need to think up something other than that jiggety jig thing

about an hour til the plane takes off and the gate is open. i hadn't planned on blogging until i got back from my vacation, but didn't quite feel like joining the snaking queue just yet so here i am. mostly just enjoying using this compact NEC keyboard they use at this terminal. the keys have a nice thick compact-notebooky feel to them and make a nice muffled thuckety-thuck sound as you type. the size of the keys is something to get used to all scrunched together as they are, but at least each key is where it should be.

i'd leave you with something interesting, but i don't get to open multiple windows/tabs here, so instead i'll just be redundant and point you over to http://www.jeffvandermeer.com where i've got a couple blog posts up.

right. see you when i see you.

*

not home yet. the queue's still a bit too far off the windy side of snakey for my tastes, so i thought i'd come back and add a bit more to this post.

the autism-induction device is currently loaded with, among other things, the following:

the entirety of:
Harpo's Ghost, Thea Gilmore
Le Maison..., CocoRosie
Year Zero and R3M1X, NIN

some things that show my age, including 'The Killing Moon', Echo and the Bunnymen and 'Head over Heels', Tears for Fears and 'Harbourcoat', REM and 'Six Different Ways', The Cure.

i don't plan on doing much reading or writing on this trip, but i've packed Kleinzeit and the collected and Mervyn Peake-illustrated ed of the Alice books which, for one reason or another, i have never read.

nothing much more interesting to kill time with than that at the moment, i'm afraid. though the queue *is* getting a little less windy now. and since i have less than 5m left in this session, i think i'll hit 'publish' now. ta.

*

still not home. inside the gate. boarding now. just keep forgetting to add:

Happy Holidays everybody!

right. run now.

more weird thingie-ness

woke up later than i had hoped i would this morning (though earlier than yesterday)to find this in the box:

Dear chiles,

Your second blog post is now live. You can find it here:

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2007/12/22/weird-tales-chiles-samaniego-on-being-asked/#more-556

Sorry I was late getting it up today. Been very very busy!

Ann

you can fine my previous ED blogpost here, and i first mentioned guest blogging for Ann on Jeff VanderMeer's Ecstatic Days here.

as i'd promised earlier, i think i managed to make more sense and you may find more to talk about there. i only wish i knew more about what i was talking about than i actually did. er. 'know' and 'do' would do just as well in that last statement as things haven't changed much for me on the 'knowing things' front since i sent that post in. er. right.

again, please do drop by, and please do set me straight where you think i've got things crooked.

now i read it again, i wish i'd done less of the 'i am Filipino ergo i am representative of all Filipinos'-thing as people who know me know that i most definitely do not. though yes, i am Filipino. just not typical. not that i imagine i'm typical of anything.

moving on...

*

Mike Mignola is absolutely brilliant. Hellboy is absolutely brilliant. i strongly encourage anyone who doesn't yet know the World's Greatest Paranormal Detective who just happens to be the Beast of the Apocalypse or who only knows him through the Guillermo del Toro movie (brilliant in its own right, imho, just not quite the same) to go out and find a copy of one of the books and read it right now. go. that's right. right now. start with Seed of Destruction and proceed from there; or, if you would prefer to be introduced without being thrown headlong into continuity, The Chained Coffin and Others and The Troll Witch and Others should do nicely.

i finally caved (i'd been hedging for, er, financial reasons) and got the last two volumes (it's xmas, ennit?), Strange Places and The Troll Witch ....

if i have a problem with the Hellboy series it's that i tend to be baffled by the climaxes. however, this is, of course, probably my fault for being a bit slow in the head. and anyway, it's also part of the joy of it, figuring out (or trying to) what just happened; as Mr Mignola himself put it, in his introduction to 'The Hydra and the Lion' from The Troll Witch...: '...in supernatural stories you need bits that are beyond human comprehension...'

apart from that quibble, the art, the story, the stories-within-stories, the ubercool protagonist, the humor, everything in a Mike Mignola Hellboy story is just perfect. imho.

The Troll Witch... also features a story drawn by P. Craig Russel and one by Richard Corben. i pretty much knew what i could expect from Mr Russel, but i admit this was the first time i'd (knowingly) encountered anything by Mr Corben. Mr Mignola's distinctive style will always be *the* way to draw Hellboy, but Mr Corben's work here is absolutely stunning and lovely and brilliant.

so there.

currently reading: Kleinzeit, Russell Hoban

on the spinner: still mostly NIN, but with CocoRosie's Le Maison de Mon Reve and Noah's Ark sprinkled lightly over Year Zero and Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D

Cloverfield again! and Avenue Q! and...

well, not a Cloverfield update, but a fix. of sorts.

i can't seem to get the video to show up on my previous post. the widget works all right though. on the sidebar. er. in case you hadn't noticed.

those of you reading this on multiply (who wouldn't have noticed) will have to check out the 'real' location of this blog, here:

http://skinnyblogcladdink2-0.blogspot.com

go ahead. grab that widget. you know you want to.

*

i'm happy to report that Mabel thoroughly enjoyed Avenue Q last night, and will now be looking for the copy of the soundtrack i'd left with her which she'd initially ignored for, er, personal reasons.

given the circumstances, the only way i could take her to see it was by proxy. yes, i know. sad, ennit?

thanks to my adoptive pathologist mother, Ella, for 'filling in'.

i really wish i could've been there. times like these, having the brilliant plot device from the brilliant Mike Co's brilliant 'In the Eyes of Many' wouldn't have been all that bad. in fact (say it with me), it would've been brilliant.

(ItEoM, btw, was shortlisted for the 2nd Philippine/Graphic Fiction Awards. if the world made any sense, it would have won, too.

you can read it in next year's anthology from this year's competition.)



on the spinner: Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D, NIN

Cloverfield 180107

omfg. this. is. so. kewl.

Holy Crap!

it was either that or 'Hell YEAH!', but i already used up my allowable willsmithian quotation quotient over on Jeff's blog.

anyway, enjoy!

Hellboy II: The Golden Army trailer

Add to My Profile More Videos

also here:

http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=24351523

thanks to AICN.

The Dark Knight trailer's been around for a while now, too, and you can find a link (and other goodies) on the movie on AICN as well. The Joker's lookin' mighty kewl.

now. when will we get anything from Sin City 2?

Christians are Creepy

well, to be fair, these Christians are, anyway:

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=5361



it needed to be said.

(discovered through Neil Gaiman's blog)

on being left behind; also a brief thank you to Uncle Zip’s Window

once again, i’m a few steps behind the Real World Out There, which is an awful place to find yourself when you’re trying to write and say things that are provocative or groundbreaking or in any way new and not pshawpfarpflepfart we’ve all heard that before. in this case: i’d been ruminating of late, that is to say, contemplating the idea of saying a few things about how much i have been for the most part these days getting bored with narrative, how i have lately tended towards things that layer rather than (/more than?/as well as?) propel, that build level upon level in many or all or no directions at all rather than one (usually meaning forward or reverse which is linear any which way you see it).

like i said at the beginning, once again, i’m a few steps behind the Real World Out There:

I hate narrative. I hate the narrative of aspiration. I hate Mythodology. I hate the narrativisation of contingent things, which is lying about how the world works; & the narrativisation of lumpy, uncorrected, real, unmade things, which is lying about how the world works; & the narrativisation of the unnarratable turbulent flow of events in time, which reveals your deep shocked fear of how the world works. I hate the vicious confidence trick closure, which says everything is shaped & meaningful according to the deep grammars & ideology of whoever you are. “Story” is so cheap. It is inappropriate in every circumstance, unless you are Condoleeza Rice trying to sell big murder, or unless you are trying to sell cosmetics, or unless you are Paul Coelho selling Spirituality to yummy mummies, mmmmmmm.

- M. John Harrison, here: http://uzwi.wordpress.com/alter-nova/

my own take on it is far less, er, passionate, but it amounts to much the same thing.

Mr Harrison is winding down his blog, and i, for one, admitting perhaps to voyeuristic tendencies i’m probably better off keeping in the dark, will miss peering into the RWOT through Uncle Zip’s Window.

The RWOT will just be that tiny bit less weird.

*

here’s a short list of things i enjoyed reading in 2007 that i didn’t find very propulsive, that presented to me not so much a narrative as an unwinding, an unveiling, an exposition, or even a covering up of something or other, to illustrate what i mean:

A Sport and a Pastime, James Salter
Nova Swing, among other things that never happen, ie, things by M. John Harrison
The Book of Chameleons, Jose Eduardo Agualusa
The Speed of Light, Javier Cercas
Justine, Lawrence Durrell
The Atrocity Exhibition, J.G.Ballard
Alabaster (particularly when swallowed whole and considered in its entirety), Caitlin Kiernan
Amaryllis Night and Day and Fremder, Russell Hoban

i wonder if Mr Harrison would agree with this list, or if i’d misconstrued something else entirely as an agreement of aesthetics? ah well, either way, this is what *i* mean.

quite possibly the best thing i read this year was The Death of A Murderer by Rupert Thomson, which is as good an example of what i’m talking about as any.

well, either that or Jeff Smith’s Bone, but Bone seems to me more of the other thing (ie, narrative) than what i’m talking about, so to mention it here would be putting the lie to what i’ve been saying...oops. ah well. i revel in my own inconsistencies.

