It Took Me 30 Years to Realize

Senate Legal now. I plan on building my campaign platform as a thinly veiled allusion to Brett Lewis and John Paul Leon's The Winter Men.

I'm fairly pleased with being on Stay-cation this week. It is a glorious endeavor. I am typing this from the kitchen table, since it offers a modicum of coolness and hosts a fan. I moved in a bin and put it on the table so that I am typing all Stan Lee style (there is a picture of him standing in a backyard way back when he was doing the plotting on all the Marvel books and the story went he typed standing up). Also, standing while you work burns more calories, not the least of which is due my pull-up breaks in between bits and pieces.

It takes a little getting used to, but so far I dig it. I have my coffee. I have bagel. I have bananas. I am writing. 30 is the new 11. Double down.

What Old Tamber Had to Say

“They say she lives alone out there.”

“What, like out in the woods?”

“Not like way back in a cabin or anything, but in a little house out there off the road. I'm not even sure she has a car.”

“What, does she walk in here every day? Seems a long way. And not really safe is it, or doesn't seem safe. Anyone come along on someone looks like her, well if they ain't a good sort that'd turn around pretty bad.”

“They say she speaks in a funny tongue, some weird, old accent. Old Tamber said she spoke with all manner of things too. That when you'd go up by the place she'd be outside, out in back of the place or over on the side nearer to the stream and the marsh near that fork in the road.”

“The one that leads over to Dalton.”

“Or over towards Hume yeah.”

“Hm, didn't realize the place was up that far. I'm not out that way too much.”

“Tamber says she'll be out there talking with the plants, sometimes treating them to a congregation.”

“The hell does that mean?”

“A sermon.”

“Like a preacher?”

“Yeah. Holding forth on all those plants and anything else there she might be seeing. What kind of virtue to you suppose you'd extol to a plant.”

“Hahaha, hmm. Constancy.”

“How about a venus fly trap?”

“Sort of have to condone murder on that one don't you.”

“Either that, or you and Tamber just having on, right?”

“I'm not, I'm telling you what Tamber said.”

“That old broad knows just about everyone, and doesn't strike me as to like to make up a story like that.”

“No, s'why I kind of went on with it. It's out there sure, but don't fall off the edge.”

“Still, even if she is sort of odd, she's still a beauty and there are still all kinds out there up on the hills. That one guy, the one they say takes off anytime he gets wind of the FBI after him, he lives out there. He's not someone I'd put anything past. Even if I didn't know him twice as well as I'd like to I'd've heard in a year more than half what I need to know he isn't any sort.”

“Yeah. I don't know. Makes a mystery though doesn't it. She's only lived here for what, five years. Opens this little store, always standing there in the doorway. But it's gotta be good for the town, having a curio shop that sells flowers.”

“Sure. You think you're ever gonna talk to her.”

“Me? No.”

“Why not?”

“I get tongue tied and stammerin' just thinking about talking to her.”

“You'd maybe do alright.”

“No, carpenters don't talk to pretty florists.”


-One of the 10% Stories I wrote during the triathlon. Got too caught up at the end with training to post this properly out side of its home at Fictionaut.

We're sitting a coffee shop now, trying to see if there isn't more to say upstairs in the old idea box at the moment. Re-reading Grendel at the moment, and have an idea for a thing and the artist I wouldn't mind talking to about it, so that might be a thing in and of itself. Fun, sort of.

Horn to Lips

Elegiac sense, the voice quivering near the clearest pitch touching near to monday hearts, lolling head on the shoulder. A son born late into the light. No more impression gongs sounding, weighing down the air, keeping it close to the mouths. Calling back to a dead line to fall down through that empty-tone pit at the bottom of it all, crawling up into the middle of it imaging the silence in its place like darkness, not void of light, but hoarding the images of everything that can be seen. The quiet where you can hear every sound.



No actual sex, but lots of amoramity. Not a place for dreams. Instead she sits against the railing on the steps of the gazebo in the center of the park. She feels protected by the topiary of a dog behind her. The heat drags her out and maybe she'll sleep on a bench near the fountain tonight, not far from the leafy mutt.



Lingering voices in the sun, awaiting a reason to stand up and walk away from the park in the bright and heat, staring like the lost at boys dressed in the bodies of men coming home from their lives to homes full of steam. Your juice for free. Nothing devoured like the mind dejected. Lost song lyrics locked away, replaced people looking, unheard and unregistered.

