corners edit

oops. that's 'going to press', not 'in the press'...which to my mind makes the deal significantly iffier. will know for sure in a couple weeks, i suppose.

to be honest, there's something i find deeply unsettling about the entire thing. a pleasant surprise, certainly, and maybe i'd just gotten used to Kenneth's very interactive style. still...

corners

i really should have posted something after getting back, about how visiting home, far from rejuvenating me for the job back here, managed to take away what little momentum i had, and only reinforced the fact that, to my mind, all the things that mean anything are back there...

 

however, i doubt any of the multitudinous readers of this blog will be interested in anymore of that sort of sentimental drivel.

 

i couldn't, for instance, have described my 'desires' any better than M. John Harrison has:

 

http://uzwi.wordpress.com/2007/03/23/it-wont-go-in-the-corner/

 

*

 

just in the mail, it seems one of my stories apparently did manage to get into a corner i hadn't expected it to: Story Philippines is publishing one of my submissions...i only wish i could remember which one they decided to take on.

 

currently in the press, Jorge Bernas, Story's publisher, assures me it will be out next month.

 

look for, er, my name, i guess.

viral

http://iamtryingtobelieve.com

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Spore City Blues

well, i'm back.

interstitium

i'd forgotten how long it takes for Audrey to boot-up. i hope Mabel has the patience for this; also, strange clattering noises have been issuing from Audrey's harddrive on startup and when she's 'thinking' for quite some time now. i hope she hasn't contracted anything terminal; at least, not for another 2 years or so.

i'm typing this up inside the Changi budget terminal. as artificial as it is, blogging from here feels vaguely cool.

a moment ago, i was wandering around the inside of the terminal when it occurred to me how potentially ironic it is that i'd chosen J.G.Ballard's Millennium People to take with me.

i know, i shouldn't joke about things like that.

my flight's been 're-timed' exactly 1h 15m later than originally scheduled. which, depending on how comfortable these flights are, probably means 1h 15m less sleep for me...

ah well. haven't had much to do with sleep lately anyway.

9

rather than posting another potentially depressing stream of pathetic, solipsistic drek, i thought i'd post something i just saw now and thought brilliant:

Shane Acker's 9



also here, from youtube.

thanks to aintitcoolnews.

what you will

of course 'doing what you want' is not necessarily synonymous with 'living the way you want':

but how is it that 'doing what you want' turns out not to be necessarily synonymous with itself as well?

PGS update, with a request

a lot of people (well, enough to get me to post, anyway; which isn't really much, to be honest) have been asking, so i thought i'd put this up, just in from Kenneth Yu, editor of the Digest of Philippine Genre Stories, who has bravely taken on The Saint of Elsewhere for their second ish:

I have to apologize that the Digest might come out late Mar to mid April instead of earlier. Three reasons, really.

One is that the cover image for the 2nd issue I put up on the blog earlier had a lot of negative comments. It had to be redone. So that delayed production some.

Second is, a couple of sponsors sent in their artwork for their ads late. The spades may be the swords of the soldiers, and the clubs may be weapons of war, but we need diamonds as money for this art. :) This added to the delay.

But don't worry, the 2nd issue will come out, and it will have improvements from the 1st issue.

i took the liberty of editing out the third as it gets a bit personal, and i didn't want Kenneth to feel there might be some invasion of privacy going on here; suffice to say the man has a lot on his plate right now, and is doing what he can to get the issue out as soon as possible.

as for Saint, it occurs to me that that manifestoish thing i just posted may or may not help you appreciate what i've done with it...but really, who bothers with these things anyway? either you like it or you don't or you don't care enough about it to go either way.

be sure to let me know, yeah?

i promise to keep my trap shut, whatever you may have to say.