*

on the spinner: Harpo’s Ghost, Thea Gilmore

the secret life of a writer

i just spent the evening ironing shirts while watching Asian Idol. to be sure, it wasn't the first time, me ironing shirts. or watching one of the Idol shows.

this may explain my peculiar taste for kitchen sink gothic, or an old desire to write what i'm told would now semi-officially be called 'Spec Chick'.

previous ironing sessions had been executed to the accompaniment of Iron & Wine, Nine Inch Nails, Ani DiFranco and Tom Waits, and, once, Brittany Murphy and Dakota Fanning. Marley Shelton and Heather Locklear were bonuses that night.

ahem. erm. right. i should probably get back to Russell Hoban's Fremder now. good night.

Weird things

this, just in the mail:

Dear chiles,

Your first post is live. Please find it at:

http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2007/12/13/weird-tales-chiles-samaniego-on-guest-blogging/#more-541

I took some editing liberties (I hope you doh't mind). Dont' sell yourself short! Tell everyone to read and post comments!

Ann

er, so there, that's everyone told, then, yeah? (ie, as Ann says above, please do check it out and post comments!)

Thanks, Ann!

Ann is Ann VanderMeer, current editor of Weird Tales magazine. she asked me a few days ago if i would like to guest blog over on Jeff VanderMeer's Ecstatic Days blog along with other Weird Tales contributors and, well, you can read about my response in the above linked post.

erm. i promise my second post will be much more coherent.

i was about to add that Ann's comments at the end make me feel a little cringey, but having just been told not to sell myself short, i will restrain myself. instead i encourage you to check out Weird Tales online, and maybe avail of their Holiday trial special.

more on Time and the Orpheus later.

meanwhile, i think i may have had a teeny bit of progress at my ongoing experiment/project/whatever, korzybskian autopsy. you might want to check it out. i'm pretty sure it'll all lead somewhere eventually, even if that somewhere proves only to be what Russell Hoban is talking about here.

currently reading (you guessed it, erm, if you've just been to k.a., that is, or by that little clue at the end of the last paragraph if you haven't): Fremder by Russell Hoban. this, after his Amaryllis Night and Day, an absolutely lovely, honest, truthful, realistic (honest!) little weird love story. i wasn't too happy with the ending, but the disappointment wasn't enough to ruin everything else about it for me. Russell Hoban's stuff as i've tasted it is the perfect reading for people who would find the experience of, say, being HALO dropped into a combination of Neal Stephenson's 'snulture' (read: snob culture) geekspeak and the mundane surrealism of David Lynch films in a framework of modern arthouse hyperrealism without a map not at all disagreeable. while Amaryllis might be called (revue-cliche alert#1!) a 'magic realist love story', Fremder is the same sort of (revue-cliche alert#2!) vertigo-inducing SF you'll find if you crack open M. John Harrison's Light and Nova Swing. absolutely heady stuff, in all possible definitions of the term.

also dipping into London: City of Disappearances edited by Iain Sinclair, which seems a perfectly odd companion for Hoban.

right. it is not 3:42 am by the little digital thingie in the corner of Liv's screen. i really must be trying to sleep now. dreamwell.

Philip Pullman was right

my friend E. Cross Saltire asked me to blog about this supposing that i could provide a more substantial argument given those bits of my background that are more or less associated with the material in question. i told him i'd think about it; while i have some strong opinions on the matter, i didn't want to end up providing arguments that were as inappropriate and inadequately considered as this bishop's. but having read E's post, i don't think i can be any more substantial or comprehensive than he's already been:

http://nontrivialpursuit.blogspot.com/2007/12/advice-for-your-excellencies.html

still, just a couple quick things:

2. Avoid making medical claims because, however we look at it, DD does not equal MD. Also, if Your Excellencies will point out that some contraceptives can raise the risk of certain cancers, you will be hard pressed to explain away the fact that contraceptives can reduce the risk of some cancers, and sex without contraceptives raises the risk of other cancers.

and wouldn't you know it, *not* having sex raises the risk for some cancers as well. higher rates of breast and endometrial cancer, for instance, have been observed in nuns.

How holy is choosing the strait and narrow if the wide and broad was never shown?

calls into question the whole 'forbidden fruit' scenario, dunnit?

and finally,

6. Do not oppose humane, non-judgemental counselling and health care for
anyone, even those you consider automatically excommunicated. Being humane and
non-judgemental are good things, Your Excellencies.

you can't imagine just how badly medical professionals need to be reminded of this. quite frankly, i was frequently more horrified by how these 'professionals' treated their patients than by what the patients had done to require treatment in the first place. whatever happened to that bit in the Hippocratic Oath which says, in essence, 'thou shalt not play God'?

(just to be clear, and to divert any potential snarkiness from that particular direction, this is not a statement of support for the medical malpractice law. that's an entirely different set of issues, and not one i'll be getting into here, thank you very much. only that i'm as strongly opposed to it as any sensible person who's been 'on the inside' should be, imho.)

on the conceptual spinner: Sex & Religion, Vai.

Insomniac!

http://www.comicmix.com/comic/comicmix/mundens-bar/3/reader/

actually, Insomniac! is issue 2. you'll be wanting to check that out as well. particularly fans of The Sandman and Marc Hempel.

right. 4:30 AM on a Tuesday. it doesn't get much worse than this.

well. almost.

David Cronenberg's Spider failed to put me to sleep. not that i expected it to. love that film. even with the sound turned down low enough so that all the dialogue becomes distinguishable from Mr Cleg's mumble only by pitch, tone, quality and by not sounding like Mr Cleg at all.

right. back to trying to shut the old brain up and getting some sleep.

Oh my God, they killed Kenny! YOU BASTARDS!

i would never presume to know enough about politics to blog about it in any way that makes sense, my rants about anarchy notwithstanding. (well. those just prove my point, don't they?) but today's events had me nursing a sullen rage as i sat at my work station all fucking day.

let's speak no more of it here, shall we?

instead, why don't you mosey on over to Nontrivial Pursuit and let my friend E. Cross Saltire tell you things about it:

http://nontrivialpursuit.blogspot.com

on the spinner: Nine Inch Nails, Year Zero.

*

done with Alabaster. i wouldn't argue with the author herself, i'm sure reading it her way would provide a very different but nonetheless delightful experience; still, i strongly suggest reading these stories in the order in which they are presented. in this order, the narrative of Dancy Flammarion's life feels just that bit more off-kilter, disjointed like some abandoned, trampled myrmecine husk, more alienating and yet also more immediate; more akin, perhaps, to the reality in her head--just that bit stranger, more obscure, more mysterious. each fiery 'chapter' goes down like a shot of Green Fairy Tequila(tm), and moving backwards and forwards through and between them gives the book the heft and feel of some Goth Epic Tarantino concoction.

right. i seriously need to chill now.

strange little girl

three stories through Alabaster. a couple left, and then the afterword. i've been reading the stories in the sequence of publication--the sequence as presented in this collection--rather than by the alternate table of contents Ms Kiernan provides, which lets you know 'which happened first'. although following the fictional chronology is Kiernan's preferred reading order, i rather like the suggestion of this strange little girl being disinherited from time...and i like the idea that i might be discovering things about Dancy the way Ms Kiernan did.

though i always itch to get out of the office, i haven't done so out of the desire to read a particular book in a while. this, of course, is a good thing.

right. i'm off to drop some text i originally wrote for this blog onto the other life, where it just seems more appropriate, and then it's back between the sheets...and into the pages with that strange little girl.

oh yes...

...because i think the world needs more of this sort of thing, or maybe it doesn't and we just don't hear about it enough:

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/search/label/unusual%20things%20that%20happen%20at%20signings

and

http://diveabout.multiply.com/journal/item/13/The_Proposal_co_Neil_Gaiman

as a friend of mine puts it, 'pucha naman o, raising the bar too high.'

good thing i'm done with all that then.

some witty reference to albinos and valets

i took a break from writing the novel today, having finished the second draft yesterday. but not from writing per se, not entirely. waking up at 3am and unable to get back to sleep, i reworked the end of a story i'd written a month or two before i even began thinking of writing a novel. this had the effect of revealing to me just how uneven a skill with words i've developed. and, more damaging, how unsuited i am to writing a novel. not that i write good short stories all the time, or even most of the time, but that with a novel the caprice of my writing hand has more room, more space to get the better of me, which, more often than not--at least as evidenced by my first arguably successful attempt at it (i've got two 'complete' drafts, after all, whatever their faults)--it does.

currently reading Caitlin Kiernan's Alabaster. Jeff Smith's Bone had given me back a taste for straight-up fantasy i haven't had in a while, and Kiernan's delightfully whimsical creepiness suits me just fine at the moment. i've also been reading Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, James Salter's Light Years, and P.G. Wodehouse's Carry On, Jeeves, but Alabaster has the bonus of being a relatively light and handy hardback that had been pre-wrapped in what i assume to be acid-free plastic by Page One, making it rather easier to read than even the smaller paperbacks (i have disgustingly sweaty palms, which makes handling paperbacks a bit unwieldy, owing to the bandana i have to use for 'protection'--i once wiped out an entire eighth of a page of text thanks to the awful combination of crappy printer's ink and sweat--before i could read it*)...i suppose that should give you an idea of where i'm at when it comes to reading right now.

i should like to finish Alabaster before i come home. and, come to think of it, Carry On, Jeeves. i think Mabel might get a kick out of them. (she, for anyone who'd like to know, is currently about a quarter of the way through her second or third reading of The Sandman.)

and on that note--slow reader that i am, i've got my work cut out for me--i'm off to bed with that crazy albino chick.