Charybdis - The Death Spiral

Now the destroyer of the establishment in me used to read revelatory and go rampaging on into the night on the wings of furious indignation, upbraiding the lords of culture, power and influence for their callousness, for their machinations, for their inhumanity. I wanted to infiltrate Wal-Mart and expose anti-union activity. Break into nursing homes and expose abuse.

Because that is what you have to do right, you fight back? Because at the heart of every Complex - military, education, fast food - is a blackened heart of avarice and greed, of the kind Steve Albini was talking about when he told us about The Problem with Music. We must battle with that and overcome. Right?

So too then must it be with publishing books, an aged, long-toothed institution older and even more nefarious than brash young corporate music. And so we have our enemy now, and it is the The Death Spiral! *Cue ominous bum bum baaaa music*

*deep sigh*

Oh, another article about another way in which PUBLISHING IS DEAD/DYING/LYING IN THE DESERT BEING EATEN ALIVE BY ANTS

Sorry, knee-jerk reaction to seeing the word "death" associated with "publishing". So let's read,

How, you may well ask, can these buyers read and pass judgement on, for example, the over 1000 SF titles published in a year?

Of course the answer is they can’t. Instead, an equation makes the buys of most of the books on the racks or blackballs the ones that don’t make it that far. It’s called “order to net.”

Oh. Really!? That does sound less than good. Personally, as a bibliophile, I think books should be valued more highly than anything (I didn't say cost!), I think librarians and teachers should make six-figures. Publishing is a business, though I think at end of day a business where you have a lot of underpaid people working passionately on making available something they really believe in: books. Onward Norman,

Let’s say that some chain has ordered 10,000 copies of a novel, sold 8000 copies, and returned 2000, a really excellent sell-through of 80%. So they order to net on the author’s next novel, meaning 8000 copies. And let’s even say they still have an 80% sell-through of 6400 books, so they order 6400 copies of the next book, and sell 5120....

You see where this mathematical regression is going, don’t you? Sooner or later right down the willy-hole to an unpublishablity that has nothing at all to do with the literary quality of a writer’s work, or the loyalty of a reasonable body of would-be readers, or even the passionate support of an editor below the very top of the corporate pyramid.

That sucks. It really does. It is a terrible way for the efforts of a person seeking to create and tell stories to end up, but I really just don't get it. Something is missing here. These numbers cannot just fall precipitously unchecked can they? Why are only 6400 people buying the second book? Shouldn't the second book do better than the first? What happened to all that editorial passion? Where was that editor when the promo-person from B&N came in to talk about tabling and end-caps for the next season when the book was coming out? Was she out sick that day? Did he sleep with promo-person's sister and never called? Did the ARCs going out to the bloggers and the indie store owners fall in the river? What happened?

Where are the fans in all of this, the people who fucking loved the first book? How come only a fraction of the people who found the first book find the second? What happened to the channels whereby the first book was found? Why were those channels not functioning on the second book? What happens when the second book wins an award?

Where is the demand?

WHY can't the voice of a passionate editor overcome the mechanical deliberations of publishing's Livia, spiteful grandmother that she is to our poor Claudius? WHY can't the desire of devoted fans overcome?

Now maybe this is me being a sort of devotee of Richard Nash - I count myself in his debt for publishing books on Bill Hicks and Martin Millar's Good Fairies of New York - but demand is key, demand is word of mouth and it takes a lot of forms. I myself have induced the sale of Good Fairies, The Name of the Wind, and Wolf Hall because I cannot shut up about those books. I have easily driven 10 sales for each of those books just being a schmo. This happens because a great book makes a fan of its readers, and fans are crazy. Being nearly driven doubly insane waiting or the sequel to Name of the Wind (March 2011 by the gods!), I can vouch that this is true.

Now an editor, they can be dangerous. This is someone who thinks an author's second book is catnip growing in a cat-quarium (like an aquarium, but for cats), can put on the working cap, show up at that tabling meeting, and fight tooth and nail to get that book on endcaps on both coasts. How many copies does that sell? How much higher does that fight raise the pre-orders for the title?

Wait, maybe Norman and I missed a step here. He's going on about supply. I'm railing about demand.

Maybe this is my false assumption: that the editor loves the book enough to be willing to fight for it. That the second book got published because the editor thought it was in fact better than the first book?

Is the problem here really that the editor DOESN'T love the book? Doesn't LIKE the book?

