]

The Captian has left the building...

2007-07-29T16:10:00.000-07:00

Captain America, also known to the more well read and knowledgeable as Steve Rogers, died yesterday. Not really yesterday, but in the eyes of the public, he died yesterday. he got taken out by sniper fire.

to those of us in the industry, and I include myself among them, this is problematic. this means a drop in sales, after today. it also means I have people coming to my store trying to buy up my entire stock of the goddamn book. this is not cool. leave some for people who read the damn book.

this is only the beginning of the problems. Cap, as we fondly call him, is an American icon. he's been with us since world war two, fighting Nazis, and briefly the commies (though this was largely nick fury's department, with the space race and all). Cap stood for truth, justice, and the American way, whatever they mean. he fought the good fight, even after he was unfrozen from a block of ice and joined up with the avengers.

cap was a symbol of America, almost like superman, but more human. because after all, Steve Rogers was a human being. he was the patriotic hero of a generation, and continued to be so, until his demise yesterday. he risked his life time and time again for mom's apple pie, and... I don't know. whatever else is American these days. freedom fries. who the fuck knows. but he did it.

yesterday, someone almost cried when they read this story. I can understand this without hesitation. I have no qualms with being touched by a fictional entity. god knows, one changed my life.

but here's the problem. HE'S NOT FRONT PAGE NEWS. it does not matter except to the few who really care that he died, and even they know that this is just a goddamn stunt. nobody dies "for real" in mainstream comics. superman died, and he's back. so did red skull, Bucky, Jason Todd, hawk eye, the list goes on and on.

IT DOES NOT MATTER THAT HE'S DEAD. grieve personally. not publicly. he's not worthy of your tears, because his death is not one that meant something, then or now, and it never will. it'll ripple in the marvel universe, but it'll fade away in a couple of months. it always does.

NOBODY DIES IN MAINSTREAM COMICS!!!!

if someone like Jessey Custer, or Spider Jerusalem, or kabuki died, it would not matter. why? because he's not a marketing tool, he's not you old man's hero. most importantly, his story will never be over. he's part of an engine unlike anything we know, he's part of the corporate company owned armada of heroes. the story of these characters that we love and hate and are ambivalent about will never end. they'll be over, finally, when the company folds, and not a goddamn second sooner.

because they're part of such a beast, all that can be done with them is more. they cannot end, because if they do, the money stops coming. they exist in a world where stories go on forever, where the folklore is forever continued, new stories are told, and death is meaningless, because it is not lasting.

Steve Rogers, Captain America, whoever, FUCK YOU. no. excuse me.

Marvel Comics, fuck you. you've made your money. now earn it by letting him stay dead! but you won't, because you're probably down three quarters running, just like a few years ago, and civil war bombed like you never expected. that'd be a lie. the readers bought it, and you made your ends, and it never mattered. because you were just going to screw it up anyway. grow as a group of humans, not as a company, and let whatever respect and attachment you have/ had for these characters prevail over your bottom line, and keep them dead. they'll matter more this way.

[originally posted 3/8/07]

the pose of the narrator

2007-07-29T16:05:00.000-07:00

this is sort of an extention of a previous entry, the one about thee's and thou's as constricting language. more like a semi-colon, seperate but related thoughts. here goes.

i'm currently taking a break from watching something called BROKEN SAINTS. it was originally released as a web-animation, i think done with flash. but this is intricate. sort of like a comic with moving pictures, and the artwork has a painted quality. high end production. looks pretty. but that's not what this is about.

this is about the pose of the narrator. i'm about five minutes or so into the first chapter, and the dialogue/ inner monologue/ narrator's voice is crap. this is easy to tell for the following reasons: first, because a portion of the writing is in caption boxes, like in comics. the narrator says things in a fashion similar to the way people who think writing poetry means writing in vague and intentionally... i can't think of another word except pretentious.

crap similar to "i see the coulds surround me and i lose myself, lost inside my inner depths." crap like that. thank god, that's not part of the script, but it could be. the pose of the narrator is such that they scream "PAY ATTENTION TO ME! TAKE ME SERIOUSLY!" i think that's what it might be. i think the writing thus far takes itself too seriously, big dramatic pose with no real reason or effect. or rather that the effect is one that can't even being to work, because it's so goddamn end-all be-all. here's a line from the show: "burning faintly... in the ether of the night," and it's spoken all dramatic and crap.

