But what I really want to do is direct.
I’d begin with a quote from the Diller Diaries, but I’ve long since lost my fanfold printouts, and nobody, but nobody, has it online anywhere. Shame on us; shame on us all. —I’d begin with an apology for the self-indulgent nature of this post—I’m going to be writing about (my) writing, after all (technical term: whingeing)—but it’s in the nature of blogs to be self-indulgent. If you gaze for long into a navel, the navel gazes also into you, yes yes, but meta-apology’s getting a tad ridiculous, don’t you think?
So all I have left is to, well, begin.
I mean, I was going to work on it last night. Settle in. Made another circuit of the Meier & Frank to fix some details in my head: those canister lights are only on the one particular floor, so the first image I’d had in mind as a conversational break—looking down the escalator at a slice of the chaos of the make-up counters on the first floor—wouldn’t work. The mannequins on the landing were as creepy as I’d remembered, but not in the way I’d remembered, and I’m still not necessarily happy with the creep: I need the opening image, I need the break in the rhythm, but do I need the note this particular image injects right up front, the hollow plastic eyesockets turned half-assedly into eyes with a few translucent strokes of brown watercolor to suggest lids and lashes? —Was pleased to note the specific style of dress I’d had in mind was actually available for sale; we’ll ignore the fact that it’s currently June, the scene in question is set in the middle of September, and I have no idea how seasonally sensitive this sort of designer dress is. For whatever reason, I got fixated on T-shirts: yes, they’re a sort of Dadaist Greek chorus, but I was suddenly hung up on the idea that the mannequins ought to wear a couple of “real,” “actual” T-shirts. Jotted down slogans seen here and there throughout the Misses section: “I’m a Leo! It’s all about me!” “Is it chicken or is it tuna?” “Artificial Respiration Training! (Cute boys only, please!)” “The center of attention.” Made note of a weird hall display in the landing of the closed-off floor: a glass case with a couple of fake topiaried shrubs inside, green flocking crumbling from old brown wicker frames, and lots of plaster? plastic? statues inside, including a nauseating little Cottingley fairy, all white butterfly wings and adorable turn-of-the-last-century Sunday dress, perched atop a plastic-plaster plinth, beneath which: a whole make-way-for-ducklings garden statuary set. Perfect! For what, though? They aren’t going up to housewares. There’s no reason for them to stop and stare at this halfway house. Tuck it away, for later, I suppose, next to the poisonous idea of otherkin, charitable satire thereof.
Home I hie myself, then. The laptop’s set up and plugged in. The notebook’s fished out of my bag and propped up on the corner of the desk. But there’s blogs to check, and the news; a couple of MP3s to download, and there’s that thing about Brokeback Mountain, that line about the sheep is too priceless to let slip, and I’d wanted to do something with the Mayday mystery, right? So sketch the one in quickly, fire up Photoshop for the other, but here’s Jenn, home from work, and then Bill, our current houseguest; time to heat up some dinner, and pour some wine, and we’re working our way through the Northern Exposure DVD, so there’s forty-five minutes or so while we’re eating and cleaning up, and then it’s back to the computer, but I have to finish massaging that 20 January ad and tweak the .gif and after I post it there’s the usual problem that the .blogbody CSS for hyperlinking supercedes the class override written directly into the a tag for no reason at all I can discern, which means the images have the distracting hyperlink line under them, so I see what I can do to fix that, and then we have to water the cat (old, hyperthyroid, kidney troubles, subcutaneous fluids) and feed the both of them and keep the one out of the other’s medicated bowl, and then, well, there’s more blogs to check up on, and news to read, and wow, is that the time?
(The whole time the notebook’s there on the corner of the desk, and I’m not looking at it, not at all, nossir.)
Half-past midnight I finally pack it in. I passed the first bit, there on the escalator. Got to the moment that Orlando kicks the door open and stopped it dead there in the middle of a sentence: “Orlando kicks” —Somebody once said, always leave off in the middle of a sentence. That way, you have somewhere to pick up right away when you get back to it. It doesn’t work any better than any other nostrum, but hey. Any snake-oil in a storm. (Somebody also once said, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns. Not that they have guns. Aheh.) I scrapped the found T-shirt slogans. Went with a Virgo variant on the Leo and a picture of Einstein with his Meyer-Briggs profile scribbled underneath it. Had to spend some time checking which is the most popular profile ascribed to Einstein, though. Of course.
Two-hundred twenty words, and that’s being generous.
(Hey, says the magpie. What about a paralitticism on Northern Exposure and utopia and reality TV? Arcadia, New Jerusalem, Lord of the Flies, Brave New World—)
Every day for years, Trollope reported in his “Autobiography,” he woke in darkness and wrote from 5:30 AM to 8:30 AM, with his watch in front of him. He required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour. If he finished one novel before eighty-thirty, he took out a fresh piece of paper and started the next. The writing session was followed, for a long stretch of time, by a day job with the postal service. Plus, he said, he always hunted at least twice a week. Under this regimen, he produced forty-nine novels in thirty-five years.
—Joan Acocella, “Blocked“
Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.
—Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography
The rules are simple: somebody calls you out, or you call somebody out. You pick a referee and a time and you each come up with a list of three words. The referee adds three more. When the appointed time arrives, you receive the total list of nine words. You have three hours to write a story using all nine. Go!
I managed six thousand words in three hours. Five hundred reasonably coherent words every quarter of an hour; as a genre exercise, it didn’t suck. And I was a wreck. Heart-racing, hands-shaking, couldn’t-shut-up bundle of neurotic energy. And even if the words were reasonably coherent and ended up altogether as something not worse than their totted-up sum, they were unmediated: a gormless rush of the me-est me, which usually ends up sounding like a Harlan Ellison huckster, hot under the collar—a sarcastic salesman unreeling the anecdote that’s supposed to help him close. (When I cool it off, it veers into a weird, dim echo of William Vollmann’s jiu-jitsued snark, which I like better, but, and anyway find much harder to hit.) (And maybe that’s why I impose so many rules, my own private Dogme, as if I could oulipo myself into somebody else.)
I can see how Trollope’s rate is possible. I just can’t imagine making a regular daily go of it.
(Besides, didn’t he write highfalutin’ fluff?)
(And? quoth the magpie. Isn’t that all you’re after?)
So three hundred words an hour, nine hundred words a day: this is much more conceivable. Isn’t it? It’s a serial, after all: a net serial. Eminently disposable. The words are there to get you from Point A to Point B and leave you panting for Point C to come; if they shine themselves along the way, that’s all well and good, but no agonizing allowed, bucko! Well-turned phrases be damned! You have a job to do, one you’ve done before, so suck it up and go. Point A: Point B. Begin.
(Those of you familiar with the art/craft dichotomy as, for instance, taken down by Delany in the aforementioned “Politics of Paraliterary Yadda-yadda” should start laughing now. It won’t make me feel any better about not having posted in two months—well, really, six months, and a dead computer’s good for only so much. —But I will grin sheepishly, I suppose, yeah yeah, and that’s better than nothing.)
The problem is that Point A and that Point B. Point A is usually not where you thought it was, and Point B ends up something else entirely, which can mess you up if you were dropping hints about Point C last time and now it isn’t. The words aren’t just the vehicle, after all: they’re journey and destination, too, and even if I see Point B in my head (a lightning flash: a pose, a line of dialogue, an emotional sense I feel in my bones just so—I close my eyes, I can taste it) I don’t have any idea what it really is until I write it down. Any critic approaching any work is one of several blind people trying to describe an elephant; a writer with a work in progress is one blind person, alone, with some blueprints for an elephant lot. They really ought to think twice before opening their yaps. (Violence: violence, and power, in the context of walking up to the groaning boards of fantasy’s eternal wedding feast, still laden with the cold meats from Tolkien’s funeral, and cheekily joining everyone else who’s trying to send the whole thing smashing to the ground just to hear what noise all that crockery will make, with little more than a crappy net serial, ha. Those of you familiar with the politics of genre ghettoization and the attendant shame and self-loathing and projection may now commence to chuckling heartily, ha ha. —But! Also: genderfuck, romance the way we wanted it done back in the day, those moments in pop songs when the bass and all of the drums except maybe a handclap suddenly drop out of the bridge leaving you hanging from a slender aching thread of melody waiting almost dreading the moment when the beat comes back, and the occasional sword fight.)
So I don’t necessarily know what any given Point B is, but I see those flashes of them, off in the distance: having gotten to this Point B, or that, is the entire point of starting off from A, after all. But you write and you write and you stop and you take a look at where you are, and it’s an utterly different Point B; the Point B you wanted is way over there, and here you are over here, except that suggests it’s the plot that’s changed, and it isn’t: those moments that make up the flash all depend on each other, and what went before, and if the words it takes to limn the image end up at odds with the words that need to be said, if what you’ve got onscreen when your hour’s up and the three hundred words have been laid in place don’t conjure what you felt in your bones, what you can still almost feel, not so strong, an echo overlaid by these horribly precise words all a quarter-turn off— I don’t have any idea what it really is until I write it down, but if the words end up betraying what I wanted it to be—? Where do I go? What do I do?
(Rewrite. Revise. —Oh, shut up. You’re missing the point.)
“I don’t like writing, I like having written.” Ha! I don’t like having written, either, most days. I like what I would have written, if. I like what I’m going to write.
Any day now.
Two thousand words! There. See?
Piece of cake.
So all I have left—
Point; counterpoint.
So we just got back from a birthday dinner and a viewing of Shrek 2 which, better than the first, so, good humor and bonhomie all around, even if Bill’s snarking off about how it went over his head, and I’m doing the usual before-bed sweep of email and referral logs and that sort of thing, and it seems Bill Scher, who’s been slaking parched throats over at the Liberal Oasis for a good long while now, said something nice about me on the Majority Report, putting me in the rather heady (if lower-cased) company of uggabugga (diagrammatist extraordinaire) and skippy (the bush kangaroo). And so now I’m looking around at the last post a couple of days ago about a comics spat and at the litter of revolver bits lying about still to be put together and wondering about the whole poltical–non-political–apolitical blogging thing, and worrying whether the personal is political enough, but then I remember I meant to tease Jim Henley (with good humor, and bonhomie) for asserting that dance or the novel can be defined in some necessary and sufficient manner that poetry cannot, and of course attempting to define a political blog or a non-political blog or an apolitical blog is just as much a mug’s game as defining poetry, or the novel, or dance, or comics. It is what it is: Damon Knight’s definition works for everything, see. Not just science fiction.