*this may or may not have happened. but it could happen, couldn't it?

a-chronicity, or anachronicity, or anachronology, or something

it had been a long time since i'd last regretted turning the last page of a book for nothing but the right reasons. then Jeff Smith's Bone reset the marker. two days and counting...i'm rarely a straight-up optimist, but i find myself enthusiastically wondering whence the next absotively wonderrific reading experience will come? perhaps the next time i turn Bone's last page...

*

a sure sign that a lot of time has passed is when events start getting jumbled up in my head. on second thought, no, i suppose that never takes more than a few days, but there you go. numbers rarely help, but sometimes they do. for instance: the time from about midway through 2005 to the beginning of this year, 2007, seems to have been the most progressive period in my life thus far. the past two years have been rather eventful, though the past few months have seen me, well, catching up with myself, i suppose. or, when i'm feeling pessimistic, only getting left behind.

it occurred to me just now that, yes, it has been that long, and it happened when i realized that the man who inspired me to begin this journey in the first place is currently back home, potentially inspiring a whole new batch of schmucks and schmoes like me to pack their bags and follow their dreams wherever they may lead. and, hopefully, a few bastards and bastardesses with real talent as well. while me, i'm stuck here, alone, blogging from nowhere.

was it ever a good idea? even now it's hard to tell. answering one set of 'what-ifs' only spawns more 'what-ifs'. but if i were to allow myself any regret, well, best not to think about that, i suppose.

on the final stretch of the second draft of Spooky. barring one less-than-mediocre short story and a thousand words or so of failed pornography, practically all of my writing mind in the last three months has been dedicated to trying to get this thing to work. and while the second draft is, imho, a vast improvement on the first, i'm finding myself increasingly convinced i'm unequal to the task.

as some bloke over at Uncle Zip's Window pointed out, it's probably the most devastating, insulting, and yet necessary question to ask anyone who's ever had the hubris to pick up a pen (or word processor) and make stuff up: maybe i'm not a writer.

and then i sigh. shove the sleeves past my bony elbows. crack my knuckles. play a few rounds of solitaire. and write.

what else can i call myself now?

dry heat

just got home from Beowulf. i've never liked CG when it's used to depict 'real' people; even done with motion capture, it never looks right to me. there's a strange foreshortening effect on anatomy, a subtle wrong-ness to movements i seem to be particularly sensitive to despite the graphics having started out real-time anyway, a certain deadness to faces--Anthony Hopkins, for one, couldn't seem to get much through the pixel-juice mask, though his line delivery was typically brilliant. it's all very displacing when it isn't meant to be, shouldn't be. 'toonish' CG folks such as the Pixarians--The Incredibles, Linguini and Collette, for instance--make much more sense in my head. i suppose that was at least partly to blame for the fact that the opening scenes of Beowulf had me shaking my head, mumbling 'uh-oh' repeatedly to myself. thankfully, either the graphics team or my head eventually started pulling things together more or less seamlessly (albeit not perfectly), and i ended up more or less perfectly happy with what i'd just seen.

i would have liked to see Stardust and Beowulf back to back. in my head they make nice endpieces on the spectrum of 'epic' fantasty in cinema. (though of course Stardust isn't epic, but let's not mince words here. i'm sure someone out there must see what i mean.)

there're a few things here and there i could link to--like this article from The New Scientist which seems suggestive of the solution to the problem of 'Is God male or female?'--and a few other things i could ramble about--like how after ten months i believe i've finally genuinely developed homesickness--but instead i think i'll just drop this quote, picked up from this review of Viktor Shklovsky's Energy of Delusion at The Guardian--it's from Tolstoy, on the writing of Anna Karenina:

"...everything seems to be ready for the writing - for fulfilling my earthly duty, what's missing is the urge to believe in myself, the belief in the importance of my task, I'm lacking the energy of delusion."

Chris had already found another way of looking at it, by way of a Marcus von Altenburg--i suppose she means Eva Ibbotson's A Song for Summer. read the quote here:

http://ficsation.blogspot.com/2007/11/advice.html

i'll figure out which might apply to Spooky in the morning. if i can get myself out of bed.

vaguely manhatten-y

just wanted to pop by to say there's a vaguely mushroom-y cloud hanging on the horizon out my window, underlit with a deep red that's staining the sky, subtley flickery. it reminds me of a still from one of those manhatten project high-speed film reel captures, one of the ones before the cloud actually mushrooms and all you have are a few low stratospheric condensations and an expanding sphere of light except it isn't expanding and it's all done in midnight-y red rather than black and very white.

that is all. now back to my chlorpheniramine high.

got riget?

a moment ago i figured i'd drop by the other life, drop a few comments on the first ep of Lars Von Trier's The Kingdom which i'd just finished watching before this head cold (or the first generation antihistamine i took last night, which always puts me out of commission for at least three days) got the best of me, dragged me off to bed with its arch viral gravity and Maelstrom 2'd my head onto the pillow. quite possibly with a satisfying thwop.

too late. i'm halfway there.

suffice to say The Kingdom (i.e., Riget, as it is more properly called according to imdb or some other site...'struth, just googled it, and it comes onscreen after the jarringly dated opening-credits-sequence-thingum before breaking apart like cheap styrofoam or plyboard and bleeding what looks like sewer water or dirty laundry water sans detergent or some other appropriately probably artificially colored water all over the place) is of a totally different species of television from Stephen King's bastard Kingdom Hospital. 'sfar as i can tell so far anyway. no annoying talking anteater for one thing. plus, being shot digital means this show's got grits Mr King's crew turned into smoothies on that other show.

it'll all make sense by morning, he tells hisself. or by next blog post anyway.

right. to bed.

home for the holidays?

sigh. i'd meant to get an early day in to get some of the novel done, but holidays inspire lassitude. it's 10 a.m. now and i've just managed to peel myself off the bed.

it's Deepavali, which suggests to my mind--erroneously or not--that 1) the Indian population of Spore City must be predominantly South Indian, 2) it would probably be a good idea to avoid places dominated by Indians today, unless I feel like soaking up some culture--which--as sociopathic as all this suggests--i don't. i just want to find someplace i can write. and 3), to put it briefly and inaccurately, time is a social contract. happy new year.

the landlord's grandson has me worried; i should know better but really i don't. it's probably nothing. the boy was born about a week before i arrived, which makes him a good eight-plus-probably-nine months now, and his most common verbalization is a high-pitched shriek. what worries me about it is how monotonous it is; it doesn't vary at all, almost like the singular call of some flightless bird. but it's probably nothing. there doesn't appear to be anything wrong with his hearing, and he seems to interact appropriately with his surroundings, he's already started walking a bit, smiles adorably--er, socially--and he does babble every now and then. it's probably nothing, although learning last night that my friend Klur's five month old Sophia now says 'mama', and has been saying 'papa' for quite some time now, had me wondering even more. but it's all probably nothing.

good God, i'm going to be one of those paranoid dads, aren't i?

still listening to Iron & Wine and Devendra Banhart, and i've just piled library copies of M. John Harrison's Signs of Life, P.G. Wodehouse's The Code of the Woosters and the Pocket Penguin Jeeves and the Impending Doom, and Anton Chekhov's The Kiss (also Pocket Penguin) on top of the stack of books i'd planned on getting through before making another trip to the bookstore--or the library. oops.

i'd mistakenly indicated that i'd gotten through two-thirds of the first series of Jeeves & Wooster, when in fact i was four-fifths of the way through the series because there are only five episodes in the series, not six as i'd initially thought. so i'm done with the first series, and look forward to the second. most certainly, sir.

10:29. right. time i tried to get something done.

Pornography on hold

all one/two of you (depending on the weather, one should expect. as in, 'whether or not you've got me standing behind you with a gun in my hand pointed at your head'. er. trust me, it's much better heard than read. and no, that's not a guarantee.) who've been following this blog will have noticed the disappearance of 2 November's 'Corn!' post. i'd been having trouble with the blog since i put that up direct from Tickle, and though i was happy to learn i was Children of the Corn (despite the crappy ending), i'm rather glad to be rid of it as Blogger's being much more cooperative now, thank you very much.

i am now two-thirds of the way through the first series (that's 'season' to the rest of us--to cut down on the anglophilia that has been running rampant throughout this blog, what with all the Whovianism, not to mention last night's Bonfire Night post and, well, this one) of Clive Exton's Jeeves & Wooster. Wodehouse has always been on my list of 'books to read before i die', but he just kept getting bumped-off on account of me losing track of the one or two Jeeves books i have whenever i feel like reading them, and me feeling like reading something else whenever they're someplace i can find them. of course, hereabouts they are nowhere at hand. they're no doubt to be found chuckling away at the bottom of one of the boxes all the way back home.

