skinnynonblackcladdink

i have fast food for dinner, listen to updharmadown or Tom Waits turned as high up as i can bear as i ride the trains to wherever, walk along the streets gazing at the crows and crow-kin and Cobbies (and one shiny black Oriental) who only occasionally bother to gaze back at me, talk to myself, talk to myself incessantly; constantly in-turned, as if i were distancing myself from this place, convincing myself i will never be at home here.

in truth, i’ve never been at home anywhere, never felt comfortable even in my own skin. it always itches in inconvenient places, so that i have to rub my thigh against a protruding bolt under my desk, stick a pen in my shoe, twist embarrassingly against the back of my chair hoping no one will notice. hairs and epithelials coat the sheets of my rented bed, dry motes that cling to the pillows and the tiles, unable to hover, to define the beams of sunlight that, my window being poised at an odd point of the compass i’ve never been able to determine, have never thought it worth slanting in to dazzle the room’s furnishings, dance with the motes in that mundane poetry of gold and dust.

when i tell myself why i’m here, i can only tell myself one thing. 'Take the money and run' a good friend of mine told me repeatedly before i left for this place, enough to believe that was as good a way to go as any. and i suppose it is. only today i realize that’s exactly why i’ll never like it here, no matter how comfortable i tell myself i am now. no matter how important it is for me to get this done right.

*

and now, just because you asked:




*

i've been sporadically watching this show called Happily Ever After (with a wiki here) and i can't help but think to myself no matter how camp or cheezy it gets, how apparently random and chaotic and contrived the plot can be, how ridiculous the special effects (which the show never quite relies on to the point of being a handicap anyway), this is how it should be done: proper myth grown into the modern world, with a genuine (if cheap) sense of humor woven together for mainstream consumption.

the recent fare of similar fantasy shows back home did what they could, or thought they did, but could never do it properly because they were recreating substance from borrowed myths, and manufactured ones at that (Middle Earth may seem mythical to some people, but it's still a deliberate reconstruction of something bigger than it could ever be); the fit never worked; the effect was always either disinheriting or disingenuous or both. it wasn't just camp: it was borrowed camp, pirated camp; never a shred of truly original imagination.

worse: they took themselves seriously; seriously enough to think they were doing something truly groundbreaking and innovative; too full of themselves to see how flat on their faces they had fallen.

worst of all: everyone gobbled it up; television defines modern cultures, some more than others; what does any of that say about ours?

i should talk: American Idol now forms part of my regular diet.

and, among others: The Office (that's the one with Steve Carell, and--i have to say it--the adorably plain or plainly adorable Jenna Fischer; i'd love to see the UK version, but they haven't got it here), and, even better, the quietly hilarious The Robinsons (2005, from BBC, starring the inimitable Martin Freeman of The Hitchhiker's Guide, who i see on IMDB also happens to be in Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz). (that's odd; i seem to remember the Working Title Films site being much cooler than that, a bit more flash. oh well.)

*

i can't stop 'writing', or at least thinking about what i'm writing--only a few of the words manage to make it onto the computer screen at any one time, if any at all--but i can't seem to move forward with any of the things i'm doing at the moment either. i'm tired of my own words even when i can't get them out of my head--am unsure, even, if i would want to if i could--but it's gotten in the way of things such that i can't even enjoy a good book; couldn't tell if it's any good even when i'm caught up in it. hence the retreat into television, the easiest, most fatal resort for the disenchanted, disenfranchised, or otherwise dissed.

a friend of mine helped me see part of the problem a few days ago, helping me with a piece i apparently couldn't get to work: i'm not the writer i had wanted to be when i started; i am not a 'storyteller'; none of the things i've done are proper stories. they are nonstories, games of language that only just resemble narratives enough to be utterly useless both ways, because the gameplay isn't all that interesting either.

so what am i doing here?

the trouble with Liv

hardware rant: it may be that i won't be able to say goodbye to Audrey after all; at least, not as soon as i thought. it turns out my user restrictions on Liv are actually quite a bit tighter than i thought; the internet access currently available to me from the room i'm renting requires the use of a service provider provided Vodafone USB modem; the restrictions won't allow me to get Liv to use the device.