Let's reexamine this. The second book comes out, without the love of an editor, without crazy-ass fans like me rooting for it, without the love a couple independent bookstore owners who blog and can chat up a couple hundred other indie stores at BEA. Why? Well, hard fact...

...the first book just wasn't that good.

The second book isn't any better. Maybe #2 was published because it would do well enough to just about break even, and offer up a couple of paychecks along the way. Is that maybe what Normie and I missed, that maybe the 2nd or 3rd doesn't deserve to be published? The first book was the editor taking a chance after having a surprise hit in quarter-life memoir "Spitting in the Wind", but it failed to light a fire among the readers.

If you follow Norman's example of the spiral, the hard fact becomes a hard lesson: that long-term success for a writer remains tied to the quality of their books and their appeal in the market.

What Norman's article inadvertantly demonstrates is not the cruel grinding up of a writer in the gears of commerce. Instead it reveals the hidden truth that authors will not continue in perpetuity, once they have published, to receive all the blessings of the system and the fruits of the institution of publishing. They must remain viable in order to bask in the light of Zeus's favor. They must push themselves forward, their writing forward, and skate the ever narrowing razor's edge of being critically objective of their work while letting loose the energies of their imagining every time they push themselves out into the market.

Writers can get published writing a book that is just good enough can get a writer inside of the wall, but like most things, being "just good enough" isn't enough to keep you there.

Lights Outside

Stay out of the light. Keep your distance as if this were a bear that had no form. Ursus, which means destroyer – the shapeless, indescribable doom peoples would not name and called only bruin, the brown, the beast left untraceable, its edges incomprehensible. It assassinates inside the captivating hugeness of its body. Its shadow was sorrow, and there are many shadows here. Perhaps they are sure lights. Maybe you want to call them that and let all of that pale, wavering immateria spill over your face. Maybe.

There are some who would want the lights to be brighter, but they stay were they are, their intensity unmoved, unafflicted by your glowing emotions. The light shining around you, circumscribing your body reflecting on the surfaces in the center of everyone around you. These two come up together, dueling, charged and seconded, your glow by the perceptions of your heart and the light by the grid. The light wins out. It sorry, weak light remains ceaseless, inexhaustible, so long as its filamental gases hold out. It awards its prize, casting a pallor on the bare skin of a coughing chest waiting to come to rest forever. Pinpointing for us where weakness has developed.

Who knows, maybe it’s a paling in the end. Maybe it keeps us aware of what’s going to happen when we look at the bed. Giving us a chance, a moment or two more to adjust our senses instead of coming in here with some kind of unknowing, or at the outside worst, false hope. Perhaps they are sure lights outside room 317, knowing that they are at least honest.


The gidget below is my Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Team in Training fundraising widget. I am competing in the NYC Triathlon this year to raise money for LLS research and patient services charity. Last year a friend, classmate, and fellow writer, Honest Jon Harding, passed away after a long battle with cancer.

For every 10% of my goal that I raise, I will post a new story here or someplace else on the internet. If you want more fiction, or if you want to donate to this wonderful cause, just click below. This weeks story riffed off of this image at Elephant Words.

Update The Fundraising widget doesn't seem to be working right now, so until then, here is a link to my donations page. Anything you can give goes to a great cause, and all donations are tax deductible.

This Is Going to Hurt

but it is totally worth it.

Baggins

Just for the sake of saying, for the sake of expunging some pent up frustration and grief, I have to say for the foreseeable future, I will continue to refer to this strange and vocal movement for ostensibly smaller government and lower taxes as Teabaggers.



Mostly, my reasons are twofold personal grievances. The first is the abhorrent rendition of history the attempted adoption of the Tea-Party moniker represents. The Boston Tea Party was a movement by the American Colonials to foment support and demonstrate to the British Crown that taxation without representation, that unfair and excessive taxation which did not serve to redress the needs of local constituents, could not be quietly and demurely enacted. The current Teabagger movement claims to use that base as the springboard for their fervor, but their argument rings hollow. They have represenation, and the taxation they protest, on issues like health care and global warming, redress some of the gravest and most serious issues facing each and every American today.

The fact that most Americans have never, and will never, see a terrorist in their entire lives does not lead them to believe that the tax dollars spent on defense and military spending is going toward some fruitless cause, but most Americans are guaranteed to seek out medical coverage at some point in their lives, and anyone who lives through the next 30 years will certainly experience some effect of global warming due to our wasteful energy habits and dependence on archaic, unclean fuels.

