Memorizing W.C. Williams

I've never been a great memorizer. Speeches were something of an exception to this, so the art was not lost to me, just hidden more often than not. Maybe I just never made the time to do it. I've spent the last three days committing this to memory. I have typed it here from memory, and I think it is right.

This is from W.C. Williams Paterson, speaking of the falls on the Passaic River:

"Jostled, as are the waters approaching
the brink ; his thoughts
interlace, repel, and cut under,

Rise rock-thwarted and turn back
but forever strain forward - or strike
an eddy and whirl ; marked by a
leaf or curdy spume ; seeming
to forget.

Retake later the advance and
are replaced by the succeeding hordes
pushing forward ; they coalesce now,
glass-smooth with their swiftness,
quiet, or seem to quiet as at the close
they leap to the conclusion and
fall! fall in air, as if
floating, relieved of their weight
split-apart, ribbons ; dazed, drunk
on the catastrophe of the descent
floating unsupported
to hit the rocks ; to a thunder,
as if lightning had struck"

Just something to make me use my mind in a different way.

Eggs in the Light

A pair of jeans lay next to the door to his closet, where they had been left when he climbed into bed last night, and retrieving them he walked through the doorway toward the kitchen. Midway through the living room he slid his legs into the pants. He had them zipped and buttoned by the time he reached the fridge.

He poured the old coffee from the pot down the drain. If he had plants he would have used the coffee to water the plants, diluted with some water, supposedly as a way to help them grow, but he had no plants. He dumped the old grinds into the trash and prepared a fresh pot.

Cracking some eggs into a frying pan where a pat of melted butter was sizzling quietly, he put two slices of bread in the toaster. He flipped the eggs, breaking the yoke of one, swirled the pan to spread the sticky yellow goo around, and turned off the gas let them firm up. He pulled a plastic container of tuna salad from the fridge and spread a layer of it across the warm bread. He pulled a square, plastic plate from the cupboard next to his head, and set the developing sandwich upon it. He pulled a slice of cheese from the package on the door, finally slid the eggs from the pan onto the whole mess. He pulled a glass from the shelf, noted that he might want to dust, and poured himself a glass of orange juice.

He looked down at the sandwich. Heat from the eggs pouring invisibly around the edges of the cheese poking out from around the crusts.

It wasn’t really cheese, cheese food if you read the label properly. Food or product, the effect of the heat was its softening, a lightening of color, and the breakdown of rigidity and solidity, if you can call cheese solid. All of that sounded right, but Matt wasn’t sure if his lingo was solid. He was a lax consumerist.

He punched the sandwich.

Oh Comely Kooks

The way he wore his beard, just beyond the edge of trim, where the occasional hair would stick out from the cheek revealing its successful escape from the shears, left the plane of his jaw active and moving as if it were a wave whose movements signified the tides of ideal diner sandwiches and the currents of coffee rings. Like her, he was an active cafe goer whose enterprise had to begin on the lip of full mug, as if he were jumping into a volcano.

That he winked as he passed sent her eye darting about his face, diving beneath the surface of those bristling waves down to the bed where the silt of his features lay. His mouth was lips and line across that which was hard to know but looked to have rested closer to a smile.


She had seen that smile in a dream the week before. She was with a boy from school, a face only partially known for a few years in middle school, once and only once fantasized over. They walked in the dream and found themselves in a woods to have sex. Crunching pines needles under their feet lead the way to a wooden bridge that ran across the river in their town. A railing connected up to the bridge and the sloping floor of the woods, and the other side came out on a bank toward the road. Not many people ever used the bridge because this end was far from the edge of town and there was another trail-head that let out closer by.

The bridge pushed away from everyone, from the town, and that was where he wanted to have sex, to get away from everything they knew while she wanted to do it by the railing at the trail's mouth, which wasn't over the water. She was afraid of the water, and the idea of having sex was the idea of moving away and she wasn't sure that she was ready to leave, but the thought of doing it in mid-air where the wind was blowing, over the flowing water pulled at her, tugging her away even with her uncertainty weighing her down.

They agreed to do it on the platform, and images started to spiral in the skies. They were images of the town, shapes like sculptures of the people of the town spinning in the sky around them between the silhouettes of the trees and the purple shadows on the underside of the clouds, showing her and the boy the hidden chambers tucked away behind the walls of their home. The world passed through them, guiding them through the places they'd stared into everyday whenever they saw a front door.