so no internet access through Liv, unless i can find a wireless network somewhere nearby i can hook-up to, at least on weekends, or convince the Company's IT dept to give me administrator access or at least a greater degree of user freedom despite my not having been with the Company long enough for them to turn her over to me.

then again, there's no precedent for my position, which means it may be easier (or, for the same reason, harder) to get anything of the sort done; part of what's difficult about my situation is that the Company i've been talking about, the one with the IT dept that provided me with Liv's software and setup, isn't my primary employer; the Company's IT dept set her up for me, but they didn't pay for her. in fact, several standard procedures were bypassed to get me Liv as soon as they did, and now i'm at a loss as to who gets to tell me what regarding how i can and can't use her.

right. gotta go; The Italian Job on the telly (the 'nonremake', not the original).

one with quite a few nons

a friend of a friend (well, they're really closer than that implies) asked if i could contribute a story for their Sorority's literary folio, Parole. unable to refuse - not least because, hell, i'll admit it, i was flattered - i did something i'd never done before; pulled an entire narrative thread from a story i'd been working on, and threw in some bits to make it into something that can stand alone.

it is, quite possibly, the closest thing i've ever done to something autobiographical; while all fiction-writing is, in a sense, the fashioning of myths out of one's internal landscape, the fact never quite occurs to you until you actually try to write something that is more 'honest' about yourself than you would care to admit.

if they do use the story (it's called The Black Parade, though i'm pretty sure it hasn't got anything to do with My Chemical Romance), and you're in any way interested in seeing what kind of metaphors (read: crap) i managed to construct out of the more sordid details of my life, i'm afraid you'll have to look up someone from the sorority, as i'm told the folio is only circulated among members.

if you drop me a line, i could probably ask them for you, but i can't make any guarantees.

besides, i'm not even sure they have, in fact, decided to publish it. like most everything i do, it may very well be an unpublishable piece of garbage.

(i have it on good authority that certain parts of it 'don't work', and, if i didn't have so many pretentions about the intentions of the story, i'd be inclined to agree. [yes, i know there's a horrible rhyme in there.])

hopefully, i'll be able to reintigrate that story with the other thread, which i'm currently trying to get on its own feet as well.

the other thread contains more SFF (or, at least, 'strange story') elements i decided to take out to better suit the needs of Parole, and concerns, among other things, cats.

*

i've been moving stuff out of Audrey(3.0) into the new laptop, a Lenovo T60 provided by the Company. though i'm only meant to use her for work, i've moved all my stories, nonstories and story/nonstory fragments, as well as quite a number of pics and music files, and will probably start doing all my writing and surfing through her as well.

i was a bit miffed to learn the Company's IT dept had locked the system to prevent me from making any sort of alteration, including anything from power management settings to installing 'essential' programs like VLC and, more importantly, Yahoo Messenger; so it doesn't look like i'll be getting as much battery time off Liv (Nova, the lenovo - i know, i know, i really should lay off the Harrison for a while) as i currently do from Audrey (a threeish year old Toshiba Satellite M something or other) - even with her significantly worn out and abused battery - may be limited to a regional dvd library (though Spore City being multiregion, i may not have that problem after all - but i doubt i'm that lucky) and, even if Mabel should finally get a line in their apartment, might not be able to maximize the interweb's golden promise of connectivity.

must remember to talk to the IT dept about that.

if i can find a reliable way to send her off, Audrey may soon be on her way home to Mabel, and this may be the last time i post anything on the blog through her.

so - anyone planning on dropping by Spore City (or coming home from Spore City) any time soon?

*

i haven't quite been the skinny *black-clad* dink at work lately; as a result, mornings have become just a little more complicated for me. still...'wrinkle-free' shirts - i suppose it beats ironing.

is it completely wrong for me to be excited about getting a Tom Waitsish linen suit? now if only i'd taken my top hat and guitar with me and knew where i'd put that harmonica...