*

later: just got an email from Kenneth, where he replies:

Nope, don't really mind. If it'll get more people to say a few, anonymous prayers, then I'll be very grateful.

so:

Third is, well, without going into detail, my father's in the hospital and my siblings are out of town, so I and my mother have had to see to so many things by ourselves. My having to delegate the Digest to my staff have forced me to be hands-off, so when I check, things are not up to par and I ask them to redo things.

it doesn't sound all too personal to me now that i read it again, and i suppose i was a bit too cautious about putting it up; but now it comes with a neat little request for all the faithful out there who happen upon this post, so i suppose it works out in the end.

hope it works out for you guys as well, Kenneth.

pretentious hacker pap

i believe it's telling that for me the most interesting character, and the one with the most engaging story on Desperate Housewives, is Lynette Scavo...but that's me. i like to read things into things that may not necessarily be there at all, even as i point out that what isn't, isn't.

of course that says something about me, what i think is brilliant, what i like to read, and what, ultimately, i like to write.

here's a sort of manifesto i constructed to 'justify' one of my more recently finished, er, works (i'm reluctant to call them 'stories'), but somehow extends to all my recent writing:

i wanted to write a story that makes use of the complete and utter disingenuousness of fiction, taking the concept of the unreliable narrator to extremes. i never believed that a narrator should be expected to either be capable of or even willing to tell their whole story; so you have to take all fiction with a grain of salt, not necessarily because a narrator may not be telling you the truth, but because the narrator is only presenting you with an interpretation of it; a story told from the first person perspective is among the most unreliable of all stories, because we see the story through the distortion of a triple, maybe even quadruple lens: how we see the narrator's words, the narrator's deliberate (or accidental) choice of words, and the narrator's perspective of, say, how something 'really' happened. something you can just as easily skirt with an omniscient voice.

that said, it should not be assumed that everything in a work of fiction should be taken as 'all metaphors', either; they read as metaphors to us because the story (to us) is just words; a set of interrelated symbols we are presented with from which we must divine what meaning we are built to read into the presentation. i write with the idea that while the elements of a story may be metaphors to us (i.e., the readers), they aren't necessarily so to the characters, even when it seems as though their obsessions might take them beyond the reasonable limits of their own ( i.e., the story's) reality.

this, i feel, combined with an unreliable narrator, opens a story up to any number of possible interpretations, using combinations of different levels of metaphorical and literal deconstruction. in other words: to understand the story, you can either read everything as metaphorical, or you can read it all as literal, and everything in between. it all depends on your predisposition, on your personal perspective.

in this manner, i'm allowing the reader a certain sense of propriety over the material; while struggling to retain as much of it as possible as my own.

make of all that what you will. it's all crap, but it's where i'm at.

so -- i've decided -- i need a break; give myself time to deconstruct my writing, hopefully recompose myself into a better writer.

someday i'll write a story you can actually appreciate.

out on parole

in the mail:

 

just received word that, yes, 'The Black Parade' has been published in Portia's (?) lit folio, Parole. (which i mentioned a while back, here.) i don't think there's a way non-members can get a copy, but if any of you are interested, i suggest you look for someone you know who is a member, or someone you know who knows someone who is...

 

i'm toying with the idea of posting the story here, only it's also a significant chunk of a longer story i've just completed the first draft of, which i hope to have published elsewhere, so that's a bit iffy.

 

if anyone's *really* interested, you can drop me a line and i can email you a copy. be warned, it's a bit sappy, and kitchen-sink gothish without any SFF elements, and is only vaguely gothish in the aesthetic pre-goth-subculture sense of the term, which i suppose makes it plain kitchen-sink...

---

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Redhill again

blue buildings have risen over Redhill; prefab cottages glittering like toy plastics in the early evening sunlight. the exhumed earth is the same color it's always been, but in this light has the texture of the contents of a child's sandbox. yellow Tonka trucks stand frozen in catalogue action poses, completing the illusion.