(you can watch the entire series--or maybe only most of it, i haven't checked--online at youtube, or, better yet--for the moneyed and more morally restrained knuts out there--purchase the DVDs.)

Fry & Laurie are always a hoot. though nothing quite beats Python, eh?

i wish i could write funny. (funny ha-ha, of course, the other kind being much too broad in definition to decisively 'do wrong'.) i happen to think i can be a pretty funny guy given half the chance, but i just can't seem to do funny (ha-ha) with my writing. i can do grotesque, right enough; i can just about verge on camp, even. but i don't think i've ever quite gotten things right for 'funny'.

sigh. someday. just another one of those things, then.

meanwhile, i've lopped off the latter end (about half, in fact) of Spooky. i think i have a better idea now of *the way things really happened*; hopefully i won't make a muck-up of it this time. though i doubt i can repeat the feverish pace i managed in the month i wrote the first draft. even if it is NaNoWriMo.

which also means, unfortunately, for the one of you who's been looking forward to it, that i'm going to have to put Pornography on hold for a while. i'm sure Zazie won't mind.

remember, remember

i'd meant to find something cool to put on here for bonfire night, something appropriate, preferrably anarchic; but i didn't really feel like blogging, or spending too much time on google, so instead, here are some bunny suicides:



also here, sans my chemical romance:

http://www.retrocomputing.net/racconti/umor/coniglio/pandora.beptuui.html

and some 'exclusive cartoons' at The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/gallery/2007/oct/18/bunny.suicides?picture=331009540

thank you, Andy Riley.



on the spinner: Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, Devendra Banhart and The Shepherd's Dog, Iron and Wine.

Mishka and Johnny

just in the mail, from the folks at the Johnny Alegre AFFINITY Yahoo!group:

...we will be highlighting this year on December 14, 2007 at the annual
Candid Jazz Festival. This will be a very special event as Candid Records
Philippines launches two albums:

MISHKA ADAMS’ amazing new album that she recorded in England,
entitled“SPACE”. Her new material is absolutely stunning and she is immaculately
accompanied by and interplayed with by some of the finest jazz musicians from
the U.K.

And the second album of the Johnny Alegre AFFINITY (with GerardSalonga’s
Global Studio Orchestra) entitled “EASTERN SKIES” featuring Johnny Alegre
(guitar/compositions), Tots Tolentino (saxophones) ,Colby dela Calzada (bass),
Koko Bermejo (drums), Joey Quirino (piano)and the outstanding big band and
symphonic arrangements of RiaVillena-Osorio. The twin launch event will be held
at the TeatrinoTheater and Bar in Greenhills.

the absolutely lovely Mishka can be found online at http://www.mishkaadams.com/, the Johnny Alegre AFFINITY are over at http://affinity.i.ph/, and you can order their CDs online through the Candid Records website, http://www.candidrecords.com/.

as a kind of experiment to see how it takes, i've uploaded Johnny Alegre AFFINITY's gig sched for November onto a public folder on esnips.

i knew they wouldn't, but i was hoping both Mishka and AFFINITY would launch their albums while i was home, or maybe some copies would hit the shelves a couple months before the actual release date, as i've seen happen before. no such luck.

i just got back, and already things are piling up to make me regret having decided not to come home this December. i almost wish The Nightmare Before Christmas 3-D *won't* play at the IMAX theater back home while i'm away--or have i missed it already? sigh. ah well.

(meanwhile, i have ostensibly started up the other life again, with a rather long-winded post that does nothing to review the books i'm currently reading. ah well.)

gang aft agley

this is all a bit late, but...

it was all good fun, but looking back i can't help but feel a bit disappointed with the way things went down at the SF writers' forum at New Worlds 5. admittedly, i wasn't very much help--hell, i suppose that's an understatement--but as soon as it started, it was evident that the forum would be embroiled in the same things writers back home tend to find themselves wallowing in all the time anyway, which has a lot to do with wading through definitions. to be fair, again, it really was fun, and rather educational, too, particularly with the arrival of U.P. Prof Emil Flores, but i can't help but feel the couple hours spent wrassling (or trying to wrassle) the concept of 'SF' down could have been spent in other ways.

this was New Worlds 5, after all. if we're still wading through definitions now, what were the last 4 about?

the SF enthusiast in me can't help but think we could have had a much more fruitful discussion with issues like 'who would win in a fight--the Daleks or the Borg?', or 'what's the best way to travel through Time and Space?', or, perhaps a little more currentsy, 'what would happen if Sylar met a Cylon? or the Doctor?' and 'what would Mr Bennett do about it?'

the forum, however, did stay clear of the much overdone 'what is Filipino SF?'

and still, i'm glad i got to be there.

Q's comments on publishing stuff that take a decidedly Borgesian approach to fiction back home had me shaking my head though. mainly because i knew he was absolutely right.

*

i'm currently contemplating starting up the other life again, if only to complain about how Alison MacLeod's The Wave Theory of Angels puts my pitiful attempt at a novel to shame.

so it's back to the drawing board with spukhafte ferwirkungen, Sehnsucht, vom Geist der Schwere. sigh.

*

i can't remember if i watched The Crow last Halloween (i.e., 'ween 2006)--a little ritual i started for myself back in med school--but i definitely didn't this year. i'm a little put out for not having done anything Halloweenish this year--though i did attend a Halloween party with my friends from my first job as Sylar (that's 'dressed up as Sylar for the party' and not 'my first job when i was working as Sylar'. i was feeling lazy.) and i did wear my Jack-Skellington-heads tie to work on the 31st.

but i must be growing old. i don't really mind as much as i'm bitching.

what really got to me Halloween night was finding out they jazzed-up The Daily Show website, currently running on Beta, and now i can't watch any of the vids. grumble grumble.

yes, i am getting old.

*

the big thing for me thing i hinted at a couple posts back is shaping up into something. but i'd rather not give it away until i'm absolutely sure it's happening. fingers crossed things don't go gang aft agley.


latest thing on the spinner: Wildlife, Pupil.

enjoyed, during my vacation: Matthew Vaughn's Stardust, finding a copy of Lawrence Durrel's Alexandria Quartet, not having to work, and [cheese alert] being with Mabel a lot.
did *not* enjoy: The Seeker: The Dark is Rising. dammit, even Chris Eccleston sucked in that movie. sorry, Mr Eccleston.


am very uncertain about Heroes 2. only the Noah Bennett/Mohinder and Parkman/Parkman/Walker plot threads have any real hold on me, and Nathan Petrelli does seem a more interesting character this season, but am really getting tired of all that 'holy crap i have superpowers! what's it all mean?!?' malarkey, which i was never too keen on--despite being ostensibly necessary back then--with the first season anyway.

the ordinary folks continue to be more engaging as characters than the allegedly 'more evolved' types.

right. i'm off to either Wave Theory or the Inland Empire DVD extras. i haven't decided yet.

Dear Mabel

everytime i go through the whole check-in and immigration process back at NAIA, i arrive at the conclusion that the entire system was designed to get your mind off all the things that might ostensibly keep you from wanting to ever leave.

but then you finally make it through to your gate, and all those sentiments you were worrying at all weekend and on the ride to the airport start crowding back in your head. particularly when your boarding time gets pushed back half an hour or so.

in my case, it's the realization that no matter how much time i take off work to be with you, it can never be enough.

'GODDAMNED STORY'...more than a blasphemy, in this case it's a pun

i'm usually pretty happy when stories write themselves. but then i have to go back and make sure they work. some of them do, some of them don't. The Saint of Elsewhere and Troll's Doll were two stories that mostly wrote themselves and ostensibly worked in most places, and where they didn't, they were agreeable enough with my small manipulations and tinkerings (much of those in the former thanks to Q's suggestions--credit where credit is due) to turn into something that still managed all right in the end. the one i've been working on lately wrapped itself up almost a whole month ago, long enough for me to start another. but now both stories are in limbo because i CAN'T GET THAT GODDAMNED STORY TO WORK. it's done. it wrote itself. but it seems to have set itself in stone. there are a number of things wrong with it--most of which are things i know are wrong with it--and i've made some changes--some of them pretty drastic, mostly to do with deleting large chunks of it--that i have no doubt will ultimately prove to be for its own good. but i can't seem to change what it essentially chooses to be. it isn't that it doesn't say or do most of what i wanted it to when i started, and a few other things i didn't that i probably haven't picked up on yet as well; just that it doesn't work.

it's frustrating and depressing and taking the fun out of my vacation, and keeping me from doing other things i should be doing.

so why write?

sigh. right. of course. well. on with the motley.

guess you had to be there

i'm writing you to catch you up on places i've been.

a bit late, but just spent a loverly weekend at Balai sa Laiya with Mabel. loverly place. perfect for not-so-active people who just want to kill that kind of time at the beach.

