Back into the valley So, I've been reading Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, which is a quasi-pornotopia. Sex is utterly everywhere in the book, and it's post-capitalist—no scarcity and quantity becomes quality. There's a lot of fetishistic counting of orgasms, doses of semen and urine, etc. Being a Samuel Delany novel, the sex largely involves sucking off dirty and/or homeless guys, dickcheese under foreskins, ass-eating, piss-drinking, and lots of happy strangers. I had to take a break for a while—not because of the incest or the discussion of licking dried shit out of assholes, but because of the nose-picking. And the eating of mucus. And the sharing of mucus. And picking other people's noses.
For a break, I read The Primal Screamer (a recent quote of the day entry!) by Nick Blinko, and Green Girl by Kate Zambreno, both of which were fantastic. They also had some similarities—the main character is observed and manipulated by the narrator; that action is seen in bits and pieces, as though through to hands worth of laced fingers; both are thematically obsessed with another creative medium (music in Primal, film in Girl); both are set in England. In these attributes, they are also utterly different than Spiders, which carries on in a straightforward manner, offers minute detail, finds non-libidinal activity suspicious, and doesn't just take place in the US, but is all about it. And eating snot for sexual purposes.
I'll get back to it in the morning. At 800 pages, I actually left it at work rather than carry it on my commute while reading the other titles. I'm told the mucophilia gets a break about 400 pages in. We'll see...
My Father vs Katy Perry Regular readers may remember the time when my father met Tom Cruise and taught him how to fake operating a crane for The War of the Worlds. Well, yesterday, he met Katy Perry, also on the pier. She gave a private show for Fleet Week, and my father was involved on hanging a banner on one of the cranes—"Gloria" is the crane's name.
According to my sister who reported the claims of my father to me, Katy Perry managed the hanging of the banner herself and made him re-do it a few times to get it right. This was difficult work, as the banner was pretty high up. Later, he dropped a box of flags from the cherry-picker he was in, sending Perry running for safety. All went well though, and Perry got into her ridiculous outfit and put on a show for the sailors:
I got my latest evaluation, and my principal sang my praises as if there were no tomorrow. I adapt for each child, I have super classroom management, I’m well respected by my peers and throughout the district, I’m an asset to the school, blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, yeah, and I walk on water. Moving on.
Cut to the staff meeting after school.
Whereupon he says that if we are selected to move to another site (one school is being completely restructured) it is not because we are not good at what we do, but because we ARE very good at what we do.
Can you read between those lines?
I have been in my classroom for twenty-two years. Imagine how much stuff I’ve accumulated. Double it.
I won’t know until Wednesday.
I do believe I’ll be relying on alcohol to get me through the next few days.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating accross the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated…
- Howl, Allen Ginsberg
It’s been a long time since I engaged with Howl in its entirety. Those first few lines, sure; if you’re into poetry in any way, there’s pretty good odds you can reel off the first line and half of Howl from memory. They’re among the most well-known in American poetry, and there’s no getting around the fact that they’re a brilliant opener (Although, I have to admit, in my head I punctuate it differently – I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked – which is actually kind of sad considering I once wrote an honour’s thesis about the use of space and punctuation in poetry and how it should affect the reading of a poem. In a form that already has a natural break in language generated by the existence of a poetic line, for example, what does it mean when you add a comma to the end of the line, effectively generating a pause within a pause?)
In any case, it’d been a long while. Then someone at work alerted me to the existence of the movie Howl, based on the obscenity trial that surrounded the poem when it was first released, and my natural weakness for cinema about beatniks and poetry led me towards tracking down a copy. It’s a brilliant film that sidesteps many of the problems that usually afflict films about the beats (ie, over-focusing on the various artists tendency to self-destruct) and actually explores why Ginsberg was interesting and how important the publication of Howl and Other Poems ended up being. It goes right up there with Bright Star as one of my favourite films about a poet, ever.