She saw her friend Nicole, who was already having sex, and lights blossomed showing her everything they had never been able to talk about. And how similar this boy was to her friend. Always an outsider, walking in the shadow of his name. She wanted to talk with him about the ways they liked each other, the way it could made them feel as if they knew the answer to every test they'd ever have to take, and if they had been able to, if they had risked it all and had sex then, they would have been able to draw the shape of the world.

When she looked at him she saw herself reflected as a paper toy in the center of his dark eyes, and the darkness wasn't bad, and the innocence he saw in her wasn't good. These were alloyed emotions, empathy and sorrow and loneliness and happiness all stirred together and fired into a metallic glass that reflected not the light but the consequences of their actions.

He was not someone she'd ever spoken with, but once, without knowing why, she had seen him smile and thought of seducing him. She remembered his smile in that dream and saw it again on the street with a wink .while it snowed.


He had put up his small grin just as soon as he left the subway. The smile for its own sake and for the weather and for the small falling snow. He put his hands in the pockets of his jeans rather than his jacket, where they might be cooler, but would help him feel as if he didn't need the extra level of protection. Flaunting daylight on a day off of work he pulled back his shoulders, arched his spine and raised his head, feeling as if a string pulled up on the crown of his head. He was embarrassed when, just as he passed the girl and met her eyes in a way a conditional introvert rarely chanced, a flake blew into the corner of his eye and melted just on the lower lid, and the cold and the wet tapped at his sensory nerves and shut the eye, and he knew that she had seen him wink and he worried the rest of the day what she had thought of him.

Mid-Week Fundraising: Writing Off of the Ass

HEEeEY Everybody,

So this is one of the best things I do, because a) it helps to raise all kinds of money for a great, great cause, and b) gives me an excuse to spend the day writing.

New York Writer's Coalition helps at-risk youth, battered women, the formerly homeless and others to find a voice. It gives them something great and he chance to create, and that's a good thing by any means.

I am going to be writing my ass off, and believe me, there is still a lot there after the holidays, so help out and donate to a great cause:

http://www.firstgiving.com/thebookhouse

Cheers,
William

Up Up and Away

With the tip of my tongue I tack the stir-stick in my mouth against my palette and try spitting it through the beige drywall by the coffee maker.

I can see every bit of lower and west Manhattan from where I am standing in the pantry – this being a sink, a fridge, and a cupboard – as well as a good chunk north whenever I sneak into the boss office. Some important sales rep is in town for a few days and staked out a cubical on the dark side of the building, the northwest side around the corner from the coffee maker. This rep is staying away from the windows.

He looks like Toby Flenderson from the US version of the Office.

There is some of that smacking steam sound as the coffee maker fills my conveniently sized cup. Toby doesn’t look up. I pour in sugar and make sure to spill some on the counter.

This is just good business.

Spilled sugar on the counter shows visitors, competitors, and ne’er-do-wells that people are working here by gum. These people are working at and thinking about their jobs, not about their coffee, and they are eager to get back to it.

I have to walk back to my desk because we don’t have moving walkways in our office. If our office was laid out in any kind of regular sort of order, then maybe there would be moving walkways, although we aren’t really THAT kind of company. The path through the office snakes, more like a maze instead something more regular, and it becomes an experience just to use the lavatory. There isn’t a track that leads you around in a logical pattern. There aren’t uniform corridors – spaces and walkways weave around exposed, painted I-beams in some kind of hard-nosed industrial chic. There isn’t that sense of normal here.

This doesn’t create an aggressive office decorum per se, but it certainly makes things a bit edgier in an unmarketable sort of sense. We’re just a bit more aware.

I sit in a corner and try not to get so bored I fall asleep, and try not to overly invest in my work, which I find stressful. I understand some people masturbate at work. I’ve never masturbated at work. I remain detached, and can’t really see how you’d want to suddenly touch yourself pouring over a spreadsheet or project report. Maybe it’s the people on the phone all day.

Sex in the office is another matter.

If Toby Flenderson wasn’t squatting in that nook I’d go back over and take a yogurt out since I haven’t eaten yet today. It’s almost 1PM. 1 hour to go. 4 hour Fridays.