My second reason for continuing to brand this group with the Teabagger moniker is due to the groups own use of language. Not so much the unfortunate self-referential signage that appeared early on, but the not-infrequent ridiculous, often-times slanderous, offensive, racist, misogynistic, homophobic and xenophobic comments made by Teabagger movement supporters.



This is a fairly tame example. While I am sure most of the people in this movement are not outwardly racist, or misogynistic, or so on, the amount of this kind of language, expressions of the most brutally racist sort directed at the duly elected President of the United States is at once ignorant, un-American, and worthy of the utmost contempt.

I do not expect America to be a perfect place, and there are certainly many areas in which this country can improve, but the utter LACK of response and denunciation by the wider elements of this movement to curb this kind of hate-mongering, to distance and disassociate from the troubling attitudes and beliefs hidden within itself is as great if not greater offense. This guy might not know any better, http://i307.photobucket.com/albums/nn312/Paul_H_Rosenberg/teapartypic.jpg, but Newt Gingrich, and Fox News, and the other leaders of this movement should. They remain silent, and therefore they remain Teabaggers.

I'm With CoCo

Thanks to Mike for this.

Mooritan

And the last of them. Here is my final elephant words story for now. I might do another run in a couple months. This week's image was here.


Mooritan

Come once a month, and take that spoon out of your mouth when you are here. I like a voice that doesn’t register or agree, you can pick one to your liking from the wall over there. Set it on the table and hear what you came to hear.

The sun is coming back out now, so you should be ok to drive. Please mind the lawn when you are turning around.

‘Sorry to call when you are on the road. What was it by the way?’

‘Mooritan? Interesting. Well I will see you next month. Drive carefully.’

Discorporeate

Here is my penultimate Elephant Word for the year. I took the theme to heart somewhat. I've always loved the process of bognostification, which is the method of creating a new word for the purposes of literary usage and gain. Combining that function with the images Elephant Words presented, with its link to memory (the elephant, if you are unfamiliar with the idiom, is purported to possess an astonishing memory, hence the scene in Amelie).

Here is a link to the image that inspired this weeks story: Discorporeate

wait here. Incorporeality is very likely if we get any closer. If you feel yourself starting to loosen up, a tingling on the backs of your hands or the tips of your fingers, try to start digging into the sidewalk. The pain receptors will help you maintain integrity.

They are going to press the whole world into a book. It’s a hobby. Their eyes, their mouths, salival smacking shut.

Hobbies usually require the expense of that which is seen as inconsequential, the rolling up of the birth certificates of orphans held to the ear to listen for the sound of paper. Burning the last photographs of the last, final, and now deceased members of the families of Napoleon’s soldiers. Leaving the Lionels of a pedophile outside, in a box so the cardboard discorporeates into the cars, warping the tracks.

Glossening

I am dashed and bashed and ready for the abuse of the weekend which will be thick and served in a glass mug, a very large glass mug. And in that spirit I have committed this affront to punctuation, pacing, and preposition, based on this past week's image at Elephant Words:

Glossening

He sat there on his ass and couldn’t believe, in the same way a person chooses to believe or not believe in recycling as an act of and expressing value, that she was going to turn the music up since he hated all the music played tonight never really getting into Modest Mouse which kept playing because they all thought the lyrics were just oh so clever but what the hell did look out the window of my color tv even mean, and so tensed up his shoulders thinking maybe he should do more than just mouth the words ‘wait wait wait I don’t think that’s the solution’ though instead he just sipped from his beer as she slid the knob to the right bringing to light more neon bars of LED-platinum illumination calling up a burst of bass compression like the air had compacted, crunched with rising density, matter spilling into an already defined space from another direction you couldn’t get sight of with simple three-dimensional perceptive physiology, gripped his beer tightly to ensure it remained where and what he expected it to be looking into the next room wondering if anyone now talking louder would comment the music was too loud and pulled his feet in closer to the couch as she set a vase full of fake flowers in front of the stereo on a piece of paper before angling the speakers at the long petals of fabric which began to quiver and wave loosing dust that fell upon the whiteness of the paper in grey abstract over which she now hung the crystal chimes off the front porch by a hook in the ceiling and directing the articulating neck of a lamp at the crystals shivering in sonic, prismatic glossening over the ever-evolving mandala of dust on the paper’s surface.