So I’ll point you to an entry by Elkins, instead, since she’s much better at this sort of thing than I am, and it’s off to bed with me. (Though I do wonder: which definition of the novel did Jim have in mind? My own favorite, whose provenance escapes me: “A piece of writing, of a certain length, that has something wrong with it.”)
Something I didn’t necessarily need to know:
When a hand-crafted, all-natural vanilla marshmallow is dunked in a glass of Rosemont Estate’s 2002 shiraz, the aftertaste—once you’re past the initial burst of something foully rot-sweet, like a failed grappa—is an astonishing simulacrum of IHOP’s blueberry syrup.
Two pictures.
Sure, everybody knows that the it-couple in the foreground is curator extraordinaire Lori Matsumoto and evil robotics genius John Wiseman. But who’s that dapper gent in seersucker strolling through the background of Patrick Farley’s latest comics infostrip for Wired?
And this, by the way, is what shoes look like at a Mountain Goats concert when you’re trying to figure out how to deal with the flash and you hit that button on the upper-left side while holding the camera in your lap. —The green Fluevogs would be Sara Ryan; and I would never wear those brown Nunn Bushes with seersucker.
Zero to sixty and climbing.
I was swaying a little, because Sara had bought me one more Manhattan, which means I owe her a drink. It was noisy, so I leaned in a little where he was squatting on the stage. “Seven days ago,” I said. “I hadn’t heard a goddamn thing. My friend over there,” she’s buying a T-shirt from Peter, and I can’t see her in the crowd, and he wouldn’t know her from Eve, but I gesture over that way anyway, “she says, you have to hear this stuff. So I downloaded a couple of songs, you know?” He’d told the guy ahead of me, who’d borrowed my pen so he could sign the CD, that it was twelve bucks, so I handed him two fives and two ones. “And here I am.” He didn’t even bother to count it. Just stuck the money in a pocket somewhere and handed me a CD. “Hey,” he said. “That really means a fuck of a lot to me.”
Which isn’t true. The first Mountain Goats song I scraped off of Limewire was a cover of Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Two-Headed Boy,” back in April. Which—and it’s a mighty fine song, don’t get me wrong, and Neutral Milk Hotel is one of those bands on my really-ought-to-look-into-them-soon list, and you can hear the quavering kick in his yelp and you can almost see him hunched over the guitar, yes, but—it’s not, perhaps, the most representative sample.
I was scraping Mountain Goats off of Limewire at the behest of Sara and Victoria and Johnzo, who’ve all done right by me so far. And if that first song didn’t move me much, well, the dark matter of P2P is shot through with Goats: there’s 450-some-odd titles in the repertoire, at this point, I think: all those songs stuffed directly onto cassette tapes through a boombox, all those prolific tiny-label releases. Plus all the bootlegged live versions, and all those rabid fans, spreading the gospel. So somewhere at the beginning of May I went back for more, and found “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” and “Cubs in Five” and I never looked back. —And I know there’s no zealot like a recent convert and I know I’m foolish with having just fallen in love but can I tell you anyway? Listen. Just listen to the angry joy. Listen to the bitter glee. Listen to all these people who know they are about to see something so big that you can’t call it terrible and you can’t call it wonderful, and listen as they try to put it back together again afterwards. He is apocalyptic in the best possible sense of the word, and that’s why when you’re in the same room with him and he’s singing you lift your hands into the air. He immanentizes like a sonofabitch.
So it hadn’t been seven days. So I was lying. But it felt right at the time, and I’d do it again, in a heartbeat.
Mollified, and yet.
Just because I feel some sort of obligation or something: one more Movable Type 3.0 post. —They’ve spoken, after all, and addressed a few of the concerns raised (rather vociferously) over the past couple of days:
- They’ve stripped the “one CPU” limit from the license.
- They count an author (the total number of which is now limited) as anyone who’s logged in within the past 90 days.
- They count a weblog (the total number of which is now limited) as a site visible at a single main URL; therefore, sideblogs set up as “separate” blogs with the software don’t count toward this total.
- They now offer Personal Edition add-ons, which will allow group blogs to purchase a somewhat cheaper personal license and add additional authors at $9.95 a pop.
This mollifies me not a little. I can still run it for free, since I now have “two” blogs, and not “five,” and it’s not inconceivable that I’d scrape together the 70 bucks necessary to upgrade to fully fledged. And the group blogs don’t have to buy the commercial license and trim their mastheads to upgrade the software they’ve been using; even sociology professors and natural philosophers should be able to pony up $12 or $13 a head to blog, right? (Though there’s a quirk in the special pricing: it’s cheaper to buy the middle license for 10 authors and 10 blogs and add on from there, than it is to buy the third license at 13 and 13. That quirk will no longer obtain in the regular pricing.)