I don’t hate my job. I’m not a dick to people. Really. Like I said this isn’t an aggressive atmosphere. Some days you can’t help but feel that the patterns we walk as we move about this obstructed realm are tracing out some large, intricate cosmological pattern, and this pervading sense of the place is to wonder exactly whose cosmos we are contributing too.

Actually I feel sorry for Toby, which is why I don’t want to walk back over there. I felt sorry for him for the 42 seconds it took for my pristine little cup of coffee to brew but the journey back to my desk has altered how I view the world. He’s wearing a suit, something that cost him what my apartment costs each month, which is a lot to some people, people like me, and I’ve risen above that. He hasn’t walked around enough in here, so he looks at me disdainfully as I am wearing sandals and a short-sleeve plaid shirt, but the fact is I look –and think- better than he does.

Apartment Overlooking the Park

Her room overlooks a park with two ball-fields and the evenings pose as summer by mid spring. Basking, rich, golden sunlight glances off windows shining over the grass, diffusing in the atmosphere as if a spell had been cast, of loose churned dirt kicked up from the base-paths and hung like a web from the corners of the buildings over the whole park, while the chatter of co-ed teams cheering their mate at bat never quite dies away as she allows herself to stroll home from work. She listens from the tiny kitchen where she cooks her dinner, pausing with her mouth open wide from reading silently aloud in strange languages one worn book or another, to peer at the branches and the families walking in the darkening evenings over a lightly sweating bottle of beer. In the living room she keeps a circle of cold-wrought iron wire set into the floor in a ring carved in the dark wood and sealed with wax scented with myrrh poured from white and red candles. Among other purposes the wax keeps the dog from playing with the ring and disrupting the circle much to both creatures’ – the dog and the thing in the circle – chagrin.

Watchmen: The Good, the Bad, and some awkward Shtupping

I think, having gone in with the lowest possible expectations, that overall I liked this movie, that it was as good a film as could have been made from what is one of the best and most complex stories ever told about ladies and lads who run around in their underwear or less beating people up - but I will have to see it again to have a better sense of it (ah netflix, how I will wait for thee). The first 45 minutes were utterly entertaining. The Comedian's death I thought was exciting, and the flashback sequence that followed was excellent. Then the movie really slowed down.

In trying to make this film as true to the book as they could, they tried to cram as much of the story in as they could, and it seems like they just ran out of steam. They didn't go back in and take their scenes to task with the same even-ness. Dan Drieberg coming home to find Rorschach eating beans in his kitchen was head an shoulders above the flashback scene to when the "The Watchmen" fail just after take-off and The Comedian teaches the Smartest Man in the World a lesson. The second act, with all its suspicion building and interactions between the characters should have been building those characters up, delving into them, making them full and well rounded. They went straight to exposition instead, speaking out the plot, like so many failed Star Wars movies(PM, AotC, RotS).

I thought Rorschach, The Comedian, and Adrian Veidt were developed characters with interesting narrative arcs, and Jackie Earle Haley is firmly someone I am looking for in cast lists from now on. The problem I had was the rest of the characters - they were not allowed to develop, and this is what slowed the movie down.

Dr. Manhattan was close to be being complete, but they stayed too tight to the chest reaching toward his dispassionate level. Nite Owl was an odd miss, since I think Patrick Wilson did a really very good job with the character - he looked the part and I thought had the right tone in his voice - but his lines just didn't hit. Bad writing undid this guy. In the book I always saw him more as stifled rather than impotent, more boxed in by the events surrounding him and his desire to see his friends through it, always uncertain about what he should do. In the movie he was too often just a sounding board for plot exposition for the more powerful, more knowing characters, which was unfortunate.

Uncertainty was the great sin in Watchmen the Film, and its most uncertain character must of course be the most poorly developed. The female characters were outright neglected, but Laurie Juspeczyk gets a big, flat gray wall as her character's emotional canvas in the film.

Laurie's uncertainty was for me the strongest emotional undercurrent in the book, because it best reflects the overarching question - what does a person need to become in order to do what they must. In the book the male characters, without fail, responded to that uncertainty as if it were a weakness, as a sign that Laurie was a damsel in distress, always needing protection and rescue. But Laurie proves her uncertainty is anything but a weakness. She is decisive, choosing to leave John and then go with him to Mars, choosing to take up fighting again with Dan, and in doing so shows how the men's failure to accurately perceive her reflects their inability to understand precisely what is happening until it is too late. In that way she always seemed to be stronger than the guys, who move about waiting to know better what is happening, but the movie doesn't have that realization of her uncertainty, it doesn't get into it enough that we care about her conflict.