*

and finally...caught the lovely Lost in Translation on a local Spore City channel tonight; it's the third time i've seen it, i believe.

the last time i saw it was with Mabel.

perfect.

blogroll

over the weekend i got a Cenix VR-W240 series digital recorder for work (about which googling reveals no english-language websites, though it does provide the option to translate), perhaps wrong-headedly impressed by the user-friendly interface and amazing quality of the recording (which compares rather favorably against Olympus recorders and is at least as good as Samsung and Sony recorders to my untrained ears).

with nothing better to do, i took it out of the box on the train on my way to Orchard Road to find a coffeeshop to do some writing, and somewhere around Clarke Quay station, i turned the recorder on and left it on til i found my way to a Starbucks, bought a coffee and sat myself down. evidence of this may be found here:

http://skinnyblackcladdink.multiply.com/music/item/11

if i'm not mistaken, that's about 19 unedited minutes of, among other things, MRT station sounds, street-noise, traffic, pedestrian conversations in Mandarin, in-the-pocket-of-my-jeans-rattling-against-pens-and-a-celphone-while-i'm-walking-sounds, and a blind harmonica player.

i had the earphones on as well, and was astonished at how much of the world i never really hear, and how that kind of hyper-real hearing makes it difficult to understand what people are telling you about the large dollop of vomit-like crow or pigeon shit that just spattered your table, endangering your coffee and laptop both (not included in this recording; both the coffee and Audrey, the laptop, were, thankfully, unharmed).

it reminded me of Simon Ings' ruminations on 'augmented reality' in his brilliant All Cats are Grey, which occurs to me now i might not have linked to before:

http://www.fisheye.demon.co.uk/homepages/simoningsallcats.html

on the subject of cats, i've started up blogging about my other life again, though i haven't yet caught up enough to do 'real-time' reviews. i feel the need to clear my head of all the M. John Harrison reading i've been doing (while, paradoxically, doing some more M. John Harrison reading), so expect quite a few more posts about his writings before i move on to other things.

of course, i've rarely ever been consistent about anything i say here or there, so maybe you should just go see for yourself.

lately, not yet having any work to use the recorder on, i've been using it as an MP3 player, with Tom Waits' Rain Dogs in near constant rotation. (though i've also been finding much comfort in updharmadown's fragmented, which also takes a nibble at the Cenix's 1GB memory.)

which seems appropriate as it started raining after the Lunar New Year, and hasn't completely stopped since. not quite cats and dogs, but wet enough. and cold...

Gong Xi Fa Cai.

*

having set up Zen in multiply, i'd thought my blogposts here would automatically be put up there as well. my bad. i'll see if i can find a way to link this up with the multiply blog; otherwise, i may just start blogging there as well.

warning: potential indigestion

Kenneth Yu, brave editor of the nascent Digest of Philippine Genre Stories, has decided to gamble on one of my stories.

The Saint of Elsewhere will be published in the second issue of the Digest.

find an excerpt of Saint, along with five others, on the philippinegenrestories blog, here:

http://philippinegenrestories.blogspot.com/2007/02/issue-number-2.html

the excerpt is a bit spoilerish, but if you're going to choose a passage to excerpt from Saint, i suppose you couldn't have chosen better.

Issue 2 will be out in March, and Kenneth tells me it will be more 'experimental' than the first.

i can't wait. i'll be hearing from you when it comes out, i hope.

i might be wrong, but i believe it was Gabe Chouinard who predicted that the future of SF lies in small press; this may well be true for all 'genre' literature, maybe even literature in general, particularly in the Philippines.

whether you're a believer in 'genre' or not, if you enjoy reading for any reason, or you're in any other way interested in literature and writing, or your friends who are and are trying to make a living out of it, support the Digest. get a copy for yourself. get a copy for a friend, or copies for your friends. give them away at your weddings. or your company outings. or, hobbit-like, on your birthday. i promise not everyone will hate you for it.

at the very least, you'll be making your friendly neighborhood hack very happy.

Idols

how can you bear to hold a mirror to yourself, your life, when the only emotions you have that seem in any way worth having come to you artificially--manufactured, vicarious--through 'reality' television or, occasionally, in a voice stuttering electronically to you down a bad connection? how can you say these things provide you with an equal measure of comfort? how can you admit that and still feel honest, whole, substantial?

for you it must be wearisome; for myself, i find i need to say it everyday, hoping i can make it all, myself, my life, somehow seem more real.

i tell myself: make this all worth it.