Anthermic

Once more round the bend, once more to upend. Time again spinning ass over head, time again to drop the Elephant Word balloon like lead. This weeks image:

Was it cold? Was it only the sensation of heat leaving his body? A negative reaction, neither endothermic, creating nothing, leaving nothing, no bonds, no connections in its wake, and not exothermic. Anthermic. Was the word just a way to relate the abstraction of lose, the loss of heat, its at times painful diffusion, leeched out by invisible forces, by things that could not be seen, could not be heard – could only be felt? What kinds of things would, could, do something like that? Where would it come from, and why?

The sunlight was coming head on, bounding in heavily and deeply yellow, packets of heat quanta nearly spent as they brushed across the world, tracing lines upon the surfaces of the room. The last few degrees of the angle that makes the day. Did the sun keep it away?

The eye tired and ready to close, the head slumping, the shoulders sunken. Shadows blurring out the form of the baseboards, the moldings strapped to the walls and now retreating from the firm lines, blending black, melting into the joint of floor and ceiling they conceal, losing the rigidity of their shape, softening in the dark. But beneath a blanket there is warmth? A force like the sun, that would drive them away, the gnawing maws on the other side of sight. But a few feet of woven cloth?

There are no blankets here. Only the stiff back of this chair. Only the feeling, leeching, like unsaturated rock, deep in the darkness. A place for fasting, retreating from the world, enduring their privations, their feasting. This place will be the seat where-in I endure them, my cave, my Alverna.

scringer terpem

A bit late in posting the Elephant Words story from last week. Thanking Givers takes ol' Bones up into that part of NY state where when you point at a map and ask, what is in this area, your friend says "Nothing." They're not quite wired up out there is what I am saying.

Here is last week's image, and this week's image will be forthcoming in another couple days.

Diane sat herself down on the couch. She raised one leg up and rested the heel of her boot on the table in front of her, put the bottle to her lips and tipped it back. She lowered the bottle down onto the buckle of her belt and closed her eyes. She pictured her sister sitting on the edge of a dock, legs dangling over into the water, trying to hear the splash of the water over the sounds of the party, the chattering voices. Her sister in a cotton dress, a slender scarf around her neck. Dragonflies buzzing nearby. She couldn’t picture the sun in the sky, as if it were an eclipse and the world had turned diffuse with thin, sickly, dying light, the colors all fading into shades.

“Is that a scringer terpem?”

Hideous. No hair, except ratty bits at the sides of his head, brushed out and bushy like all the sad young topiaries would ever hope to be. Dark-rimmed glasses with bits of silver on the temples, expensive jeans from a trendy shop down on Broadway, a stylish sweater. His forty-ish chin and the line of his jaw was raw and red through the stubble he’d grown out since early that morning.

Already she was tired of thinking about him.

“A what?” she asked, wholly un-amused.

“On the table.” There were two packets there. One looked like a candy wrapper, opened and likely half empty. The first looked like a packet, but it was a guitar pick.

“What is a scringer terpem?”

“It’s a prophylactic. A condom organically made.”

Hideous and now nauseating. One in ten thousand of these kinds of guys is actually genuine, actually worth half a damn and capable of telling you something about books or music. They’ve been outsiders with two good god damn’s of a rat’s ass for what anybody wanted them to think and they are living in spectacular lofts and having dinner parties full of photographers and musicians and fashion-fiends. Some have probably even met Bowie. You can see it in the way they walk, in how they’ve dressed themselves. How they look you in the eye. How they know to leave you alone when you are sitting on a couch resting a beer on your belt buckle. If there is a universal signal for leave me the hell alone for five minutes, it is a beer on the belt buckle. This guy is two years into books on how to seduce women, on image shaping courses and more than likely a little baggie full of blue triangles. He is bloated around the eyes, newly divorced after leaving his wife. Addicted to porn, too chicken shit to skip a day of work, probably in banking and responsible for processing promissory notes. He doesn’t even have a secretary he can fantasize over in the stall of the bathroom, touching himself with his pants around his ankles. He doesn’t even have an office, doesn’t know enough to leave a body alone, or that esoterically bringing up a sexual reference in an unwanted conversation ought to be punishable with violence.

Diane’s bare shoulders flex into the couch, pushing her forward. His eyes follow her about six inches below her collar. She closes her eyes as she stands up, then opens them again when she is over his head. There is a radiator behind the lounge chairs set up in the dining room by the window.

“That’s a packet of mints. I’m going over there now.”