Speaking of conflict, the highs of Watchmen were, ironically, some of the best fight scenes I have seen since Sayid took on Kimi. A fight scene for me has a simple test - does it bring up that feeling my younger, more erstwhile self would have felt, causing me to run out of the theatre and across the hoods of cars in the parking lot, jump around on street signs, or otherwise engage in stunts I'm not sure I can manage anymore. The Matrix was a prime example, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon another. Watchmen has this feeling. And it does make for entertaining cinema.

My biggest problem with the movie was Laurie and Dan's fight scene in the alley, where they take on 15 gangmembers then slowly make love in Archie(and ruined an otherwise excellent song in the process). The fact they were able to take out so many guys just smacks of "superpowers", of some super-fu that allows them to dash evil upon the rocks of justice as unceasingly as a wave and then follows it up with a very typically hollywood, very awkward, slow, and unexciting movie sex scene.

In the book I remember them only taking on 4-5 guys and then, pardon my french, fucking. The whole point is they are adrenaline junkies who have been clean for years and all of a sudden get another taste, and all they can do afterwards is rip each others clothes off and get down to it. All of these characters need that stimulation in order to feel anything but the slowing of the blood in their veins.

The lack of any allure in that scene is kind of telling the story of Watchmen the film for me, because Watchmen is a lot like sex - it doesn't have to be as good as the book to enjoy it.

A Wave

This is the only wave, breaking with the blood and all its’ substantive nutrients, its calcium deposits and the flecks of oxygen and iron together racing past purple to black, drying beneath the skin, the split open heart of the knuckle, like the faces of wood that you can peel away from one another. It’s terror that you can swallow up hoping it’ll choke down easily enough.

It’ll be forward and together until it strikes the wall to hand itself out as flyers on the street, it separates so easily you’d never even know one side was not near the other anymore. The pain left you and there was only the absoluteness of clenching your fist that helped you feel the pressure inside where all of it was just waiting, storing itself up until you decided to test it out and see if the whole system worked.

You curl up your fist in front of a smooth concrete wall, or brick since their roughness does feel that much better, and you let it fly, without pistoning, without that posturing cock of the arm, just the snap back you should be striving for beyond the surface. You let it run, a bull out of the gates speeding with that willpower to bring your world of flesh and bone through to the other side, or to feel the pieces of it separate and go off where ever they might, to leave you with that broken, silly wave.

Falling

She lets the book drop through her fingers to the floor and stares straight ahead watching the red lights streak by in the darkness. The train rocks her away from the seat and back; she rolls her spine along the plastic to absorb the motion, taking it away from the train. She watches him, in the seat across, his gaze shifting from the book, to her, and back to the book. His eyes rising and falling but never meeting hers like a dawn never reaching noon.

He waits for movement in her shoulders, a muscle twitching or contracting, but they are unmoving. His dark eyes come up from the book on the floor to her chest, inches below her neck, where the first indication, a pull or shift beneath her shawl, would signal that she is bending forward to pull the book from the floor. He feels sparks bursting beside his ear and feels them popping through the shirt covering his shoulder, as though sprites and fairies were setting quarks to spinning or playing jai-alai with neutrinos. They were spitting out plasma which would cost him a loan later today, when he couldn’t think straight while filling out the application. The shawl was pulled tight around her neck; realizing he is staring at her chest he looks up and feels awkward seeing that she has been watching him.

She does not change her expression when he turns red and sheepishly rubs together his hands covered in wood-stain. The train stops and she rises from her seat, walking smoothly through the doors onto the platform toward a stair with the string of elves trailing behind her in the air. He looks back too late to see the girl - head wrapped in a hive of dreadlocked hair, hemp twine, and beads, - waiting, shaking with anticipation, dart her hand out from beneath a dark poncho to grab the book, and all he sees is the dirty floor.

Momentary Disruption

Sorry, nothing to see here, move along. (Ok, it'll be back at some point, so come back then).

If the System Were Named Sampson: A Venture Brothers Fan Fiction

Deftly swinging a broom has only limited applications but in the instances where those applications come into play they really do make one stand out.