But: the personal license at its regular price of 100 bucks is still 30 bucks more than 70, and I’m not necessarily going to upgrade right away. And you still have to be registered with TypeKey to download a free version. And—well, it’s weird. Jay Allen’s point is worth considering: this is called, after all, a “Developer’s Release”; it’s primarily intended for developers to get in early and start hacking together their third-party plug-ins, updating and upgrading to work with 3.0. A general release (it’s then theorized) of 3.0 is still to come. A fine point, but there’s some stuff left out of the equation: I, after all, am not a developer. I’ve already downloaded MT 2.661, so I can ride it out until this (as yet unacknowledged, mind) general release. But if I were just coming into this blogging game, and had heard MT was teh hella best, and went to get the program, I could download the Developer’s Release, or I could—
What?
TypePad, probably. —Not to climb to far out on a limb, but in the absence of clear communications, theory will fester: I think they’re trying to haul their income from one stream bed into another, roomier one with raw muscle power. Little blogs like mine ought to end up on TypePad; power users and “enterprise” folks can beef up the bottom line; de facto resellers like the fine folks over at White Rose can pay up or fall by the wayside. And this is SixApart’s prerogative. (Given the “oh you whining free-software hippies, it’s only 60 bucks for a cab ride, why don’t you just suck it up, you ungrateful internet freeloaders” rhetoric that’s spewing from some quarters, one feels it’s de rigueur to include a standard disclaimer with every post on the subject: “In our wondrous capitalist economy, a software company may charge whatever it bloody well feels like for its proprietary product,” or words to that effect. Also: Saddam is evil; the killing of Nick Berg was deplorable; and courage! Bush is a noodle.) But hauling rather than weaning an income stream from here to there is by its nature disruptive, and Jesus, I’m about to descend into punditry.
Fuck it. I don’t want TypePad; I like Movable Type; I’m not happy about paying $100 for it; there are alternatives out there; I’m going to start shopping around (WordPress and Textpattern, yes, and thanks for the recommendations). And that’s it; I’m spent.
MT 3.0.
Oh, hey, guess I’m sticking with MovableType 2.661 for a bit. —It’s not that I begrudge them their lucre and it’s not that I think software must (necessarily) be free or something like that; it’s just that I’m a cheap bastard. I mean, Jesus H. Christ in a jumped-up sidecar, the price breaks: $69.95 is steep enough, but that’s the introductory price. It jumps to $99.95 at some point after that. —It is still available for free, yes, but you’re limited to three blogs off one installation, and it only looks like I have two blogs running in MT: I actually have five, since three feed sideblogs to the other two.
I think maybe it’s time to bite the bullet and climb under the Textpattern hood to see what’s what.
And you know, the price breaks make even less sense when you consider the ever-growing popularity—and visibility—of group blogs.
Just to expand on the above point: two of the most popular and visible standard-bearers in the ever-growing trend toward group blogs are Crooked Timber and the Panda’s Thumb. Both of them run on MT. Both of them now face the following choice:
- stick with MT 2.661 until the cows come home,
- port their blogging and archives over to a different system, or
- pay $600 now, or $700 later, for software they’ve been using for free, or supporting with donations—
- and even then, the Panda’s Thumb would have to cut loose five authors to fit the top-end restriction. (Should they really be forced to get that Darwinian?)
Yes, SixApart is trying to account for the big companies that are using MT for things quite other than blogging, and that’s fine, go team! But the way they’ve gone about it—distinguishing personal from commercial uses primarily by the number of authors and blogs involved—leaves a big fat slice of their enthusiastic amateur base in the dust. Their prerogative; then, you can toss the baby with the bathwater whenever you want, so long as no literal baby is involved. There’s not a great alternative blogging tool (that I know of) which allows multiple blogs and multiple authors with such ease. Yet. —There will be, soon enough.
Oh, hey, more! Shelley over at Burningbird compiles a list of reasons why, even if I did only have three blogs, I couldn’t use the free MT 3.0: as it currently stands, you have to be registered with TypeKey to download it (which isn’t a prospect that thrills me), and you’re only allowed one installation on one CPU—and I have no idea how that fits with my hosting company. More phone calls and emails with technical support would be called for, with the possibility that I’d have to move everything elsewhere anyway (after further calls with their technical support, etc. etc.). Why hassle? My path is clear: 2.661 > some other solution. What fun!
One last update, and then I’m putting this topic to bed: Dean Peters has some very thoughtful things to say on why, exactly, there’s been such an uproar, and sketches an alternate pricing plan that would have made nary a ripple with me, at least (and not just because it’s cheaper, peanut gallery).
Maybe you had to be there?