IMELICHOLIDON

I got all stumbling upon Elephant Words some months back, oddly enough, just about the time the daring dude behind Dead Rat's Press was gathering up a small army of ne'er-do-wells for yon Postcard Fiction Collaborative.

It's switched on, let me tell you. As is our one and fine Dilettantsia's new Candor literary magazine. They say it is a place where women can spar with text and culture. They've sold me.

But getting to the elephents and their words, I decided I'm going to embrace the burst culture a bit more fully, for a stint anyway, and elephant it up from the sidelines (and like most things, it's all Warren Ellis' fault. So once a week, from here on through the end of the year I'll be posting a story that's wandered out to the road from the dark corners of my skull and hitch-hiked its way to you here.

This week's inspiration:

IMELICHOLIDON

He had something to say but didn’t know how to say it. He had been trying. Wandering the aisles he scanned the arrangements of the produce. Stacks of potatoes, melons set out alone. Heaps of apples on one side, and the next line over green beans. He compared the prices with the shapes of fruit. Kiwi, $.99 each. Oranges, $2.59 per bag (they were in season). The wooden racks reliably holding the cauliflower and the broccoli had the sense of a stall, a farmers roadside stand, of an outside world brought inside among the metal shelves, the plastic labels, stand-up coolers, and the cardboard displays. He got lost in the basic commerce of food, of sustenance, and when he found himself again he was still unsure. Still mute within the thing’s importance.

He read books, taking in the characters, their voices. Translating their desires into words, their words into the coded messages of their desires and passions, of their hatreds. He copied out passages that worked and passages that failed, and he wrote over then in pen where he should put his own words, stealing the cadence of the other writer out of the thought his own paces were unsuitable to the job.

Reciting out loud he addressed picture frames and mirrors, the shoulders of his shirts hanging in the closet. Notes were typed on a typewriter, outlines drawn with webbed diagrams in notebooks, but it sounded wrong. The words didn’t look right on the page, the meaning taken away with the sound of his voice.

Walks in the park found him trailing joggers growing ever distant or staring into the bottoms of the fountain.

At the movies he looked for the shoes the actors wore, the movements of their shoulders. He watched how they turned their heads when they followed their eyes or how their eyes moved after they turned their heads. How their motions conveyed the expression of their person, of their character. He listened. He mouthed along with the words once he had seen the film a time or two, mimicking the movements of their jaw in impersonation, to capture the voice, the resonance of the palette.

There was an old Hi-Fi in the closet. He tried different arrangements of the speakers. He pointed them at one another, away, inside of windows. He took out a microphone and read onto tape. Continuous sections, then fragments, then he used a dual deck to splice the material together. He felt as though each run-through the sound degraded. Each re-dub created more and more static. He put on CDs and read through the liner notes when the music played.

He tried to name it. He called it Roger. Helios. Imelicholidon. The Trigger. Cage. Belfast.

A séance told him he was the reincarnation of Robert E. Lee. He walked around his apartment with a saber strapped to his hip, and used a southern accent he imagined a genteel southern general might use. He said y’all once or twice.

One morning he made breakfast. He just made breakfast. He didn’t try to think of how the pattern of the yokes or the distance from the bacon on the plate would look and what it would mean. What the flowers he had run out that morning to buy said standing in the vase on the table. How the fullness of the orange juice glass mattered.

Last night, he had said it. Said it the right way.

He talks in his sleep.

On Promethea, and our need for Her

They posted this over on Newsarama today.

To say that Promethea sets me off is an understatement. When I write, I try to clip the very lowest edges of that story with my reaching, out-stretched hand. It is a mountain, like The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, or Blood Meridian, which I have set for myself to cross when I approach a story.

The asshole in me regards anyone who is not suitably impressed by Promethea as a story and an artifact worthy of awe in a very poor light, and the more enumerated renderings of those comments said asshole makes are sentiments I keep to myself.

I truly and utterly love this story, and I'm very happy with the comments I wrote, so I wanted to post them here as well.

To tell you that I nearly cry every time I read issue 17, at the image of Christ on the cross, would compel you to take up immediately and read the entire series (if you had ever actually met me, such would be the impression you had of what strokes of evocation it would take to induce such a reaction in a person such as myself).