The point of Brock grabbing the broom was to try not to kill the cat, but to swat it enough times that it wouldn't want to fight anymore. To punish it, without termination, what with all that business of mice and men concerned with their plans we find that despite thought towards the path action leads down strange paths and suffice to say intention does not too often find itself getting the better of the outcome, as it were. It could not for instance overcome nature. For nature decreed in making graceful, sleek and often strikingly beautiful the cat, and with those gifts the cat was made arrogant and haughty, such as it is that through this, the cat's own natural enmity for all non-cats other than its master, it has become legendary for ire. They are species known for their spitefulness and outwardness of hatred.

This is simply the way of things after all.

So after Brock first brought the broom down on this particular cat's skull, he was, as a cat lover, affected, though by being Brock, he was not affected as another might. His affect processed according to his nature, which much like a cat's, is contrary often even to being unkind. Perhaps this explains some reason for his affinity for felines; their reflection of his self. Brock's response is entirely after the fact, in the reflection, in the brief moment of account Brock takes with each life, discerning insight in conjunction with the application of power, understanding the balances that scale within the universe.

Brock crushed the skull of this cat without too much psychological transference, so what, if anything, can really be said about contrariness without entering into wormholes of tangential causation is not a line for this page. He modulated the speed of the swing while the broom already arced through the air, seeing a murderous lack of restraint in the eyes of the cat and the scent of an acid boiling in the cat's mouth, twisting the broom from the flat to the outer edge where the metal guide would stave in even a coconut.

The cat's skull cracked under the force of a broom being swung which is impressive to say nothing else, and Brock stalked off through the train to find the cat's owner for some thoroughly justified retribution at being required, per his nature, to terminate the cat. Of course the largesse of this cat was a nature fueled with enmity and a modified physiology, so its' skull did not so much as repair as filled in the splayed, fractured portions, widening the cat's head and in the process its' maw, and shuddering its' body as a cat will do when stretching the thing got bigger to accommodate its bulkier and toothier anterior, to stalk after the non-cat it was most spiteful toward at the moment. This of course being Brock.

The cat tore the leg off a porter who was changing the bedding in Brock's cabin. The porter died hearing a Door's song in the cabin nearby, and the cat waited for Brock, waiting to tear his face off and claw out his eyes.

Brock found the cat's owner and held him by the jaw dangling between two cars of the train, letting the man's bare feet knock against the ties and stone beds of the tracks. He said nothing while staring into the man's eyes, letting the wind of the moving train spread cold against their faces and finally whispering to him harsh and menacing as he lowered him onto the tracks in front of the wide steel wheels.

The cat leapt out at Brock as he entered the cabin, going first for the eyes, scratching at Brock's arm as it was caught in mid-air, hissing and spitting while Brock stuffed it into a sheet and beat it against the walls of the cabin. It grew and its bones knit together once more larger and stronger as Brock carried it towards the front of the train, struggling to tear its way free as Brock reached the engine room. It tore free of the bag as Brock grabbed the back of its neck and clamped a jumper cable run off a line to the train's diesel engine to its spine.

Brock now regretted only having already dispatched the car's owner.

This is the first time I have ever written fan fcition. It will likely be the last.

I'm Not Saying I Attained Enlightenment at New York Comic Con but...

Well, I am the burning elation of exhaustion and excitement. I dare not actually try to make anything at this point, since I am far too overcharged, but nothing a nice day of the job won't cure (ok, that's a lie, I did write for about an hour or so last night, but it was just mind-garbage).

I used to feel like this after my residencies in the Grad School days. We'd burn through 8 or 9 days, talking about books and writing, just a pack of little Prometheus' and Promethea's in the woods of Vermont spinning in circles as we carried the light down the hill, and when it was all done, after 6 or 7 hours on the road, always glad to be home where everything was soft and warm the only thing I'd feel was that we'd burned, held over the coals and our minds flashed, cerebro-spinal fluid glowing with the luminosity of imparted wisdom and the shared passions, spent and delirious and washed in the rains of a rebirth.

NYCC was like that for me this year, for the first time really. I went in raw and tired, stressed on too many fronts, and unsure of what I was going to do. Which is perfect sometimes. It is the state you have to be in to summon angels and demons, the state Gautama reached under the tree when the wheel opened up and he saw himself at its center. In comics, it is the place Jack Frost reached when fighting the King of All Tears, stepping out, but coming back having seen it all. You empty your cup and wait for it to be filled.