However, my favourite part about the film lies in its special features list – there’s recordings of both James Franco and Allen Ginsberg doing readings of the poem. I can count on one hand the number of poems I actually enjoy when they’re read aloud – most of the time I find myself getting irritated at readings, trying to reconcile the foreign rhythms being forced on the material with the rhythms I hear when in my head when I read on the page. Howl’s one of those rare exceptions, though, given that it’s rhythm is based on the metric of the human breath and it’s got the kind of easy repetition of phrases that’s hard to get wrong. It’s also possible – although I don’t remember for sure – that I came to Ginsberg’s poetry through his readings first, and his voice is generally distinctive enough that it gets lodged in your head.
The other nice thing about the film is that it prompted me to go and re-read the “and other poems” part of Howl and Other Poems, and I got to revisit a bunch of poems I’d forgotten I’d loved: A Supermarket in California; America; In the Baggage Room at Greyhound. It’s been a long while since I mainlined a whole bunch of poetry, rather than reading individual poems, and it reminded me of how much I used to enjoy reading it before study and endless poetry readings and the nightmare of my thesis sucked all the fun out of it.
The end of my short story is in sight. I know more or less what’s going to happen in the last page or two. All that remains is to write them. I stopped this morning on a high point so I’d have some momentum going into the ending tomorrow. The first draft is going to clock in at over 5500 words. Maybe as high as 6000. Well within the guidelines, but I suspect I’ll be able to trim it back to 5000 words before I submit it at the end of the long weekend.
I was surprised to see “Mayhem” from the Allstate commercials on Law & Order: SVU last night. Even more surprised, when I looked him up, to discover that he’s an alumnus of the show from back in 2000. That was one heck of a season finale: Cragen gets the Godfather treatment, sort of. I think this is the first time they’ve done a real cliffhanger, and it was a doozy. It was funny, too, seeing “Taub” from House playing a character somewhat sleazier than Taub. I guess the House clan will be popping up all over from now on. The same way I used to see Lost actors everywhere.
Speaking of Lost, I’m continuing my Season 6 review. I get confused at times about what we’re supposed to know when. During “Recon,” for example, I forgot that we didn’t know James Ford was a cop in the flash-sideways. I’d also forgotten how much “Ad Eternum” ground the show’s forward momentum to a halt. It’s an excellent episode in many ways, but in terms of overall series pacing: ugh.
I finally got around to seeing the latest Jesse Stone TV movie starring Tom Selleck. These two-hour movies have the same pacing as a 1970s crime drama, which is to say that they are leisurely. I wasn’t sorry to see the two cops go up in the opening scene, as they were annoying to the utmost. After that, it was a kind of old home week as Selleck’s Stone meandered through the landscape, touching base with all the familiar characters/actors from the previous movies. Some of it felt obligatory, like the visit to William Sadler’s mobster character, though it did set up the interesting flirtation scene with his assistant, Amanda, and he extracted one piece of useful information from her. On the whole, I enjoy these, but I think they try a little too hard to be Robert B. Parker. The whole dialog repetition thing (You didn’t like him. I never said that.) grew old fast. Also, I don’t think Parker would ever have written a criminal mastermind who commits the rookie mistake of knowing something before he’s told about it (the perp knew about the bombing before anyone else). Who was the sniper working for and why was he following Jesse around, so overtly? The scene in the ship at the end confused me to no end: did the perp know the sniper was there, or was the sniper after the perp, too? Hard to say. Selleck speculates that CBS might not order any more of these movies because they don’t know what to do with them. Sad state of affairs when a two-hour mystery of the week can’t exist any more. The demographics were interesting, too. The show performed well and won its slot overall, but the all-important younger audience didn’t watch.
I almost gave up on The L.A. Complex when Connor started acting weird on the set, but I’m glad I stuck with it. Raquel gave the performance of her life at that AA meeting. (Jewel Staite was excellent, too, but it was clearly her character putting on an act to salvage her movie deal). I got a kick out of the geeky (and painfully unfunny) stand-up comic’s plight. He’s been having women problems since, well, birth actually, but in one day he ends up in bed with two different women.
Shades of War Games on this week’s Eureka. At least the computer program didn’t offer to play a game of tic-tac-toe or chess.