At this latitude, the sun doesn't seem to set until well past 7pm; or, perhaps, it sets the same time it always has, and it's only the city that retains some of this sunlight as a means of maximizing productivity.

of course, it's Sunday. there's no reason to be productive today. is there?

my name is whatsit

say what you like: i like Jason Lee. judging by his work, i would have to say he was probably heading more or less in that direction anyway; still, i have to say it: Kevin Smith helped raise a monster. but somehow i could never get into My Name is Earl. that was back home.

here, where i've fallen pell-mell (a word i don't think i've ever used before but thought i'd try out) into the mass hysteria that is AI, i've found the show provides a nice garnish to my weekly mindless-media diet, something i look forward in the thin drowsy space of week-ends.

which was all fine, until i remembered i'd said this.

Wouldest thou lose thyself and catch no harm,
And find thyself again without a charm?

Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress

*

what the hell was i thinking? i tell you before you have the chance to say it, before you even realize that's what you were thinking. perhaps, now that i've said it, you never will.

what i don't tell you is that i ask myself the same question everyday, and what i mean is not necessarily what you have in mind.

what the hell was i thinking? i tell myself everyday. of what i did, of what i do. even, i suppose, of what i say.

changes at the other life

i thought i'd give up the whole review thing. there's something disingenuous about it all and it just hasn't been as engaging for me as it used to be.

so i've decided to do something different with me other life blog:

http://onanotherlife.blogspot.com/2007/03/china-mievilles-un-lun-dun.html

i wish i'd brought my copy of Simon Ings' The Weight of Numbers for the purpose; there's a great gross tonne of little gems in there that i'd wanted to put up...which is why you all should pick-up a copy of that book as well.

age, escape, reprieve

Chervelle is the five, six or seven year-old granddaughter of my landlord. (i've always been useless with people's ages. i could never figure out the codified nuances of years in human faces, they're all just 'people' no matter how much more honestly so children can be, and no one ever seems to be my age.) every morning she rails noisily:

'I don' want! I don' wanna go to school!'

i know exactly how she feels.

we never talk. the precedents of culture have me hermetically sealed in myself. but every morning as i'm getting myself ready for work, i hear her, and when i step out of my room watch her face contort, particularly around the corners of her mouth, and i wish i could say something.

it feels like my one true connection to this place, that silent commiseration. i know how you feel, i could say. but how disingenuous is that?

and anyway, it doesn't always get any better for everybody, does it?

still, as we step out of the elevator and part ways, she gives me a lopsided smile and waves the way children do, gently says 'Bye!' in the kind of voice only little kids have, and i feel a little better.

*

last night, i missed out catching AI. it's only the second ep i've missed since it got its hooks into me when i arrived in Spore City. the previous night, i was out with a friend who just flew in from home, so i missed that ep as well.

last night i had a different reason: i went out to see 300.

brilliant movie. the most entertaining and witty testosterone banter i've heard in a while. i laughed out loud at every well-placed repartee, both verbal and physical.

utterly sturm-und-drang even in its most quiet moments, 300 is a Greek melodrama all the way (all the old politicians yelling 'Traitor! Traitor!' like college kids at a toga party), such that at times, the sentiment and idealism of it i found a bit distracting and heavy-handed; but, fortunately, never quite out of place. it's a Greek melodrama, after all.

the no nonsense (Spartan) approach to the resolution of plot dilemmas (Gorgo's scene with the council is my favorite one in the entire film) sets a nice balance to the otherwise almost Michael-Bay-oid portrayal of nobility in war.

but i must be getting old. as exhilarated as i was by the film, not thirty minutes after i was surprised to find i was not thinking about it; instead i realized i could have lived without seeing it.

though without regret, i found myself wondering what else i could have done with my time.

(but that's just me. don't let that stop you; this film is utterly brilliant and surreal, serious and yet not without a hefty serving of cheek, smartly visceral in just about any sense you can think of to define the phrase.)

*

I was surrounded by a language

In which I could say only 'Hello'

And 'Thank you very much'

But you spoke so I could understand

Ani DiFranco, Hypnotized

how could i have said it any better?

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sliding

out through the-mail:

a few people know me well enough to recognize how well loneliness suits me.

but i've never worn it cut for two; frankly, the fit sucks.

I know what I've been told
You gotta work to feed the soul
But I can't do this all on my own

Lazlo Bane, Superman

right. back to work.

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