I am many things, mostly yeti, but surely not what any reasonable person would consider a christian and sure as hell never cry, but that scene, the evocation of that image, is the most pronounced rendering of Jesus I have ever encountered, and does more to reconcile the nature of Christ’s value as a figure worthy of the highest regard than any words ever uttered by a pastor asking for a tithe.

It IS a long, drawn out essay on magic done as a comic book series. But name anything even remotely like that? “Everything is magic" is entirely the point and has never been made so completely and with such applomb.

The storytelling weaves together Moore's musings on magic and the nature of imagination, and J. H. William's pages, his layouts and paneling, and José Villarrubia's coloring follow in richness the examples set by Eisner or Steranko. They break out of any commonplace ideals set for modern comics storytelling to create something singular, something that holds up a mirror to ourselves to show we are, in fact, capable of much more than we have ever been lead to believe. I for one appreciate that sentiment.

Promethea incorporates nearly all of existence into the story. It is not a mistake that Moore uses a significant portion of the text to mirror the content and ancient role of the tarot and the kabbalah, because both of those systems served to provide a cosmological framework for a time when science was not capable of doing so. They were structured schema organizing observable phenomena into a coherence with the unexplainable chaos of life.

That Moore was able to realign these elements with our modern understanding of time, evolution, and nature I think is actual magic, because he is able to use such admittedly esoteric quanta to the effect of compelling the reader further into a story which illustrates, again and again, how the value of humanity MUST rest not in our derisive contempt of the mistakes we have made, but in how we move forward from failure, in inches by the decade at times, towards being worthy of the time we have on this world.

The christ scene, and countless others, strike at the base of what I believe, and by projection (because I have never met him but I argue he believes the same), Moore believes: that humanity has, and will continue to, attack, destroy, and punish the people who have found through their own awareness, talents, and abilities the means to make of us a better people and a better world, but that through the suffering of fools and tyrants and despots upon those who seek to remove chains and hatred we find the road from darkness up into light.

Moore exults, and I freely admit and support this, writers, as well as artists, poets, philosophers, and teachers. He exults those who would bring us light, which should be pretty obvious from the title, and I am thankful that he does, because there is not nearly enough of that in this world.

The Day of Attrition

I have no juice in my gonads of creativity at the moment. I am stealing everything. I'm robbing Warren Ellis blind. I just tackled Chabon, punched him in the back of the head, and ran off with his notebook. His wallet I tossed into the bushes where he’ll never find it, just the way we used to do it in high-school. If Robert McKee wants my blood he can come and fucking try.

In the meantime, I need a crutch, to hobble on my ill-fitting writing legs up these uneven hills with jutting rocks everywhere that don’t hide any secrets more interesting that telling of how a big fucking block of ice the size of Canada once raped the shit out of this place. Not exactly impressive.

That dog is wearing a foot-brace, or a wrap or something, and he still doesn’t look as ridiculous as the fat old man in a Montauk t-shirt and running shorts. Still need to get into the bathroom seeing as how I’m not actually competent enough to drink coffe without snorting it all over myself like an idiot, like this orange shirted dude here.

You could choke on the humidity out there and I don't even need to think about a jacket for another three weeks yet that dude has a parka on and moon-boots. He is also holding an open umbrella under a dry, overcast sky and carries a plastic bag filled with what looks like rotten weeds so there you have it.

The problem is still mine, because these people are offering me gold, more shit than I could ever want, and I can't mine a fucking thing out it.

Time just to throw away the shovel, shut down the drill, and just dig my fingers into the rocks until they are bloody. Someday it'll all be interesting again.

Worn, Torn, Yet to be Reborn

Kicked in the gut today, so try as I try, there was nothing for it. A moment maybe somewhere in there, when it looked like it might come out into the light, but really all for naught. Got run pretty deep into the ground yesterday, face-first into the muck, to suck and choke on blubbering sick pooled thickly in the gutter, and all that.

I've got egg on my face, a stone in the pit of my stomach, and a stake in my heart. So no more blathering.

Go listen here: Kalpana

And we got some new stuff up for Septermber: Postcard Fiction Collaborative

Jet Boy Meets the Angel of the Odd

Think the kinda place where no one cares
What your livin for
And Jet Boys so preoccupied
He don't care 'bout before

I do well to remember this, because I look back now, at folders and files and backed-up verbal ammunition, and it occurs to me that I've been going about all of this very, very poorly. I've kept too much space between all of the buckets, when they could be closer, the little slithery tentacles and pokers and things playing with one another. What do they say these days, you have to let kids get dirty, get em all covered up with germs building those 5th dimensional ecologies where size doesn't matter. Or maybe its sixth.