Originally published at Bev Vincent. You can comment here or there.
hey, it’s new TILT time – so without further adieu (was there any adieu? I say nay!), this is what I’m kind of digging this week -
Sidewalk Citizen Bakery. Oh, yes. Scones and bread and meringue and things made of love + Deliciousness ≠ words involving owls and boys in slick latex ≠ new skirts ≠ car wash days ≠ derby hate turning into people love ≠ long weekends ≠ roller rink birthday parties ≠ volunteer parking lot painting ≠ big steps ≠ breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Cover art for my novelette "Faster Gun," (Working title: "John Henry Holliday is Sick of the These Time-Traveling Assholes") forthcoming on Tor.com this summer.
Hey, The Uncertain Places Got Nominated for a Mythopoeic Award! The full list of nominees is here. It's a pretty strong list, so I'm not expecting anything. Still, as they say, it's an honor just to be nominated. I also note that four out of the five nominees are women, so the chances of a woman winning are pretty good. : )
I am editing a collection of essays on 50 Shades of Grey, titled 50 Writers on 50 Shades for Ben Bella Books. I'll announce the line up of authors in a few weeks, but I am looking for different takes on the trilogy, both positive and negative. But you already know where I stand on this debate.
And please feel free to make suggestions for contributors. I am especially looking for a female 21 year old Seattle college student's take on Ana, so please pass that on.
Read my Publisher's Marketplace write up below for a more complete description:
May 23, 2012
Non-fiction: Anthology
Lori Perkins's 50 WRITERS ON 50 SHADES OF GREY, an anthology by a panel of insiders - from the editor who first "discovered" Fifty Shades of Grey, to BDSM experts, erotica authors, feminists, romance writers, and a whole lot more - extending the conversation about the pop culture phenomenon that has captured the imaginations of so many, from the sexual politics and its fanfiction origins to what sets it apart from other erotic fiction and romance (and what doesn't), to Leah Wilson at BenBella Books, for publication in December 2012, by Louise Fury at L. Perkins Agency(World).
OK, so I’ve given it a try, but it’s not working out. Clearly the novel thing needs a little more of my focused attention, and I can’t do this while managing a blog and a twitter and a facebook. Accordingly, I’m having a mini-darkness notice: I’ll still post about the important stuff, and do a few things, but I’m cutting back on my internet consumption.
[personal] Miscellaneous this and thattery I am off to Detroit this morning for World Steam Expo. My thanks to the good folks there for the invitation and the support. I did learn something while packing: Don't leave your top hat until last, after you've filled the suitcase. I hope this will be a relaxing weekend, but, heck, I don't know. I do know it will be a fun weekend.
A bunch of Dad time yesterday, including homework as well as watching the first episode of Sherlock [ imdb ] with the_child and her mother. Then N— brought over a lovely strawberry-rhubarb pie for us all to share. Mmm.
Life stuff going on otherwise which I need to process. Also, I had a recent severe bout of Impostor Syndrome, which is unusual for me. Still trying to frame that in my head, and whether it's worth discussing in detail here on the blog. More than one close friend was surprised that I have episodes of that very common writerly affliction.
I've drafted a blog post about male sexuality and chemotherapy that I'm wrestling with how to put online. Of necessity it's very explicit, not to mention somewhat personally revealing. I don't have any particular discomfort in talking about that sort of thing publicly, but the editorial voice of this blog is usually PG-13 at most, plus or minus a few choice expletives. Even putting it under a cut won't keep me from being indexed by Google, for example, and I don't really want to show up in searches on certain sexual terms.
I am torn between what I see as a critically important need to talk about rarely-discussed aspects of the cancer experience, and not wanting to alienate my audience by what will doubtless be seen by some as an over-the-top sexually explicitly discussion. So, thinking and editing. If I take too much out, it won't be as useful or impactful. If I leave too much in, it will violate the voice of this blog.
An Obama Spending Spree? Hardly — A dominant theme of the national political discourse has been the crushing spending spree the U.S. has ostensibly embarked on during the Obama presidency. That argument, ignited by Republicans and picked up by many elite opinion makers, has infused the national dialogue and shaped the public debate in nearly every major budget battle of the last thee years. But the numbers tell a different story. Your Liberal Media, of course, enables and abets the counterfactual conservative position on this question.