I'm not saying I attained enlightenment at New York Comic Con, but I came out the other side to stand in the rain and knew it was good.

For the first time in a long time, I am happy to have been royally screwed over and out of two jobs I loved. One was simply a political game I hadn't known I had to play, one was because my bosses boss was an asshole. Both times it knocked me flat on my ass, because I still had the Kool-aid in me, and that tends to turn to poison when it sours. So I like my job now, but this job is just a job, and I am going to do it well for a while, and then I am going break free of it and I am going to write, and that is very encouraging thought. Because if I hadn't been screwed over in those two jobs that I loved, I wouldn't presently be more determined than ever cut my own path and work on the things I want to work on, not the things someone else tells me to.

Coveted Nails Comic

For some time now, I have slowly and determinedly been writing an epic pop cultural poem. Wait, no, it's a Pop-Cultural Epic. Yeah, that's the stuff. It is a sprawling affair that comprises 13 episodes, and skews determinedly across media structures and character archetypes to tell what is a simple story: two-people trying to figure it all out. I've written nearly two-thirds of the book, so there is still much more to write and certainly a good deal of editing yet to do.

I am calling the book Coveted Nails.

The book that this will become was always designed with a fluidity into and out of itself, and so I decided a couple of months ago to try and offer something from the book in another form I've been a fan and pursuer of, comics. Here is the first page of Coveted Nails: The Comic, drawn by Dominic Salerno-

Wait, Twelve Monkeys What?

Never mind. Twelve Monkeys say what. Got you again.

Ooo, hmm, beh. So the weekend skaned (because I didn't go) and writing was sporadic though it did happen. I was not several floors up in the dead of night though. That would have been preferable. Still. Still. Stillness (also didn't go due to attendance at an enviro film festival, but you should check out Tim's stuff here).

Wrote a Venture Brother's fan fiction this morning, which is odd, because I'm not a fan fiction writer for the most part. I only rarely wrote Spider-man stories growing up, and I've been working toward and holding toward any success I have as a writer I would prefer come from ideas I've worked up myself. I've always spent far more time creating my own worlds, my own characters. At most, I'd prefer to follow a trajectory like Gaiman or Moore, and work with or completely transform earlier creations into a more rich and nuanced form. Maybe I am. Maybe I can't. We shall.

My Brock Sampson fan fic more specifically was really my way of coaching an essay on the limited wonderment of an individual who can deftly and martially wield a broom. That's how I play that.

There is a spec of dust on the screen that suggests to me it is a period where I'd not want one. Specifically at Brock Sampson.fan fic

I have no use of a period there. But I am hopeful I can find a way to make sure of this essay I have written. And then find the time to finish writing this damn novel, although I do actually have many pages of the story written out in ink on paper, in ye olde fashioned way. I am troubled by the fact that in a script I am writing for a comic series, the spell check doesn't like the work Old-fashioneds, as in the drink plural. But I like me the old-fashioneds, and it shouldn't not, if there is any justice in the universe, be long before I have aforementioned cocktails. But aside and away there are pages yet to write, novels to enrich with the tears of people who've never had bodies, and the smattering of instants to craft into a series of pages with art hopefully drawn by people far prettier than me, and so I leave you. Do as thou will.

PS. If you do draw and are prettier than me, and possibly want to draw things I may write of which you would have very little idea except a vague sense based on what I have assaulted you with here on this page, please feel free to contact me.

Molly

Molly was, very clearly, a mastiff. A Bordeaux. She thought she was at times a lapdog and she loved to hunt woodchucks, and always looked happy or bashfully cute despite weighing 175 lbs. I'll post a picture as soon as I get a chance, but it is agreed that we loved her very much and she had land and woods and hills and a pony and her companion Bruno.

I won't be able to go home again for a couple more months and it will not be until then that I feel I will really feel the true impact of the fact that she is gone.

She was very special. Rest in peace girl.

This is the Post Where I Post Nothing

Give me a break. I've been holidayed, and as such, required much time to read. See Goodreads blurp on the side. I've twittered, and been working on some of the fiction. I have much fiction, and I want more.

And because I am still very keen for it, I found out, after happening upon a free copy of Thomas Bernhard's The Voice Imitator, that Jenny Boully used one of the subtitles from that for her book from Tarpaulin Sky Press.