So Morah got shot, see, and ended up dying in Venice’s arms, except it wasn’t really like you’re thinking, they’d just met, and anyway Morah wasn’t really dead, she ended up ghosting into Venice’s head, and maybe it’s because Venice is a powerful yet naïve telepath or maybe it’s because Morah is really a body-hopper and she’s been lying to us all this time, I mean, she is an agent for the Resistance, but I at least am predisposed to trust her if not for the best of reasons, but we’ll get to that, the important thing being that Morah’s now a matrix of data set askew inside Venice’s head, where she can be called up in secret with subvocal whispers, Venice’s own pocket oracle, but nothing more than that really, until Venice interfaced with that ancient computer and something happened which pretty much woke Morah back up again, so she wasn’t just a matrix of information, she was, you know, self aware, and she’d get up in the middle of the night and go walkabout in Venice’s body, which really freaked me out, since I was the Guard, and Venice was my charge, but a couple of tense conversations at gunpoint and we worked it all out because maybe I’m big and maybe I’m stupid and I don’t really remember all that much about myself at all which is why it was Burhan who had to come up with a name for me but I’m not the sort of person to go shooting at just anything that moves unless there’s drugs involved but that’s another story, anyway, after the bit with the baths and the tropical socks and the junkyard SATs which I’ll gloss over we ended up in the city that was under seige from the Madlands which are underneath, except when the Madlands beseige your city it looks a lot more like somebody’s trying to set up an embassy, unless of course the Nemesis of the folks from the Madlands is trying to scotch the whole thing by dressing up in the bodies of the city’s ruling class and working mischief after mischief, and there was the musicbox bomb that Burhan had to defuse, and I keep forgetting that K’ia has the tone plate from that bomb wrapped up in something soft and stuffed at the bottom of her pack, because one of these days she wants to get it up to one of the city ships that fly across the sky and ring it and see what it happens, but I really don’t want to think about that, I’ve got enough to worry about, see, because while we were sorting out the whole Nemesis-necromancer thing I shot the Zoxone of the folks from the Madlands and it wasn’t by accident, and I know I said I don’t shoot just anything that moves, I’m actually very careful about that sort of thing, because before I was a guard I was a soldier, and that sort of thing is what I know how to do and it’s important to do what you know how to do well, but let’s make this long story shorter than it is by leaving out the stuff with the soldiers who were just like me and who let me stand a watch or two at the emergency embassy, which was nice, but the point is at the end of it all the city was in chaos but the castle was still standing and the folks from the Madlands were pretty much okay and the Nemesis was dead dead dead, and we weren’t, only everybody else said Morah was still dead, because she was in Venice’s head and nowhere else, except I didn’t think she was dead, because you can’t talk to dead people, you know, and we’d been talking some when I was standing guard and nobody else was awake, and see the thing is Venice thought maybe the Nemesis wasn’t dead either, and Timbuk who was the one who thought maybe Morah was really a body-hopper also didn’t think the Nemesis was dead, or maybe he was, but see, nobody could talk to the Nemesis, right, so I mean he pretty much had to be dead, was what I thought, and anyway we were headed off elsewhere, we found the Resistance and Morah didn’t want to talk to them since she thought she was dead, too, and there was some more stuff with red dust and giant metal bugs and an ancient city, and the important thing here aside from the fact that we did in the end manage to stop the red dust from swallowing pretty much the entire world is that in the course of fighting off an attack by the soldiers from one of the city ships that fly across the sky I shot one of the soldiers who was doing something to the ancient computer we’d found except Timbuk really wanted him alive and Venice poured one of her potions on him and he wasn’t dead so much anymore except that inside the interface space where Morah didn’t look like she was in Venice’s head because I think when we were in that interface space nobody was in anybody’s head, anyway, Morah was able to race the soldier back to his body and beat him to it and now she had a body and Venice didn’t have anybody in her head except herself and the soldier was dead dead dead, except he was a matrix of data still fixed in his head which was now Morah’s head or at least the head where she was living for the moment, except when we were up at the edge of the Madlands while the rest of them were down inside the Madlands trying to make a copy of a dying village something happened which pretty much woke the soldier back up again, only it turned out that I was the only one who could talk to him, and even though I could see him and get him to feed the gorzah and follow him places where he’d been it turned out that he was in my head now, and I think it was because the Madlands made it happen, I mean I don’t think Morah pushed him, and I did feel responsible because I had shot him, you know, and he didn’t remember where he’d come from, like me, and he wanted to get back there anyway, like I did, but the sort of soldier he’d been had nothing to do with the sort of soldier I’d been, I mean, there’s a reason there’s a Resistance, and anyway I didn’t like him very much, he was supercilious and he called me his jailer like it was my fault, and so it was best for all concerned if we just got him the hell out, even if we didn’t have a body to put him into, because we’d left Morah’s behind way back at the beginning when she got shot and everybody was sure she was dead, so we decided to go deeper down into the Madlands, where Timbuk could lead us maybe to somebody who could maybe help, but Venice, who was pretty sure the Nemsis wasn’t dead, was also pretty sure that the thing I was talking to wasn’t the soldier, but was, instead, the Nemesis, only how on