Over the rooftops a plane in the sky
Beat of a bass drum cars passing me by
Under a bridge dark then back into light
A river of raincoats and a forest of faces
Still for a moment then red into green
Slow shuffling shoes whisper sight unseen
Row upon row of houses return an empty stare
Let me daydream for a little while longer

Hope Ill never wake
When Im thinking about you

-The Sundays, When I'm Thinking About You

2/14

at redhill, the train stops everyday as it takes me to and from my place of work: lumbering machines nod their yellow, molluscine appendages slowly over some sort of excavation, and the exhumed earth is the color of a fishmarket floor, the sharp bouquet of blood and detergent sticking to the roof of your mouth as the dregs intersect with the water from some custodian's hose; or, less shocking if no more dramatic: finely ground rose petals, Gallicas and Chinas and Hybrid Teas, reds and whites, pinks and a hint of dark ash and orange and burgundy, all caught murmuring at the moment of atomization.

it's there i realize what an idiot i am for not having had the foresight to prepare for today.

it may be a manufactured holiday, but isn't meaning, after all, and all the truths we imagine we understand nothing more than constructions?

sorry for being a deadbeat, Mabel.

with love always,
c

a Byronesque adolescent in Saudade

having finished reading Nova Swing, my quickest read in a while, i also gobbled up Paul Di Filippo's Victoria, first in his much hooplahed 'Steampunk Trilogy', well within the succeeding twenty-four hours (before my full response to Nova Swing could finally sink in and put my reading brain into hibernation)...will be posting my thoughts on those and maybe a few others over on the other life in a few...i hope...if i can properly wrap my head around them. 's been a while since i did a proper blogpost, yeah?

meanwhile...i've been wondering if Saudade is where i've been these past few days; more like weeks, probably months: this blog, of late, has fallen into deeper, more pathetic, ruefully solipsistic disrepair, and the last few posts, i feel, have been a bit too confessional, a little too close to where i've *really* been in the past few so's and so's...and i've been wondering: where have i been taking myself to dredge these things up?

a friend reminded me today of the old Byronesque incarnation of myself in my adolescence, and while the description made me smile, i had to wonder what that meant, and could only conclude:

'we are utterances, not makers'

John Clute, The Guardian, on Nova Swing

*

i've been friends with 'E. Cross Saltire' for the better part of my life now, and while our intellectual crossfire has left many an upturned (empty) bottle of rum, vodka and/or gin in its wake (hardly ever beer--he 'can't' drink beer in the same way he 'can't', to Mabel's continued delight, eat 'peanuts'), he still manages to astonish me:

http://nontrivialpursuit.blogspot.com/

on the 'literary front', as much as i'd like to throw my lot in on M. John Harrison's rather extreme opinion of 'world-building', and perhaps have myself branded an 'Harrison Apologist', i see Banzai Cat has already gone and done covered that side of things better than i would've done without launching on another full-on rant that would probably have gotten me in some sort of trouble:

http://estranghero.blogspot.com/2007/02/imaginary-worlds-in-house-divided.html

nevermind the 'elitist' comment he managed to sneak into the whole thing at the end. (wink wink.)

if you haven't been there, or haven't been paying attention, other things of writerly interest may be found on Mr Harrison's blog:

Uncle Zip's Window

right. well, wasn't that just a cheeky little post? just thought i'd remind everybody (that's right, all three of you who actually read this tripe--unless you've all buggered off to better things) what it *used* to be like around here.

and that, yes: i'm still around; if not *quite* where i'd rather be.

sigh.