Black Friday Death

I am going to be honest with all of you, we are not doing too well. The fact that we have managed to trample a person to death not out of religious fervor, not out of desperation, fear of pain or death, but simply because a TV was on sale, well I'm just horrified.


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/29/business/29walmart.html?_r=1

We are all to blame. We have all allowed this to happen. We have got to be better.

On Pasts

"Ooooh you look so good, ooooh you looook so fiiine."


Who makes up the past anyway?

Was it you? I seem to remember you being there, like a detail in a movie that is very small and has to be mauled out in a flash, but that doesn't really fit. It's tight, it's a close-up, and it's in there, pressing it's untrimmed finger into your stomach. But I remember your name. And I remember when your Birthday is.

Because it's alive man, it's everywhere woman, the middle word in life, keeping itself inside your head even when everyone else is loosing their's and blaming you. "Are you going to travel through space on a fraction? What are you going to land on - one-quarter, three-eighths?" Have you lived a third of you life? By 18, 22, 35 - do the math, and then tell me. It's the past man, your past man!

Or maybe, it's raining frogs, and the past, the past, we're through with the past, no, we're through the past, and we'll be back after this short commercial break, but the past ain't through with us.

And so maybe it's a weird night, a night that is happening again and again, always happening, like the restaurant at the end of the universe, a perennial blooming and blooming and maybe because time is a whole and doesn't come in slices. Maybe it's a Rolo, and you can tick off the bits of it and pop then in your mouth. But it's hard to say that it has been a weird night if it's still the same night - yet to become 'has been' - and it is the same night it has always been, when it is all kinds of full of the past and the future, and the past might be the future, and we maybe want the past and the future to meet so that we can feel like we are off the hook for a change.

So if I remember your name, what past can there be for someone who doesn't forget? And if "blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better of their blunders," well what then? Where do all blessings lie? Does this one in his time play many parts too, if his time curls up into a ball, the end always somewhere near the beginning, the feet always near the face. All the world staged in one act.

But then too, onto the last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, in second childishness and mere oblivion. Who is that we speak of in our legacy, whose legacy do we speak? What's left?

Am I having the past over for dinner? Is the past having me for dinner?

On Research, and Letting Things Lay

I've been researching lately. I don't know why I started (actually I do), but it will be a while before I finish. I am writing in the meantime, working on bits for a new novel (which the research is geared towards), which means I have more projects on my plate than I really should have, but I feel, at least on a day like today, that its all worthwhile and I would prefer to have a whole bunch of things to focus on than none at all, so I'll keep listening to the New York Dolls and letting today just keep on raining. Every drop's another story, from a certain perspective. I'd like to blame Neil Gaiman for my concern with perspectives, but he just gave me some solider grounding for that sort of thing. I like the word solider and will continue to use it.

The research has been geared heavily toward Global Climate Change and the issues of Water Shortage/Water Rights. Last night, in a kind of break, I stopped off to meet some friends for a fete of the release of 2666, the final novel by the amazing Roberto Bolano, and not only did I get to chat a bit and hang out with some people I ever so rarely get to hang out with because I am dodgy and far too encumbered by life, but I managed to find some excellent further reading into the issues at hand.

They are intensely important issues and from here until the rest of this post I rail with the utmost vehemence (you are forewarned). People need water to live, let us try to keep that in mind. Just every day, keep that in mind.

One of the absolute necessities I see for the soon to be Obama Administration will be the elevation of Director of the EPA to a cabinet level position, or creation of an equal level position with the same purview, and Obama's choice to fill that position will be the MOST important decision he has to make.

That we have only a few months left of the abysmal direction of the EPA by Stephen L. Johnson, who for a scientist, is an utter travesty of an intellect, a waste of education and brain cells, and from a purely personal standpoint, a fuck of a human being.

If that offends some, I feel justified as he so greatly offends me, on every level, as a human being. His attitudes, his lay-like-a-rug allowance of the worst president in history to dictate in the face of all scientific research, of expert opinion, and of dire, apocalyptic warnings policies totally devoid of solutions and replete with exasperation of the problems totally in line with the interests of nearly archaic fuel source suppliers is the epitome of monsterdom. That he should act in complete opposition to the platform of State's rights so espoused by the republican party and threaten the very sanctity of life so fervently and wrong-headedly fought for by conservatives, is painfully sickening hypocrisy. That he should so pettily, so meekly and spinelessly gamble with the future of our world, with the lives of so many living on this planet and yet unborn is, with no other word to match the enormity of the crime, a sin.