I'm still trying to get around inside Ideaspace, with Alan Moore reeling up out of grain of wood and the patterns of sidewalk concrete and telling me things I can barely remember in the lower dimensions. Apparently he appears before Warren Ellis in a flying hoverchair that may or may not be capable of traveling through 7 dimensions.

Get to be my second favorite prime number today.

Shoe Shows, and We're Inside the Onion

We could pretend that everyone here wants peace, but where is the fun in that. If one person wants peace and the rest all want to swing socks full of pennies into each others kneecaps, that is less fun than many things, but more fun than everyone wanting peace, or if everyone wants peace but one person, then that can be greatly fun than a whole mess of things, like wombats (wombats being the most fun animal to occur to me as I am writing this).

The funnest example of having a room full of people who all want peace is to have a small group who doesn't want peace actually, and then one or two other people who through both guile and simple apathy pretend to want peace, but are totally willing for their own amusement to foment further and increasingly vehement non-peace in the argument between the peace-seekers and the non-peaceful.

I fall into this later category, and do so in the hope the peaceful will violently pursue their goal of peace, and the violent will prove cowardly and untoward in their attitudes towards upheaval. Yes, this is the kind of person I am.

Put that in your guitar and plunk it. I've been reading Fictionaut lately, and Warren Ellis' column at Bleeding Cool, Do Anything.

Ben McCool's mercenary ramblings strike somerthing we have attempted all so often, working at the dayjob. Becacuse they are two different things. A job is fuckall of the highest order, something we do to ourselves, inflict on ourselves, sometimes as he says, so that we can force ourselves to be a little more invested in the work we do. Work therefore is something we give a fuck about.

I'm on page 96 (including endnotes) of Infinite Jest. I made a new playlist for the working a couple nights back. I called it Floorshows. I'll make another today called Floorshoes. This is how I am. New York Dolls feature heavily.

I'm working on my novel, really, except for yesterday which was a fuck of a day. Worst Saturday in quite some time. I would have rather been at the dayjob.

MoCCa Grab Rundown and Linkage

It was all a blur. Not intentionally, or even metaphorically. Clinically, since I managed to spend some MoCCa time just at the onset of a preemptive con-cruding, clearly designed by my enemies to keep me from basking in comicdom's comforting glow.

On the upside, when I was sitting outside at one point, trying to muster enough consciousness to stay on my feet (which didn't last), I did see Bob Fingerman pass by eating some McD's, and I'll be treasuring that moment for some time to come. I made a once around pass of the place, had a few moments to talk with Brian Wood while I was hanging out with Salgood Sam, and then went on a time and pocket tightened spree.


-Kenan Rubenstein's artwork


The cream on top was:

Connor Willumsen's The Middle, which I picked up for a few skads. It's a clean, sparse surreality of a tale that doesn't waste any time explaining itself. I'll be re-reading this again and again, and looking out for more of his work.

Jon J Muth's Vanitas. I'm basically always looking for Muth work, since some of his mid-80s Marvel work I am lucky enough to call my first experiences in comics and has formed large sections of my brain. The drawings, paintings, and photographs in here are simply out of this world, and it always feels like I'm learning about how art works by looking at his stuff.

The Biographer, by Ada Price. I picked this up from the SVA student table because the cover had such a great design (she has a pic on her blog, which will hopefully continue to be updated). The story itself is lots of layers of who is telling what about who, and that works for me.

On the Beach by Kenan Rubenstein. Another skad pick-up, very nearly my last skad. I was given the choice between Hipsters in Brooklyn or naked folks. I went with the naked, and it turned out for the best (I've been among the hipsters, and while some are nice, they are still just yuppies that just happened to be born in the 80s).



Also good, for reasons I don't have the where-with-all to expound at present, were a couple more SVA products. Allison Strejlau's work, this time Kakapo, found its way into my bag once again, having earned a place there from the SVA student mini-comics show in 2008. Edwin Huang seems fast-tracking towards the big guns with his thick shadows and panel borders. This time around I picked up Yide'.

My biggest regret was not being able to now have the "Helper" statue sculptor Jesse Farrell had out there, but I enjoyed the hell out of talking with him about Venture Bros.

Since I feel I am inching ever closer to another nap, I'll have to pause here, but will come back for a rundown of the rest of the grabbage later on.

Cheers