earth could the Nemesis have gotten into my head, you know, it doesn’t make any sense, but anyway we went down into the brightly colored copy of the village that wasn’t dying anymore and from there we got into a boat and we let it take us to the place where the windmills are, because a windmill was drawn on the plaque that we picked at random and stuck into the little frame on the back of the boat, because that’s how the Madlands are, and that’s why they’re down there and the city ships full of soldiers are up there, but anyway we were following the path because it’s very important not to get distracted or rock the boat and you must never, ever leave the path once you’re on it, and when we got to the end of this particular path Timbuk would get word to the folks we’d met earlier, who had been trying to open an embassy to that city, and whose Nemesis we’d killed until he was dead (dead dead), and because of that their Zoxone would come to us and help get the soldier out of my head, only we’d stopped to rest and I said the soldier’s name which I think was the name he’d had before he became a soldier, and he appeared, and everybody could see him now, because we were in the Madlands, which is like I think when we were in the interface space, only we all had our bodies with us, even him, and so K’ia who knows about smells and tastes and blood decided to do an experiment to see if she could tell the difference between me and him since we both smelled the same to her, even though Timbuk who knew the most about the Madlands didn’t think this was such a good idea, but he’s not the sort of person to leap in and say no, he just shook his head, and maybe he would have burned an orange duck again, but Venice, you remember, thought that it was really the Nemesis who was pretending to be the soldier while he bided his time and healed from what we’d done to him back in the city that was being beseiged, and she thought the best way to figure this out for sure (since Nemeses lie if you aren’t careful) would be to surprise him, and so while K’ia was tasting our blood and surrounded by silvery insects and while I was standing there shivering and while Burhan was holding his dog and while Timbuk was tut-tutting the whole thing and while the soldier was standing there shivering Venice drew the Nemesis’s sigil on a piece of paper and when she was finished she showed it to the soldier and the drawing grew claws and leaped after him and they both disappeared into me, because that’s how the Madlands are, and it doesn’t matter anymore if that’s the soldier or the Nemesis and it doesn’t matter if Venice is right or if K’ia is right because it’s damn well the Nemesis in there now and he’s only going to get stronger because a Nemesis draws strength from its nemesand and the Zoxone is on her way—
All of which and more is why I gasped and leaped up from the couch, and it’s why John grinned sheepishly and Jenn put down her pencil and Charles shook his head with that smile and Dawn got that look and Becca outright laughed, because when six different people take up different threads of plot and character like that and under loose direction manage to drop something that big and patterned and meaningful into place without quite knowing that’s what we’d been doing right up until the last minute when it was too late and it all snicked into place, well, it’s as close to magic as I think I’m ever going to get, and it’s why gaming is such an intoxicating pasttime, even if it took us over a year to get this far. —But it’s also why that intoxication is so hard to get across to anybody else, you know? Or maybe you can extrapolate.
‘Well, I’m back,’ he said.
Okay, so it was only two and a half days in Ocean Shores, Washington. But the Shilo Inn had no wifi and no broadband and none of my dialup numbers was a local phone call away. It was horrible, I’m telling you. Appalling. Unbelievable.
Really. It was. Had to walk on the beach and everything.
(At least the Spouse abided.)
Memery index.
- Number of trackback pings: 18
- Number of links spotted by Technorati: 19
- Number of people who mutated meme by leaving fifth sentences sans instructions in comments rather than posting to their own journal: 67 (hereabouts)
- Languages spotted: English, Italian, French, German, Swedish
- Number of people who mistakenly ascribed this blog as the originator of the meme: 8
(But I lost count. I gacked it from Elkins. She plucked it with some mutation from the Happy Potterer. And so on. A zygote is just a meme’s way of making another meme.) - Amount traffic jumped once meme was Memepooled: 488%
- Number of short fiction pieces written incorporating fifth sentences from other people’s posts: 1
A complaint.
So I’m zipping through my Bloglines list on my morning break and The Minor Fall, The Major Lift has a squib pointing to a Guardian article or maybe an interview or something about that guy from the Brass Eye. I think. See, I followed the link and found this notice that, well, since MediaGuardian.co.uk has slaved away putting virtual brick on virtual brick to build its reputation as the UK’s leading media news website, and by golly they want to maintain this reputation come hell or high water, they are planning to introduce registration starting March 11. Now, I was not until this moment aware of said reputation. —And on the one hand, I usually click away from registration notices, since I find them tedious, an unconscionable impediment to my flitting about the web on a morning break looking for diverting nuggets of infotainment quickly consumed and easily forgotten, and actively painful. But it is a profile or maybe a puff piece about that guy from the Brass Eye, maybe. And they promise the registration will be as quick and painless as possible. So I give them my email address and I make up a password and I get this notice saying that I need to validate my account with them; they’ve sent me some email, and all I have to do is respond to it.
Sigh. This is more effort than I really want to put into skimming a mild rewrite of a BBC press release, even if it is about the guy from the Brass Eye, as I think it might be. But. In for a penny, etc. So I bring up my email.
Bupkes.
Okay. Fine. Maybe it takes a minute. Yahoo has its quirks. So I skim through a couple more links off Bloglines and then check my email again.