this is hideously upsetting to me. i can't stand reading crap like this, and i know why. i know that this is a stage that most writers have to work through before they can write anything worthwhile, i know i did it for a while. looking back on the crap i wrote from a pose similar to this makes me want to cry, but i console myself because i know i can put it in its place, and move forward, i know that my writing has improved, at least to the point where i stopped thinking that everything i wrote had to be world-altering.

i think that this problem comes from the want to be taken seriously. a young writer tries so hard to write, and each sentence is so labourious, that they cannot bare to be dismissed, they cannot bare to be ignored. with this in mind, they try as hard as they can to chose language that they think has the tone of serious-ness, that has the tone of so-called real writing. they fail to realise that this will do nothing but alienate an audience, if they're lucky enough to keep one past the first page.

writing is in and of itself a serious endevour, but this does not mean that the writing has to be serious. it's like trying to tell a story where the narrator is, unbeknownst to the writer, is an academic trying to sound intelligent. the end result of this is a bone-dry narritive: the words are not intrensically serious or intelligent; talent does not lie in words, but the use thereof.

for example, take John Milton: "She fair, divinely fair, fit love for gods, / Not terrible, though terror be in love / And beauty" (Paradise Lost IX, 489-92). this is not that hard a thing to say, and i'll prove it; here's my re-writing: "she's so pretty, gods love her, and terror lies in both love and beauty." the two bits say basically the same thing, however, Milton is a god among sentence-architects, while i am nothing close. it's not what you say, but how you say it.

the narrator should not suck, this is self-evident.

there we go. rant's done. i know it's a step in the right direction, but even so, it still bothers me that i have to be party to the garbage. occupational hazard of being a reader, after all.

[originally posted 11/19/06]

just a quick one

2007-07-29T16:04:00.000-07:00

something's been bothering me for the last few minutes: king james. to clarify, i mean the King James version of the Bible. all the "thee"s and "thou"s and such. this has become a venue of authority in popular forms of religious texts.

when somesort of god is envoked in popular texts, there is a "thy suffering" or some such business woven in, even if it isn't a christian god that's at issue.

i was reading FULL METAL ALCHEMIST, and in the first chapter, the sun god Leto can "save thee from all thy sins" through prayer and faith.

it feels like this mode of speech is used to create the image that the dialogue of god can only be accessed by the initiated, the ordained, the learned, so forth to be called the clergy.

i dislike organized religion. and communists. deeply. deeper than a bullet burried in a wall that was fired through a body at point blank range by a magnum. such is my hate. there exists one and only one statement with which i'll share with karl marx: "religion is the opiate of the masses." enough with communism now.

if i were to subscribe to any form of religion, it would be protestantism. i choose the protestant faith for the following reason alone: personal interepretation of the text at hand- the bible. PERSONAL BLOODY INTERPRETATION! if i choose to believe in an invisible man, than i'll do it my own way, if i do so please.

if we are all god's children, then why must i become clergy in order to have a deeper relation with god? what about that makes one more special than the other?

main point being, i feel like this dialogue of "thee"s and "thou"s is used to distance, rather than to bring closer together, which is what, arguably, any given religion is supposed to do.

if i see god in a spoon, i'll talk to the spoon any way i like.

[originally posted 8/26/06]

2007-07-29T15:43:00.000-07:00

in america, we have soap operas. they are stupid for the vast majority, and sterotypically they're things that housewives watch every day at home to pass the time- it helps them pretend that they have lives. blah blah blah.

in china, they too have soap operas. one interesting thing is that all TV shows that are not games shows are referred to as such. but this is not the point. a large portion of these shows are set in what time period? you guessed it, the good old days of dynastic (which is a word) china. we know this time period mostly through movies with people flying around and kicking ass and taking names and mouths continuing to move despite the fact that their dialogue has ended. i'm talking about kung fu movies. actors like Jackie Chan, Jet Li (whose character in HERO is called Nameless), and more classically Bruce Lee. masterpieces like DRUNKEN MASTER 1 and 2, NEW LEGEND OF SHAOLIN, ENTER THE DRAGON, and for the newcomers, CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON, HERO, and HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS.

there are countless stories about real people, like General Guan Yu, and fables of their actions: he escaped from prison and ran across a desert back to his king because he was so loyal, despite countless efforts on the part of his captors to retain his services (General Guan is one of the greatest military minds and personel that ever lived). these stories are told over and over again, and new stories are created in this time when anything was possible. a time of honor and love and violence...