Mothers of Invention 2

some bug or other prevented me from adding to my previous post; everything here is in chinese, and i can't figure out how to translate everything into english. so i'm posting what i wrote as a new entry:

*

Later: no matter where i am, what i do, i feel myself soon enough settling into routine. (shameless self-promotion: one of my most unreliable narrators, from a short i completed a couple months ago, speaks quite extensively about this manner of living, of seeing life.) M. John Harrison opens Nova Swing with three quotes, the third credited to John Gray, from his 'exciting, radical work of philosophy', Straw Dogs:

Our lives are more like fragmentary dreams than the enactment of conscious
selves.

apart from being the perfect description of Mr Harrison's writing, i have the uncomfortable privilege (for lack of a better turn of phrase) of knowing exactly what he means. or thinking i know. of being, if you will, in dangerous proximity to these words. if you know what i mean.

after enjoying a stick of Japanese Crispy Chicken (deep fried chicken skewers in nori wraps), i wandered into a busy little mall of mostly low-end stalls: hawkers, tailors, parlors, wholesale electronics and clothing shops (one of them carrying, sans brand, a pair of dress shoes exactly like the ones i'd recently bought for work), a Watson's and a Burger King. desiring to distinguish myself from the--to my impishly deranged and contrary mind--touristy desire to 'soak up the culture', and knowing full well that i would have at least two full years to 'soak it up' and therefore not wanting to saturate myself too soon, i decided to walk into the BK for an early dinner. i wanted a Whopper.

'Would you like to try our specials? We have spicy chicken, spicy beef, and spicy something else or other.' the impending Chinese New Year informs the flyer he shows me.

'All right.'

'Chili sauce with your fries?'

whereas anywhere else the slightly orangey tang of the sauce smothering the dry, unapologetically white meat patty of the spicy BK chicken sandwich i had would have struck me as not unpleasantly odd, it somehow managed to scream 'SPORE CITY' in my ears with every bite.

drats. foiled again.

*

on the blogosphere: i see the ripples of consensus reality, the subconscious thread that weaves, winds and ultimately connects us all and subtly saturates Simon Ings' The Weight of Numbers; i see that, like Zen in Darkness, and 'the shape of modern SF' and literature in general as 'art' imitates 'life' and thereby defines, for the willing, the times, a lot of you have turned your eyes inward. should i applaud? bask in our unity in individualistic solipsism while it lasts? or wonder at the unimaginable, improbable yet probably inevitable backlash as action begets reaction begets reaction?

further on the connectedness of everything, these had me spooked:

http://uzwi.wordpress.com/2007/02/05/february-blue/ http://uzwi.wordpress.com/2007/02/06/sleeping-rough-in-the-hall-of-mirrors/

of course it's ridiculous for me to make anything of it: so what if i'd just been thinking these things as i began banging about in a new life i never thought i'd put on? signed the contract for the bedroom i will, hopefully, be renting for the next two years? i, after all, have never read anything by Nick Flynn, though i once browsed through a couple pages of Another Bullshit Night... in some bookshop or other back home.

meaning is where you choose to find it; it may be time for me to admit: i'd been reading too much M. John Harrison.

ah, well. i'm off; back to Nova Swing. and tomorrow: work, at last.

Mothers of Invention

in the morning i tell myself: enjoy the opportunity for reinvention, if nothing else; it isn't a changed thing i'm looking to make of myself, but something purer; something more fundamentally, essentially me. in this world where everything is as strange to me as i am to it, the opportunity presents itself for me to strip away all the pretentions, all the facades i'd constructed around myself through all the years of proximity to a single culture, a single way of life. all this time, whatever i did, wherever i found myself i'd always been, at heart, entirely alien; here, where the phrase takes on a more literal significance, i suppose i should take it as my chance to find out exactly why that is, what, who exactly this 'me' at the heart of it all is.

i only hope that when i find that stranger, he'll be the same one you've come to love.

Lost: an open letter

i know now that whatever i say can only translate to you as sadness. but i'll keep talking anyway, try to tell you things i think you need to hear, want to hear, even if i can't speak them to you directly, even if they can bring nothing but more tears.

after i gave up my old life for the new, i promised i would never make a decision i didn't know was something i truly wanted for myself. i never believed in promises, and it's clear to me now, here in a world entirely devoid of the one i've known all my life, that i failed to keep that one i made myself not too long ago.

but i believe in this one, and will do my best to keep it: you are the reason i'm here, and i'll make it, somehow, worth it for both of us.

*

because this is, in a way, my fault, i take time out to recommend this blog:

http://nontrivialpursuit.blogspot.com/

E. Cross Saltire is one of the smartest people i know, and one of my best friends. you should listen to what he has to say. disagree at will.