and yes, sorry: no 3 x 5s. not that i ever had to overcome the urge to fit the world inside a picture frame.

i also had the pleasure of finally finishing off Heroes. i found the ending a bit flat given the build-up. and i can't say i didn't see the Petrelli's 'final solution' coming.

the most interesting thing i find about the show is the perspective it seems to offer on the effect of the sort of 'evolution' that forms one of the central conceits of the series. people who develop superpowers tend to be hobbled by their abilities; a bit too concerned about what they literally can and can't do, if you will. the most interesting characters for me, then, are the ones without 'special abilities'.

i'd say more, but i'm on limited access. i will add, on a totally unrelated note, that there may be some big news here soon. big for me anyway.

right. later.

more on porn

i forgot to end with this link as i'd intended last night:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/10/10/baseduced110.xml

don't ask me what it says. i haven't read it.

call me queer, but i like hanging out at the airport. i like being much too early for a flight. every now and then i like the feeling of being a non-entity in a non-place. and Changi is one of the most comfortable non-places there is to be a non-entity in. null pointe. and with free access to the internets. and Bundaberg Root Beer. joy.

i should be catching up on The Daily Show, as i may be missing the next couple weeks of it, except when i get to spend a couple weeknights over at E.Cross Saltire's place, but my man Paul just sent me the latest Radiohead; the internet access here is amazing. i've almost got the complete playlist on my harddrive and the player's only on track two.

so far, i have to agree with Paul: this is amazing stuff. it has the Eraser vibe, but is far more accessible. and yea, hints of Hail to the Thief.

there. back on track one (typing and downloading has its hazards...such as accidentally clicking open file when you only want to add the file to the wmp playlist. ah well. so far this stuff is good enough for me not to mind. and besides. it be Radiohead) and i've just completed downloading all ten tracks.

the box still looks mighty tempting though. (which can be found and ordered here:

http://www.inrainbows.com/Store/Quickindex.html)

anyway, where was i? oh yes, hanging out in nowheres. i was the first person through immigration. unfortunately there is no door prize for that, except maybe complete privacy when using the facilities, but i get ahead of myself. anyway, i just barely got out of a gazillion-course lauriat-style whatever-you-call-'ems-Chinese dinner thingies my boss threw to thank everybody who helped out at the Hanoi meeting a couple weeks ago. don't get me wrong, Chinese food is tasty, but dammit i can't take very much of it. so the cab i'd called for arrived just in time to save me from a very harsh, very impolite, very nasty, very slow gastronomic death.

and i still had to use the facilities when i got here. which is why it sometimes pays in very practical ways to be insanely early for your flight.

i'd just gotten my luggage from the bosses car when i was informed the taxi had arrived. my exit was as unceremonious as it was sudden. sometimes i think all goodbyes should be so easy.

right. enough rambling. time to soak up In Rainbows. yea, thank you grampa Paul.

drat. just realized i forgot my mp3 USB cable. ah well. i doubt i'll be using the ol' autism inducer while i'm home. i do have my trilby though, so that's all right.

jiggety jog

in about 24 hours, if all goes according to plan, i'll be getting on a plane and flying home for a much needed two week break.

from the look of things back at the office, however, it's going to be a working vacation. sigh.

i don't know if i'll be able to blog again soon after tonight. we haven't got a decent connection to the internets back home, and any time i spend on that connection will probably have to be used on work things, and it looks like i'll be racing to my flight tomorrow night so i probably won't be blogging from the airport, either. meantime, any readers this blog might still have can sink their teeth into this, from Grantian Florilegium:

http://www.kingsmeadow.com/2006/06/home-again-home-again.html


i'm a bit worried about how a story i just started tonight will survive the change of scenery; the past few weeks had put me on a rather pleasant routine of starting and actually finishing things--something rather new for me, and really rather more delightful than the phrase 'rather pleasant' might imply--though i only got one story out between Spooky and this one. hopefully i'll want to get this done enough for the inevitable break in my momentum to not matter. maybe i've actually got this 'getting stories done' thing down for good. one can hope.

for the incurably curious, i'm currently working on a little meditation on pornography i'd always wanted to do. some of the ideas i want to put in it are stated quite eloquently by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie in this interview by the brilliant Susanna Clarke, on Lost Girls:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/10/07/sv_alanmoore.xml&page=1

what they say will probably prove to be far more eloquent than what i'll eventually manage, so maybe it wasn't very bright of me to have put anybody on to it, but there you go. i'd been mulling over it for some time now, and reading the interview convinced me i had to do it. i hadn't known quite how to begin, but tonight i picked up my copy of Kathy Acker's Literal Madness and read a bit of Kathy goes to Haiti, and found just the right voice--i think--for this piece. As Susanna Clarke puts it (from page 3 of the interview):

Pornography by its very nature has a deadening effect on story.

hmm. thinking about it now i wonder just what i've gotten myself into. for a long time i also hesitated from starting because it seemed the ideas i had would be better served with a more visual medium than plain prose, and seeing Inland Empire just made it seem even more inadvisable for me to even try. ah well. fingers crossed. (obviously i still don't trust myself enough with the craft of writing to stop believing luck has anything to do with getting anything done.)

Empire building

i suspect that rather than narrative, we are confronted with fragile raw material for a disembodied subconscious, of the sort for which, ostensibly, a way might be found to put the pieces together into something resembling things like 'character', or 'personality'. philosophers like Campbell might have you believing they are the same thing, that narrative is the summation of subconscious. David Lynch seems to argue otherwise. instead one realizes that 'narrative' is as artificial a construct for the subconscious as 'plot' is for real life.

the narrative exists, but rather than being the framework upon which 'events' are hung like adornments, the narrative hangs delicately from the events, or visions: typically, for Lynch, a framework that consists of a mishmash of hallucinations, memories and nightmares/dreams. (remember: the mind makes no distinction between any of them; it is mere consciousness that imposes such definitions, and disallows substitution and transitivity.) also, the framework, the skeleton, is the meat.

in the end, however, in spite of or perhaps because of all that, Inland Empire manages to be the most surprisingly uplifting of Lynch's films. when what might possibly be reality--and we are never told that it is: Lynch presents, instead, a naked id we must clothe with our own egos to come up with anything approaching 'sense'--when what i think might be reality finally breaks through all the hooplah, we are given, thankfully, some relief from the grotesquerie, the guignol, and, more than that, we are offered that startling gem that is so valuable when it is found in arthouse cinema: a happy ending; and a surprisingly sympathetic, 'meaningful' one, at that. Lynch's work has always been informed with a core of humanity, no matter how obscure or deeply buried, but Empire seems more so than the rest, and we eventually come to realize that it is a film that, again more than any other in the Lynch catalogue, wears its heart on its sleeve. but is it really 'good cinema'? i suspect not. in fact, in many ways, it is a horrible piece of 'cinema', perhaps even the worst. but i suppose it wouldn't hurt if we were to call it 'art', if only in the Lanarkian sense of the term.

and damned if i don't love every crudely pretentious, obscurist minute of it.

and yes, while i see no real point in saying it since most reviews seem to gravitate to the fact eventually, and it seems the one point of agreement between most (all?) critics of the film, i say it here because, dammit, it is deserved: Laura Dern is amazing.

right. been reeling from all that balderdash since last night. glad to finally get it all out.

more pretentiousness on Inland Empire here:

http://messageboard.inlandempirecinema.com/forum/index.php

on the spinner: Challengers, The New Pornographers, and Voodoo, Terez Montcalm.

currently reading: The Wave Theory of Angels, Alison MacLeod and 334, Thomas Disch

children of Спутник

"The Sputnik launch changed everything."

here's how, according to Ivan Semeniuk, last month at the New Scientist:

http://space.newscientist.com/channel/space-tech/sputnik-legacy/mg19526201.200-how-sputnik-changed-the-world.html

"...we were children of Sputnik. Although we weren't yet born when the Soviet satellite made its startling debut on 4 October 1957, we were of the generation that grew up in its considerable wake. ...Fast forward to today, and the results seem disappointing. Space travel - the technology we had seen as the emblem of our future - has so far turned out to be more emblematic of our past." (my ellipses)

later, he says:

"Access to space has not, on the face of it, transformed society in the same way as the car, air travel or the internet, for example.

Or has it? Could it be that human society has been so thoroughly altered by the emergence of space flight 50 years ago that we are no longer able to recognise the change?" (my ellipses)

ultimately, Mr Semeniuk proves to be an optimist:

"[Sputnik's] impact on day-to-day life in 1957 was essentially nil, but its influence is immeasurable. Through the huge investment in higher education it generated, Sputnik was the most important catalyst for human development there has ever been. This is the hidden dividend of the space programme, and we are just beginning to feel the full impact.

"For my childhood friend and I, the space age was about what was going on "up there". Five decades after Sputnik, that view seems too literal. ...it will take many more decades to discover where the changes triggered by Sputnik are leading us. In a society driven by scientific discovery, the possibilities are virtually endless.