Still with the bupkes.
I think you can see the punchline from here. My break is pretty much over and I’ve still not heard anything from the Guardian and I still don’t know what’s up with an as-yet unnamed person who might have had something to do with the Brass Eye once, and by the time the email does show up in my in box I’ll be all, what? What is this about? The MediaGuardian what? Why do they have my email address?
Yeah, I know. You should have such problems.
The banality of outrage.
Ah, the moral rot is clear: someone somewhere to the right of me is claiming the Japanese hostages taken yesterday were peacenik appeasers most likely working with their captors in a sort of Stockholm-on-the-Euphrates, so we don’t have to worry about it. We don’t have to worry about a thing, and I can puff up my chest and pontificate, I suppose, if I want. —What I want to do is watch another episode of Wonderfalls. We’d finally managed to catch an episode last week, and liked it a lot, and figured, hey, maybe we’d better make a point of catching this show before they cancel—
While it was on, though (and hey, you can still snag the theme song from iTunes: recommended), we did manage to catch a jaw-droppingly awful commercial for The Swan, “a new series where fairy tale turns into reality.” See, what they’re doing is—oh, hell, let’s let them damn themselves with their own press release:
THE SWAN offers women the incredible opportunity to undergo physical, mental and emotional transformations with the help of a team of experts. Contestants must go through an intensive “boot camp” of exercise, diet, therapy and inspiration to achieve their goals. Each week feathers will fly as the inevitable pecking order emerges. Those not up to the challenge are sent home. Those who are will go on to compete in a pageant for a chance to become “The Ultimate Swan.”
Each contestant has been assigned a panel of specialists—a coach, therapist, trainer, cosmetic surgeons and a dentist—who together have designed the perfect individually tailored program for her. The contestants’ work ethic, growth and achievement will be monitored. The final reveal at the end of each episode will be especially dramatic because it will be the first time that contestants will be permitted to see themselves in a mirror during the three-month transformation process. Two women will be featured every week and at the episode’s conclusion, one will go home and one will be selected to move on to the 1st Annual Swan Pageant.
The commercial makes a lot about how these “seventeen average girls” are all ugly ducklings being given a chance they never thought they’d ever have: competing in a beauty pageant! —Forget whether Bush manages to eke out (or seize) a victory in November: if there’s a Swan 2, I’m leaving the fucking country. Y’all can have it.
But that’s not the worst of what’s coming our way on “reality” TV:
Child-protection experts and media watchers are alarmed about an effort by a reality-TV producer to create a CBS show that attempts to find and recover abducted children with a team of former military and former law enforcement personnel. [..]
Individuals and organizations that work on behalf of missing children, including the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, say the show’s premise runs contrary to the commonly held principle of relying on legal authorities to handle recovery cases. They also were scathing in their criticism of using such cases for any entertainment purpose. [...]
Rick Smith, a former longtime FBI agent, said he thought using a private team to recover children was “a terrible idea,” but also he could see it working “if it was in conjunction with law enforcement and law enforcement had the lead role.” [...]
A story in the entertainment trade publication Variety, which included comments from Burnett, said the show has been under development for 18 months, but “kept under wraps so as to not endanger the secret rescue missions conducted for the pilot” episode.
I, um. Yeah. I know ragging on reality TV is something of a pasttime for bored, dilletantish pseuds (hence), but. I mean, I. Um. I’m honestly, I mean—
Hey! Look! Evil lottery!
Part of an online ad for playyourdebt.com. Oh, type it into the URL bar yourself, you want to go take a look at it. I’m not about to juice them.
So I go to Kevin Drum, forgetting he’s not doing the cat blogging anymore now that he’s hit the Big Time, and I discover he thinks it’d be cool to write off the fifth amendment if we get stringent about videotaping all police interviews. Which, minor little thing, hardly even merits a squabble, just a shrieked “You WHAT?” and, you know, we move on, but I’m dispirited. I’m in a Mood, now.
Luckily, the Three-Toed Sloth is there in a pinch.
This brief note describes the discovery of an apparent joint burial of a human being and a cat, c. 7200 to 7500 B.C. (Some of the details that follow come from the on-line supplementary material.) The human being was aged at least thirty, buried facing west. Whoever it was, they rated a lot of Neolithic swag: “a marine shell, a stone pendant, a very uncommon discoid flint scraper, two small polished axes (one of them broken), a pumice stone, a fragment of ochre, a large flint piercing tool, and several non-retouched flint blades and bladelets,” plus, in a near-by pit, twenty-four sea-shells from three species: “One shell of each species had been artificially pierced; the remaining 21 shells had not been worked. All the 24 shells had been arranged around a central raw fragment of a green soft stone used for jewellery [sic] (‘picrolite’)”. “This is the only burial with such a high number of offerings for the whole Preceramic and Aceramic Neolithic in Cyprus.” The cat was aged eight months, apparently buried at the same time, definitely buried in the same orientation as the human, and was definitely not butchered. —The significance here is that this pushes back the period for which we have firm evidence of the taming of cats considerably.