So let us be clear. My name is William Arthur Owen, and Stephen L. Johnson, you are a monster. Good day, and good luck.

It is Through Obama That We Are Free to Hope -The Final 36

*Sen. Ted Stevens (AK) [not AL] 10 minutes ago from web

Last piece of business will be the defeat of Sen. Ted Stevens (AL). 19 minutes ago from web

I am impressed by McCain's speech. It sounds like the old John McCain. 30 minutes ago from web

cnn.com crashes 33 minutes ago from web

America you did er right! about 1 hour ago from web

GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! about 1 hour ago from web

Gaaaaaaaaa! about 1 hour ago from web

Franken back up by 9k about 1 hour ago from web

MT, CO, IN, VA, and FL for Obama, plus CA in 5 min, = 325 electoral votes about 1 hour ago from web

Damn MN race down to 2k votes about 1 hour ago from web

I am saying as of 11:06EST = 275 electoral votes for Obama about 1 hour ago from web

VA and CA. 24 Minutes now about 1 hour ago from web

2500 votes seperating NC. 30k in VA. 3500 in IN. hhhheeeee about 1 hour ago from web

@templesmith LA, CO, and MN all upswinging for the Dems. 57 seats with OR and AL still to go about 1 hour ago from web in reply to templesmith

O HI OBAMA! about 2 hours ago from web

Ohio about 2 hours ago from web

Florida, every day that passes I have less and less of a use for you. about 4 hours ago from web

@peachesmalone Seriously. Polls should close at 6:30, so that we can either drown our sorrows or celebrate properly and still get some rest about 7 hours ago from web in reply to peachesmalone

Can I take a nap before the party? And where is the party? about 7 hours ago from web

@Jimmykitty I would have walked by them and kicked them squa' in the nahtz about 10 hours ago from web in reply to Jimmykitty

@chapmanchapman Wait, you mean I didn't get a free coffee because of my mesmerizing beard-powers? about 11 hours ago from web in reply to chapmanchapman

@templesmith The truest test of a leader: funk. about 11 hours ago from web in reply to templesmith

@ZSOstudio Five up top ! Wooo! about 13 hours ago from web in reply to ZSOstudio

I am Jack's inability to stop twittering about 13 hours ago from web

You know what today calls for, a little "Come on Feel the Illinois" by Mr. Sufjan Stevens about 13 hours ago from web

I am Jack's raging urge for coffee about 13 hours ago from web

I am Jack's calm elation for democracy. about 13 hours ago from web

I am Jack's happy exercised center of civic right. about 13 hours ago from web

I say, now that we've voted where's the sexy parties? about 14 hours ago from web

Voting makes you cute about 15 hours ago from txt

@tropicalsteve 11:20/12:30 if I had to guess about 22 hours ago from web in reply to tropicalsteve

Re: Election - really wanting to watch the series finale to SportsNight. I feel a lot of relevance there. about 23 hours ago from web

Keerist! How am I this busy? I blame the demycrats! 9:30 PM Nov 3rd from web

Drinking coffee to try and calm down 7:14 PM Nov 3rd from web

Apparently if you vote and take your sticker or whatever to Starbucks, you get a free coffee. I love America! 4:18 PM Nov 3rd from web

@corbst3r How about "Vote for McCain, because we're ready to pack it in" 4:17 PM Nov 3rd from web in reply to corbst3r

My slogan for the rest of the day: A Vote for John McCain is a vote for Utter Fucking Stupidity 3:34 PM Nov 3rd from web

@peachesmalone Agreed. Our world is too often puerile and dumb. 3:13 PM Nov 3rd from web in reply to peachesmalone

I just tried to review the Planned Parenthood Voter Guide and was blocked because it was Sex Education. I work for an academic publisher? 1:11 PM Nov 3rd from web

@corbst3r Wallaby has to learn to stand up for himself. Thanks though, that is actually a great distraction from the election. 12:32 PM Nov 3rd from web in reply to corbst3r

More than anything, I need me some EnvirObama! 12:19 PM Nov 3rd from web

Politics: LET ME LIVE DAMN YOU, LET MEEE LIIIIIIIVE! 11:58 AM Nov 3rd from web