"Perhaps, somewhere down the road, we may even get a vacation to the moon
out of it."

meanwhile, NASA explains our status as 'children of Sputnik' by reiterating the definition of modern man as Homo consumerus:

http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/

and while Burmese powers refuse to let the perspective of the rest of the world and the Word of Mass Media influence their rule:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7018285.stm

Filipinos--all too conscious of 'Mass Media'--find themselves indignant over the thoughtless comments of a fictional television character:

http://michellemalkin.com/2007/10/03/desperate-housewives-insults-filipinos/

(update: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7027551.stm)

the Space Age at 50, ladies and gents. how would you define your reality?

Feast of the Guardian Angels

as a child i remember saying one prayer every night, reciting it in the sing-song cadences of something learned by rote; a phonetic echo, lacking the clear, overpowering layers of a self-consciousness with meaning that grows rather than eases with maturity.

i miss that old sincerity; as hungry as i was to learn the 'real' socially-derived definitions of words, they were then still only as powerful as i was willing to let them be. the dictionary was a curiosity, not an authority; the cool, laid-back uncle rather than the terrifyingly stone-faced aunt.

words were personal. the words i used were mine, they served my needs and not anyone else's.

the romantic in me can't help but look back and be filled with the sense of it all having been a much simpler time. which, in some ways, is completely true. and yet, having been there, i know better than to let myself believe just that.

when the cynic in me looks back and hears me utter those words each night, kneeling in the dark before the Sto Nino with its soft, unreadable smile, the cold porcelain face lit from below with a flickering pair of red electric bulbs that pretended to be candle flames...

now when i look back and hear myself utter those words i can't help but feel a brief shiver run down my spine:

Angel of God, my guardian dear,
to whom God's love entrusts me here,
ever this day
be at my side
to light and guard,
to rule and guide.

back on the exhausted side of tired.

er. yes. i guess that's all i have to blog about.



oh wait. there's more after all.

this, by Geoff Ryman, had me scratching my head. not because i disagreed with it or wasn't excited by the 'serious' ideas behind the Sinister Mundane Manifesto--in fact, it's sort of not quite almost the kind of thing i tried to do with the work-in-progress i've tentatively called Spooky--but because i find myself increasingly uncomfortable with the culture of writers this sort of speechification portrays. yes, i know i have been and continue to regularly be guilty of the same behavior, but that just makes it worse, dunnit?

even more baffling, despite the correspondence between the SMM and my own perspective of fiction, i couldn't quite find myself on Mr Ryman's side, and the little voice in my head i'd bound and gagged regained consciousness and started knocking its head against the panels--first on the walls, then on the floorboards when the chair it was tied to collapsed from its violence--trying to catch my attention.

and then M. John Harrison said this:

SF is an opportunity to have an intense relationship with your own imagination. It's a kind of drive-by poetry, trashy and addictive; it's fun. After that, for me, it's an opportunity to explore that kind of imaginative artefact from inside, and use a little camped-up contemporary science as a way of generating new metaphors around my typical obsessions. While I agree with almost everything that Geoff Ryman and the Mundanes say about SF, I can't join them because I find it impossible to assign different levels of plausibility to acts of the imagination. If you limit yourself on the grounds that faster-than-light travel isn't "realistic," you might as well go whole hog and write only fiction set on the street where you live; if you limit yourself to that, you might as well go whole hog and write nothing but nonfiction; if you limit yourself to that, you might as well go whole hog, admit that writing is not the real world--and can't even successfully represent the real world--and give it up altogether.

I'd be happy to do that, and indeed I've already done all of those things more than once in the last forty years. But if you're going to write SF in the first place, why not lie back, admit it's a farrago, and enjoy it ? I think there's a great deal to be gained from revaluing and enjoying the distinction between the invented and the real. As long as you maintain that, SF's a great genre.

(in an interview by Jeff VanderMeer for Amazon, here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNKU9IKGSQRRMJA)

and suddenly, all was right again in the world.

yes, i know. disgusting how much the internets has had me relying on ventriloquism, ennit?

apocalypse whoa

i've been writing hard (for me) everyday (yes, including weekends, which should explain some things to certain people who will probably never read this anyway) from a little over a month ago (Liv informs me i created the file 16 August 2007) to get my first draft done running against a self-imposed deadline: i'll be flying out for work in a few hours, and will be pretending to be a real journalist with little time for anything else in Ha Noi til Sunday.

if Beijing and Jakarta are anything to go by, i'll most likely be taking nothing but exhaustion and a sense of not-having-been-anywhere-in-particular home with me. in short, something like a regular nine-to-five work month condensed into five twenty-four-seven days. yes, i'm probably exaggerating. but still. i most definitely do not thrive under pressure.

i'm still hoping for another San Diego, though that seems highly unlikely. oh, i never said anything about that, did i? the closest i apparently got to talking about it here was this. (the trip did, however, provide a lot of these photos.) well, it was crazy, but it turned out well in an 'i can't feel my face' sort of way; but again, highly unlikely. still, fingers crossed.

i was worried the interposition of all that work might kill the momentum; for something this long, i'm surprised it sustained itself as long as it did. to be honest, i probably needn't have worried: i started losing it about a week ago, and it shows in the last third of the draft; still, i'd have been rather more bothered by the 'narrative schizophrenism' having a gap in the process would most likely have produced, an effect i've seen before with another story i wrote a few months ago. it's an effect that can probably be useful for some things, but one i feel would have had no place in this.

as it is, the gradual loss of momentum took its toll; much work to be done. but at least i've got something more or less complete to work with when i get back; hopefully that will make it easier to maintain a consistent tone when i start doing revisions.

for those concerned, i'll probably not be in touch til i get back Sunday night.

right. i really need to be packing now. now...which hat to take to Ha Noi? hmm...

seizure.

right. first draft. novel length. more or less. brain seizure. buzzed.

lots to do yet. a break, yes: a break. sounds good.

mmm...

more tomorrow. maybe.

fifty thousand words

fifty thousand six hundred and seventeen to be exact, by the automatic word count. i don't think i've ever done 50k of anything before.

lots left to do: an ending, for one thing. maybe another scene or two, though i'm hoping i'll be able to avoid that. i expect i won't. once that's sorted, there's a lot of cleaning, cutting, rewriting, rearranging, &c left to do. the end product, in fact, might not be 50k at all. given the shape it's in right now, it'll probably be significantly less.

so yes, i'm jumping the gun. potentially jinxing it, even. but still. right now. fifty thousand six hundred and seventeen. 50k.

i'm exhausted.

i think i'll do something with higher octane next. and shorter sentences. fewer adverbs. maybe no adverbs. and none of what Chris once called my signature, those unwieldy compound-complex over-constructions. or as little of it as i can manage, anyway. i think i'll keep the semi-colons, though; i find them comforting. (now how might that work?)

Ed Rants has interviewed Rupert Thomson, author of the quietly brilliant Death of a Murderer for The Bat Segundo Show. listen as Ed Rants once again reads things that aren't there, and then insists that they are.

part one: http://www.edrants.com/segundo/?p=171
part two: http://www.edrants.com/segundo/?p=172

peace, Mr Rants. dig the show.

undetermined; or, long live the little chamberlain

this morning, i realized that while i'd expected the worst, i hadn't really planned on it. which i realize now would have been rather obvious had i bothered to read what i'd posted last night. so when i peered into the little chamberlain's cubby and found it lying at an odd angle over the dish of crumbs i'd given it last night, i sort of just looked at it for a while.

for those of you reading this blog who have more sense, it may console you to know that i'm kicking myself now for being so impulsive last night. of course the little chamberlain was dying. of course it would be dead by morning. of course i'm an idiot for having potentially brought 'a plague on both your houses'. actually, technically speaking, there are four 'houses' here i could have 'brought the plague on', so to speak. good grief. and the children...

not that a single avian (now there's a red flag word if ever i heard one) death is automatically something to worry about. i believe i may have mentioned it before that walking through town in Spore City is almost like walking through the end of The Birds; i can almost believe the soundtrack for that movie had been recorded right here in the city. i'm sure pigeons die in residential buildings all the time hereabouts, and most of them probably go unnoticed.

having got up early to check on the little chamberlain, i decided to go out for a run. (not as impressive as that sounds. i go out for a twenty minute run about once every one or two months, the run staggered into twenty-second half-sprints. so no, i'm hardly out there for my health, much less getting ready for a marathon. it's just something i do every now and then.) i found myself watching the birds: mostly columbiforms and passerines--a lot of them corvine, though some of the ones i've seen might actually be mynas (which would make them, i just recently learned, starlings, i.e., Sturnidae, not Corvidae)--and the occasional, less visible apodiforms (i saw my first hummingbird last week, on my way to work, darting in and out of the hedges at the bottom of the stairs leading up to Queenstown station). i suppose i must have seen a lot of them before--hanging about the outer walls of the building, in the fields and empty lots out back, on the sidewalks and streets and by the cafes and hawker centers and railway lines &c--but of course, one can't be too sure. they all look pretty much the same to me. but as i went running, i had the sneaking suspicion i was being talked about...