Why Mitt Romney won't get specific — Simple answer: Because nobody likes conservative policies when applied to them personally. Not even conservatives. Ie, "Cut spending on all those lazy, entitled people over there, but not my essential social service." If he gets specific, he loses votes all over the political spectrum. ?otd: Steampunk much?
5/24/2012 Writing time yesterday: 0.0 hours (travel logistics, dad time) Body movement: n/a (airport walking to come) Hours slept: 5.25 (solid) Weight: 239.6 Currently reading: Lightbreaker by Mark Teppo
Yet another male writer interviewed about "why he writes strong female characters." Um, okay. But where are...the interviews of female writers who write strong female characters? Or strong male characters? Is it that no one cares...or is it that men really, really need those cookies? #womenareinvisible
To which @rachelswirsky replied, "Man bites dog" situation.
That's part of the explanation, sure. It's the same reason so many stories and movies fail the Bechdel Test: our culture is male-centric. Straight white male centric, to be specific.
Writing from a female point of view seems to be generally regarded as something more like writing from the perspective of a deer: you might get points for novelty, but it'd be impossible to get right, and who really wants to hear a deer narrate a story, anyway?
Good article, thoughtful comments (at least, as of posting this entry). Depressing, too, if you consider that fewer people will listen to her just because she's female. It's not conscious, but it's real. I see it happen in the workplace, on SFF panels, in LJ blogs, all over. Women are invisible (especially older women, but that's another rant.) We are making progress, sure, but we won't make real progress until books about women are seen as just as important as those about men, until the words of women are valued as much as those written by men.
After season 1, USA axed the show creator and brought on a different show creator, then brought in Ben as a love triangle character. Season 1 was about the rather broken relationship that Kate had with her soon-to-be-ex husband Justin, which was summed up in season 1′s episode “Coming Home”: ( cut for post length and spoilers )
" #protip " Useful things I have learned or figured out recently:
* When staying at a hotel or spending a lot of time in a climate-controlled space where the air is very dry, drink coconut water--at least a liter a day. Bring it with you or buy it nearby. If traveling by air, see if you can buy some in the airport once you're past the security line. It will rehydrate you much more effectively than water, without all the artificial crap (and vile taste) of Gatorade. Also recommended: just before bed, apply lip balm and hand moisturizer. (In that order. It's hard to get the cap off the lip balm if your hands are slippery.)
* If you experience anxiety-related muscle tension, apply heat to those muscles to reduce your anxiety. A hot bath or shower works well. A heating pad is even better. Warmth is emotionally comforting, and will physically relax you as well.
What useful things have you recently learned or figured out that you wish you'd known years ago?
Full disclosure: I will forever not care about this book, for many reasons. Sure, if Kate Beaton can cut your book to the quick in five strips, that's pretty telling, but also because sophomore year of high school, it was the book my English teacher that year chose to suck all possible beauty out of, right down to mandatory dioramas.
My diorama was Gatsby's closet, which was a tiny table (round white pizza-box-support) stacked with Ken shirts, and then a "close up" of some of my beloved costume-fabric swatches folded nicely along the right-hand side. I included all the fabrics named in the book, the entire height of the diorama, and pasted the quote along the back of the diorama, and all the things one does when one is working on a diorama at the kitchen table at 2 in the morning. When asked why I chose this scene, I said, "Because it's the one where I laughed the hardest."
And man, Baz Luhrmann brought that scene to life! (Didn't you laugh? I did.)
For a book with such emphasis on imagery, The Great Gatsby is difficult to film. None of the characters are heroic; many of them are ciphers even to themselves. Nick is a hanger-on; Daisy is beautiful, but her attractiveness largely lies in a laconic charm and a vagueness that gets interpreted as deep feeling when it's not; Gatsby is driven, but as an American Dream Symbolism stand-in, he's too busy being symbolic to do more than dazzle and then disappoint others. The nuances of the prose disappear, and you're left with a bunch of rich people in a room talking about new money and sleeping around and throwing champagne.