in america, a time period like this doesn't quite exist. i think i know why. america is too young- it doesn't have the history to draw upon. to speak momentarily on the old american literary problem, how do we create literature that is not new-european lit? they thought it couldn't be done, here when my favorite US of A was still an infant. le infant terrible (that's a reference to TRANSMETROPOLITAN, in case you're wondering). but it was done. emerson and frost and whittier all proved this (yay snow poets!).

the american revolution was a time of heroes, but not ones worthy of legend. the only names that even attempt to echo in this day and age are Paul Revere on his horse and George Washington with his wooden teeth. what next, but the civil war. we all know Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. and i know Grant was a drunk- the story goes that his urine could strip paint.

i have recently read one story set during the reconstrucion- it's called LOVELESS and it's killer. but it doesn't measure up in mythos.

here's the big one: the wild west. cowboys and indians, the frontiersmen, westward expansion, and that fun stuff. this is where it gets interesting. people like Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, and John Wayne, the Duke himself. yes, John Wayne was not really part of the west, but he's mythic none the less. don't like it, go fuck off.
the west was, for a time, the subject of so much media! we had comics and movies and books and televison! the tales of these folk were known far and wide. Calamity Jane, with her tongue that could tan leather, and Wild Bill who might have been able to out-shoot the Duke himself. and it is only now that the west matters again. if you look at mass media (in which i'm counting comics- again, don't like it then fuck off), you'll find that the west is back. sort of. HBO is showing DEADWOOD, a great show about a settlement that would later become part of California. it's got Wild Bill and more. it's angry and drunk and it's got more profanity that an angry crew of truckers on st. patrick's day.

we are trying to bring legends back to america, and it all starts here. in the wild west, before space was even a thought, there was adventure and fear and hope and legends! there are no enigmas in contemporary america. you hear no tales of justice or evil reaching far and wide, save those that wear turbans. because that's what's hip right now.

THE END...

PS- if you're shallow enough to treat that last bit as a dismissal of the current situation, then you really need to stop reading right now, and never come back. but at least comment and tell me so.

PPS- there will probably be more on this. i cannot promise, because i've largely said what i wanted to say. but if there will be more, than it'll be named as such.

[originally posted 8/21/06]

some things to come

2007-07-29T15:36:00.000-07:00

in case you dont know, there is a really big and important story/ myth/ thing in chinese culture called JOURNEY TO THE WEST. it's one of the four classic novels of chinese literature. and it informs almost every method of storytelling used in chinese pop culture (i.e. comics, TV shows, movies, novels, etc). it's like the ILIAD and ODYSSEYand the BIBLE all rolled into one for chinese culture- it has power and influence on that level.

it's set in dynastic china, which is the crux of my argument. we dont have something like this in american culture. we have something close, but not quite. there will be more on this later. i promise. i've been wanting to write it for a long time now.

sooner or later, there will be a thing about atheism. why, you ask? because i want to talk about it. the fact that i'm an atheist doesn't hurt, either.

there will be a thing on comics. i love comics. yes i do. i love comics. how about you?!

and more likely than not, there will be more than one thing about violence in lit. it's my senior project, so deal.

[originally posted 8/16/06]

The newness begins

2007-07-29T15:34:00.000-07:00

the new-ness begins...
hello. i am max.
i do not use capitals when i'm not writing by hand, or writing a paper. this will be a space for many things, for me ranting mostly, but it will also be for my writing, and for cool things that i find and that i feel like sharing.

i am beyond an amature at the web-page thing, so it'll take some time for me to get used to it, but hopefully it'll provide some entertainment for you all; more hopefully, it'll be good for me. i now sort of feel obligated to write something. this is a very good thing. summer has been writing free for me. i now have a new toy. hehehe. be scared.

i will leave comments open at all times, so if you want to tell me something, please go ahead. i am a fan of information.

that's whats up.

[originally posted 8/14/06]

Headsup!

2007-07-29T15:32:00.000-07:00

What follows is a re-posting of my entries from fullalbums.com/max, in chronological order. Tell me things?

another entrance

2007-07-29T09:17:00.000-07:00

Greetings.
I am Max.
This is my new home.

While I'm getting set up, please feel free to read my old posts over at http://www.fullalbums.com/max. They'll be here soon enough, but not just yet.

Enjoy.