of course it was only my imagination. of course it was. what's important is, apart from that, none of the birds i saw on my run seemed to be behaving unusually. not in any particular way i could identify. of course i'd have to get in the little nooks and crannies where the pigeons actually roost to know for sure, but that's well beyond my personal sense of initiative, so let's leave it at that.

still, all this has left me--admittedly not for the first time--hankering for the old lab. it isn't the work, it's the access. (normally i'd say it's the people, but in this case i've got more practical concerns in mind.) i could have performed a full autopsy on the little chamberlain back home, had body fluid and tissue specimens processed at the clinical pathology lab--bit of an abuse of resources, i admit, but one i could have justified with talk of public health and safety and all that, or just palmed-off for a favor...that doesn't quite sound right, but i'm sure you see what i mean--and examined them myself; after which i could have said, with scientific certitude, that the cause of the little chamberlain's death was most definitely undetermined.

i could say that now, of course, and i *had* done a cursory external examination of the little chamberlain's body (and found nothing unusual, by the by), but it just wouldn't be the same.

well, we all have to make our choices, and at some point you've got to stick to your guns. i have to remind myself how utterly miserable i was back there, nevermind how miserable work can be here.

anyway. i wish i could say i at least provided the little chamberlain with a comfortable place to spend its last few hours on earth, but, to be perfectly honest, i expect i probably only gave it even more reason to be terrified.

blackbird; or, the little chamberlain

i'm currently holed up in my room with a black pigeon. i have no idea what to do with it. i had the misfortune of running into it in the elevator. it had somehow found itself stuck in the suffocating little box that opened its doors to different places without really seeming to move, letting in and letting out strange wingless giants with flat, featherless faces. it had a mortified look plastered to its face when i found it, a look it's still giving me now crouched in a little cubby under the writing desk across from the bed where i'm typing this. (edit that: it seems to have fallen asleep now, head tucked under its wing, the dish of mooncake crumbs i'd given it as yet untouched. i hope when the ants come, it'll realize the crumbs are edible, and take a bit of it before the ants can rob him of sustenance, or, worse, overwhelm him. i'd hate to wake up tomorrow with a bird corpse covered in ants.)

at first i urged it out of the elevator when it reached my floor, but then i thought 'what would a pigeon do with itself up here?', and urged it back into the elevator and accompanied it to ground level. once there, i followed it out to see what it would do. i couldn't just leave it, could i? (of course i could, but if you know me, well, i wouldn't. not when i have nothing better to do, and no one around to watch me being silly over a strange bird.)

it waddled about in the enclosed atrium thing on the ground floor for a bit. old people use the space to get some fresh air at unexpected hours of the day. luckily, the old people who'd been sitting on the benches there had only been waiting for the elevator, and they got on it right after we'd gotten off. i'd hate to have had someone watching me try to figure out what to do with a silly little pigeon that won't fly away.

and it wouldn't fly; it just kept waddling slowly about like an old man with a fractured hip, or a little skeksis. yes, almost exactly like a little skeksis, only--as far as i can tell--without the pure wickedness. i followed it around some more. i tried to pick it up when i realized it wasn't going anywhere. (there were cats about and i thought it should find someplace else to be. i like them well enough, the cats, but they aren't really friendly, least of all to a hapless pigeon, as you might imagine.) the first time i tried, it spread its wings and finally fluttered away from me. it made it up about a foot off the ground...not quite high enough to keep it from bashing into the low ledge fencing in the atrium. almost, but not quite.

eventually i managed to pick it up; once you got your hands on it, it couldn't put up much of a fight. now i had a bird in hand with no idea what to do with it. a bird in hand is much overrated, times like this. i could have hoped for two in the bush to take this one off my hands, but there were cats, not birds, in the bushes, what few bushes there were, at any rate, and anyway, it's night time. the other birds have no doubt gone to bed by now.

i decided we should try a test flight. maybe all it needed was a jump start to really get off the ground; if it could fly far enough from me, what happened after that would be none of my business.

i walked out of the atrium with it cradled in both hands, into the football field out back. i counted to three, then tossed it into the air like i'd seen them do at magic shows, or on TV when they were making John Woo films and the pigeons wouldn't cooperate.

this time, with the additional altitude at take-off, it made it out a few meters further than it had in the atrium, before setting down in the grass. at least it had no low wall to bash into. i walked over to where it had landed and sat down beside it. 'you're not getting anywhere on your own steam, are you?,' i said to it, or something like that. 'what am i supposed to do with you now?' it just looked at me like i was crazy for trying to talk sensibly to a pigeon.

anyway, it seemed too exhausted to even try to respond, much less waddle away when i picked it up again. i didn't even need both hands.

so now it's up here, in my room, with its head tucked under a wing, while me, i type up this blog post and hope my landlord doesn't find out i've got a guest. (i'm not allowed guests. much less if they happen to be pigeons, i imagine, what with the baby and all.)

i can only hope all it needs is food, maybe some sleep, the latter of which it's finally getting a bit of. at least it's relaxed now, the mortified look (mostly) gone from its face. who knows what it might be dreaming.

i'll figure out what to do with the little chamberlain--as i've decided to call it, what with the skeksis reference--in the morning.

endangered species

as if we didn't have enough to worry about, what with decaying concrete meltdown containers and unaccounted-for nuclear weapons and inconvenient truths and noxious gas-emitting meteorites and blood-sucking mutant dogs and new Ebola outbreaks and dengue and tuberculosis and Viktor Bout and politics and censorship and religion and obsessive bosses and quantum physics:

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/mission/enduringvoices/

and here i was thinking it would be nifty to learn French at some point in the near future.

Adobo

...and Beng Calma. oh, the music's tasty, too.



(post inspired by The Theoretical Chef.)

Cabal, Chuck and Camille; also, a panda on [my] lap

i'd known this all along, ever since the first pictures of the i-believe-then-yet-unnamed Cabal started hitting the internets (formerly known as the interweb on this blog).

i even wrote in about it, all the way back then. no one ever listens.

ah well. can't stay miffed for long. apart from being a perfectly amazing world-famous writer, Neil provides one of the best reasons to aspire to be a perfectly amazing world-famous writer:

http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/uploaded_images/IMG_0181-751862.jpg
http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/labels/chengdu%20panda%20centre.html

a few days ago, i met a black and white kitten--imagine Sylvester or his son, or that relative pussy, Figaro, or Snoopy's antithesis--while waiting at Kallang station for my friend Ana. he seemed to like the carefully worn ragged ends of my jeans, and it was then i noticed he was the same color as my beloved leather Chucks. so i named him Chuck. i could have named him Taylor, but there you go.

then a local couple who'd been watching us from the steps approached. i stepped back and they lured Chuck away from me. i didn't mind. not really. i didn't want us to become co-dependent, anyway; there was just no way it would have been a good idea for me to have taken him home.

after the couple lost interest, Chuck wandered into the station, stumbling about recklessly until Kindly Maintenance Guy led him back out, away from all those Careless Big Shod Feet rushing blindly about. then another local couple started playing with him.

thank me for introducing you to kittens, Spore City. Mercer would have been proud.

i think i must have mentioned before that i'd become enamoured with Camille, whose Le Festin i first heard while watching the movie Ratatouille. before the movie, i caught a bit of an interview with her on a television set set inside a Ratatouille poster, playing what would undoubtedly become a DVD extra by way of entertaining movie-goers before they were allowed to find their seats in the theater, and became curious. after the movie, i immediately went ought and bought the soundtrack.

thanks to Kala, who might occasionally be found having a perfect day for bananafish, i now have a copy of her CD, Le Fil. and yes, i am now most definitely in love with Camille.

i am proud to say i can now whistle the instrumental bit of Le Festin, even though i can neither sing the song, nor even properly say the words out loud.

Nine over Ten

finally finished my nth viewing of the Complete First Series of the Russel T. Davies incarnation of Doctor Who, right after finally getting to watch the Third Series Finale (The Last of the Time Lords). i'd been putting off watching Father's Day coz i'd been feeling a bit too fragile for it, and it turns out i was right.

anywho (see what i did there?), i'm done now, even the First Series Doctor Who Confidential episodes, and all that's left is to watch the episodes with DVD commentaries with the DVD commentaries on--but i think i'm ready to put this out there: contrary to general opinion, David Tennant's Doctor Number Ten isn't the best Doctor ever. he's pretty amazing, i'll admit, and even Tom Baker's Doctor (just because he happens to be the 'Original Doctor' in my head, me having come to the series ages ago off those particular episodes once shown on the now long defunct FEN--meet the Doctor and his various incarnations here) is hard to pit against Tennant's, but i still say he isn't. i've always been of the opinion that Christopher Ecclestone's Doctor Number Nine didn't have it fair at all, what with having just come off the Time War and having survival guilt and all, but having seen it all over again, it isn't just that.