However, Baz Luhrmann isn't afraid of nuance! He's going to make that nuance loud as shit! He's going to make his movie 3D and throw the malaise of the twentieth century RIGHT INTO YOUR EYEBALLS. THOSE SHIRTS WILL FUCKING RAIN ON YOU.
(Things that will also fucking rain on you include: Leonardo DiCaprio's Frown Acting, which he's going to deploy at varying decibels until he wins that Oscar, dammit! Meanwhile, Carey Mulligan probably has Daisy down; Tobey Maguire...is definitely your guy if you're looking for a vaguely-insufferable POV character; Elizabeth Debicki has promise; Joel Edgerton is amazeballs and I have high hopes for him here, except that many another good actor has fallen into the Luhrmann Spectacle Vortex before him. When the music is doing most of the emoting in your trailer, you have the John Carter of Mars trailer, is all I'm saying.)
And you know, I find the Twenties fascinating. I am always down for a huge symbolic flapper party with an air of desperation underneath it! We know Baz Luhrmann can put together a musical number (it's pretty much the only thing he can do well with any consistency). However, most of his musical numbers are at least fond, if not utterly sincere; if he plans to highlight the anxiety under the thrill in Gatsby, the trailer doesn't show it. I'm willing to wait on that one until there's more to go on, but something tells me that for Baz, the inside of his head is just this praise squad, all the time:
Meanwhile, I had a little argument with myself on twitter as to whether I should use some modestly bogus science to create a cool special effect. I went with it. ;-) Now I'm stopping because I have to figure out how the protagonist intervenes to stop the Bad Thing from happening, or how he mops up afterward...
Have I mentioned that my wife has become a marathon-running machine? Not only did she do the More Magazine/Fitness Magazine Half Marathon back in April, last weekend she and her friend Laura did another one: The Superhero Half Marathon and Relay in Morris County, New Jersey! Benefitting Meals on Wheels and the American Cancer Society, participants of the race were encouraged to dress up as superheroes, either established characters or one of their own making. Here’s Alexa as her own superhero, the Poison Dart (note the homemade frog symbol):
There are a bunch of fun pictures of the race itself and other costumes at Flickr! (Also, it was announced that they had created a new Guinness world record of most superheroes in one place with nearly 1,700 superheroes on site! Woohoo!)
Only in the past ten years have I been writing my own work.
And I review books. On Amazon and on Goodreads.com. Now recently its come to my attention that a neo-pro/semi-pro author such as myself could have a conflict of interest in writing reviews.
And I get the point about that. I'm not going to say that writing doesn't influence how I read books. It TOTALLY influences the way I watch plots to see if they are too predictable or if loose ends are tied up. It influences the way I read characters who are too Mary Sue or who pluck my hearts strings out with their vulnerability and humanity. Writing means that I think consciously about pacing and world-building when I read books.
But what it doesn't do is influence the truth of my review. Some books are so amazing that I read the book without ever really coming up for air as a writer (the last couple of books that did that to me were Bitterblue, Firelight, and Lola and the Boy Next Door) and those are the books that I usually give 5 stars to...because the writing is so tight it never trips my writer/editor brain.
Other books, no matter how masterful (Murakami's 1Q84, for example) have some quality that makes me turn on my writer/editor brain at the same time as I read.
But isn't that useful information?
Isn't it useful to have reviews from all kinds of readers? I would much rather, myself, have access to reviews of a new book by readers young, old, professional, motherly, and neo-pro. Believe me, I'll snap up a book in a hot second if one of my favorite authors recommends it....
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dbraum's Friends Page
accomplished
The end of my short story is in sight. I know more or less what’s going to happen in the last page or two. All that remains is to write them. I stopped this morning on a high point so I’d have some momentum going into the ending tomorrow. The first draft is going to clock in at over 5500 words. Maybe as high as 6000. Well within the guidelines, but I suspect I’ll be able to trim it back to 5000 words before I submit it at the end of the long weekend.
pleased
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mellow