Tennant's Ten has a more conventional charm, owing to his brilliant sometimes-verging-on-maniacal behavior, but this often takes away from the complex subtlety that comes off as a poor echo of Ecclestone's Nine's; admittedly, he's a bit more healed from the Time War, so this can only be expected, and besides, yes, there are other subtleties to Ten; still, Ecclestone's stone-face is often more effective than Tennant's playdough features at showing the exact same sort of thing--the shift from confounded contemplation to dismissive delight, for instance.

this may sound like me repeating myself, but in the past few months, i had, in fact, grown to love Tennant's Doctor as much as Ecclestone's. (i'd also grown, at last, to actually like Rose, but that's another thing altogether, and something i don't think i've ever mentioned before. what?!? you didn't like Rose?!? not initially, no. mainly because i thought Billie Piper hammed it up a bit too much a bit too often, but i'm about ready to change my mind on that as well. there may be another post in that; the Doctor's Companions. stay tuned after the break.)

er. where was i? ah. may sound like. repeating myself. love Tennant's Doctor. so, how to decide between the two Doctors? well, i wasn't about to, but then comparing the three serieses (?!?) in my head changed my mind.

the problem here is that we aren't just talking about the Doctor and the actors' distinguished portrayals; we're talking about how they've been written as well. had it been just the two Doctors to decide between per se, i'd have had to chalk it up to my mood at the time: damaged, occasionally sullen and potentially ruthless, or schizophrenic (in the typical literary sense of the word), ginger and rude?

despite dishing out some of the best episodes (for my money Girl in the Fireplace, Love and Monsters and the absolutely fantabulously unequabble Blink), the latter two serieses have been, for the most part, rather uneven. when those serieses's (?!?!?) episodes were bad, they weren't irredeemably bad (except perhaps, off the top of my head, the utterly malodorously horrendous The Shakespeare Code, saved only by a few brilliant one liners: 'Fifty-seven scholars just punched the air with their fists' after a homosexual innuendo from the Bard, for instance--oh and that 'Human Dalek'. wtf), and unevenness, by itself, isn't particularly fatal. but, on top of the unevenness, there was a failure to satisfactorily tie-up all the threads that had been woven into the series, and, on top of that, an insistence on even trying to tie everything up--more a disservice to the series than anything, really, seeming, in the end, nothing more than an unnecessary obeissance to the precedent set by the First Series--or, perhaps by contemporary television in general (thank Babylon 5 for that; i hear they're to blame for all this 'story arc' business in serial TV these days).

and while the latter two serieses might boast some truly niftier-than-nifty eps, the First after all had The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances; the utterly revealing Dalek; the disturbingly insightful Boom Town; and, yes, the gut-wrenching Father's Day (a rather silly ep, really, but utterly effective); oh, and who can forget watching the TARDIS hurtle through space as it charges bravely into the thick of the two-hundred-ship-strong Dalek armada? and while the First Series did have the potentially annoying tendency to resort to Deus Ex Machina (but what is the TARDIS, after all, but a ready-made, custom-built D.E.M.?), there was a majesty to the way the series engaged in its resolutions, and, though i admit to being initially miffed by The Apotheosis of Rose (in The Parting of the Ways), i now, surprisingly, find it rather satisfying. (the D.E.M. resolution of Boom Town never really bothered me; there was just no other proper way to end it, and by that point in the ep, it was a definite relief for the TARDIS to have stepped in just then.)

(it was interesting to see, then, The Apotheosis of the Doctor in The Last of the Time Lords; an even more complete apotheosis, in fact, with Martha Jones playing the role of uber-companion: prophet to the Doctor's deity. more on this, if i feel like it, later.)

the Doctor's overall story arc seemed to have hit a peak with the First Series and with Nine, akin to my mind to the way Neil Gaiman's The Sandman caught Morpheus at exactly the right time for us to come into his story.

(and, like Morpheus, Doctor Number Nine also had reached a point at which he had to change or die; sure, they'll tell you, Nine died to save Rose and that's that, and they're exactly right. but there's an undeniable weariness to Nine which makes me almost believe that, yes, maybe the Doctor had, at last, seen just that bit too much of the cold, hard universe...alors!)

at this point, i now feel capable of sympathizing with those who feel the show isn't what it used to be; i would even add that what the show lost, it lost immediately after the end of the first series, and the Doctor's ninth regeneration; it faltered at The Christmas Invasion and never recovered.

however, i will say this as caveat: yes, it lost something, something precious, even priceless; something worth missing. but no, that shouldn't keep you from watching what remains a damned fine show; Russel T. Davies' Doctor Who is still better than Doctor Who has ever been, and the show remains one of the finest on TV these days.

and anyway, the latter serieses, after all, only fail to my mind in comparison to the First.

watch it for the Doctor's wit, his incomprehensible brilliance, his endearing rudeness, or his suspicious penchant for sneakers...watch it for the scary monsters; the bold, imaginative silliness you won't find on any other SF TV show that isn't a parody (MST3K, for instance; or Red Dwarf and Hyperdrive); the well-developed humanity...watch if for the TARDIS...

or watch it for Catherine Tate. i hear they're bringing her back for the entire Fourth Series. i can't wait.

why yesterday's blog post was not a proper blog post; and, return of the tool

1) i should have posted this link:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1651341_1659152_1659089,00.html
and/or this one:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/completelist/0,,1651341,00.html

it should then be easy to find where to go from there.

2) i should have put up this video:



and linked to it like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKBnR43-7cI

and let you know that it can also be found by clicking yourself onto youtube through the next link, or by putting said link in the address line of your browser:

http://www.youtube.com/

3) i should have paid more careful attention to what labels i was using, because i missed out on a few useful ones such as:

Q., hackery, The Simpsons, return of the tool, thinking too much and spending way too much time in your own head,

some of which i only made up just now after spending way too much time in my own head.

right. now that's sorted.

working on my current project (really, it shouldn't sound so pretentious; but how else should i refer to it? i'll let you know when it's done.) makes me appreciate how useful it can be to think of what you're doing as 'not SF' when it isn't, even if, from some particularly stubborn perspectives, it might look like it isn't 'not SF'. it is, in fact, at least as useful as thinking of what you're doing as 'not not SF' when it isn't 'not SF'. either of which is only about as useful as thinking about what you're doing at all.

which is apparently--for me at least--almost completely inadvisable. unless you're good at that sort of deliberate tinkering with what you're doing--like Gene Wolfe; or M. John Harrison; or Thomas Pynchon; or Ballard; or Borges. which, as i'm sure i've demonstrated before, i'm not.

and which, to be clear, isn't meant to say 'nay' to SF, or her most fanatical adherents...only to the constant, befuddling insistence on things like 'appropriation' and, less comprehensibly, 'reappropriation'. alors. i'm going to get screwballed for that comment, aren't i?

ah well. bees be. but what am i, in fact, doing, or, to be more honest, trying to do? i know you didn't ask that, but, this being my blog, let's pretend that you did. and to answer that question, i borrow something one of the above (guess who?) said:

'...to claim fiction as a kind of Bedlam in which the inmates communicate with partial success through temporary idiolects bricolaged from both cultures [i.e., 'Science' and 'The Arts' - c]; or a very large alphabet soup in which you could swim & play & act out & generally behave irresponsibly. What we can do now (& what we’ve been doing since Ballard & Burroughs & Gibson) is take advantage of all that potential symbology, all that spare poetry lying around & up for grabs. Why limit yourself ? I don’t neccessarily think of this as a big, clever or serious attitude–no more contributive to the Third Culture project than to any academic or purposive theory-based idea of fiction–but play is, well, releasing. I think keys to my attitude might be discovered in the short story “Science & the Arts” as well as in Light & Nova Swing.' (my ellipses)

Mr. Harrison (of course) said all that here:

http://uzwi.wordpress.com/2007/07/01/cheap-sunglasses/

in the comments section. i must have used that before; can't be helped, or, to be more precise, i can't help myself; i particularly like that bit about 'all that spare poetry lying around'. which i've found a useful thing to keep in mind while writing 'not SF'.

Frank Zappa is another usefully mad genius to listen to, times like these, and sums up what i've really been getting at all along: 'Shut up'n'play.'

currently reading: whatever i feel like reading in the moment.

on the spinner: Tom, Elvis and Camille. and rats.

The St. of Elsewhere

during the editing process of The Saint of Elsewhere, and quite a bit of the few discussions on the short that followed, Q used to reference the TV show St. Elsewhere. i never thought much of the comparison, though i never refuted it either--while i never paid attention to the show as a child, i couldn't deny that the show had filtered into my subconscious, and was, in fact, there in the back of my mind when i eventually settled on the title. while i don't remember actually waiting for the show and watching it when it came on, the show--its name and its theme music--are as comforting and familiar as anything i can dredge up out of what little i remember of being a kid.

after reading this from Time Magazine's The 100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME, i realized what a disservice i did the story by not actually following through on the cues of my subconscious.

just to be clear: no, the show does not actually explain the short. but it comes closer to the mark of what i'd been trying to do with the story than any interpretation of it i've heard so far. (though admittedly, there haven't been a lot.)

read more about the show and what the hell i'm talking about--where else?--on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Elsewhere

it all makes me wonder, just how much of me--consciously and otherwise--is, to borrow a quote from the list, brought to you by the letters T and V?

note to self: the voice may seem crazy, but it knows things. yes in-diddly-deedy, it does.