Ah. I feel better. —A bit, anyway.
Oh, that wacky Shadout Mapes!
A few changes, here and there, to this blog-like apparatus: most notably, I’d like to direct your attention to the little Danegelt box there in the right sidebar (down a bit, past Achivery, past the Deltolographs, just above Permanescence, which you’ll find refreshed with links to pre- and non-blog content: Herschberg [now with discussion forum, oh my], that thing I wrote about Buffy, my second 24-hour comic [be gentle], and the somewhat-less-hiatused-than-last-week City of Roses). Recent linkage has bumped my traffic something fierce; I actually had to buy extra bandwidth last month. Not that I’m complaining much. Or making an overt plea. But: if you were so inclined, there’s a couple of tip jars on the edge of the pier, there: PayPal will let you slip some virtual folding green in (if not make an easy text-based permalink in the course of a blog post); BitPass will let you chuck in a nickel—heck, a penny, if that’s what you feel like. (It’ll also take nothing at all, yes. —It’s a micropayment system, if you missed the brouhaha: you have to put a minimum of I think it’s five bucks in, but you can spend that in nickels and dimes and quarters on mp3s and comics and prose and toys and tipping the occasional weblogger, wherever you see the BitPass sign.) —There’s also a link to the requisite Amazon Wish List, which is more so friends and family can find it easily than anything else, but hey: bait never laid traps no bears.
Other than that: an updated colophon, to reflect the broad array of syndication possibilities available (two flavors of RSS and Atom, whoo!) whose nuances I still haven’t a clue as to; also, I finally remembered to add a link to Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Accessibility, which is a good starting point for making your site better than it is if you haven’t yet. And I remembered to close some image tags and line breaks; the sort of stuff that you can’t see at all, but makes validators clutch their pearls and shriek instead of just tutting darkly over the same phrase being used as link text for more than one location. —But hey, it took up most of yesterday morning, so I figured, what the heck. Make a note. (I couldn’t mow! I’ve got a busted elbow!)
Eating crosswalk.
I have quite possibly fractured my right radius (which is strange, since it was the ulna that hurt). Stepped off the bus on the way into work, waited for the light, stepped blithely into the crosswalk, caught my toe on a sandbag the city had left by the stormdrain, and went down hard. The immediate pain faded rather quickly, which is good; I haven’t been in that much pain in years. But now it just feels—weird. One doctor seen, x-rays shot, the orthopædic doctor this PM, thank God for health insurance, and since I work for a litigation support firm, one of my fellow project managers nipped out on the double with a camera to snap photos of the offending bag. (Many thanks; they all rallied with alacrity when I stumbled into the office, grey of face, cradling my arm; my only regret is that I misplaced the bag of frozen peas and carrots and broccoli somewhere in the Portland Clinic, but until then, it served admirably to keep the swelling down.)
But fuck the arm. The important thing was, I’d been carrying my iBook, and even as I was lifting my face off the pavement I was sick with worry—the bag had bounced. So the first thing I did (as my co-workers were rallying round, scaring up phone numbers, calling the clinic for me, digging up various bags of frozen vegetables) was yank open the padded case, pull out the computer (wincing not at the considerable pain but at the sight of the CD drive, popped open), and fire it up.
It was fine.
Anyway. Blogging and suchlike will be light the next few days, I think. (Most of this typed left-handed, which, well. Not recommended for the dextrous.) Further bulletins yadda yadda. —Oh, for those with my medical history at hand, keeping score: it’s the right elbow, which means if I’ve broken it, it’s a first. (The left elbow I’ve broken twice, and it’s better if I tell that story in person, since it involves gestures. The right has only ever been severely contused a couple of times.)
Severe contusion; tiny, minor fracture; wear a sling, work the elbow now and again to prevent stiffness, don’t lift anything heavy, and see the doctor again in about 10 days.
Oh, and typing is not contraindicated.
You’ve been to a marvelous party—
I must say the fun was intense;
You all had to do
What the people you knew
Would be doing a hundred years hence.
You talked about growing old gracef’ly
And Elsie, who’s seventy-four,
Said a) it’s a question of being sincere
And b) if you’re supple you’ve nothing to fear,
Then she swung upside down from a chandelier—
And you couldn’t have liked it more!
With humble apologies to Noël Coward, by way of Neil Hannon. Now go, let Patrick Farley tell you more about what went on—
It was in the fresh air
And we went as we were
And we stayed as we were
Which was Hell.
I’ve been to a marvelous party…
There once was a sleigh from Nantucket.
A cautionary graphic: here’s what it looks like when a tossed-off link from the Mighty Casio tsunamis through a sleepier backwater of the Islets of Bloggerhans in the late PM of a slow-news Friday:
Cocks crowing; dogs barking.
Five days after 9/11, I got my birthday presents. They Might Be Giants were supposed to play the Crystal Ballroom that night, so there was something of a theme: Mink Car and McSweeney’s no. 6, the one they did the soundtrack for. That McSweeney’s came as a long, low, hardbound book, and the front cover is stamped with the following:
WE NOW
KNOW WHO
I still get shivers.
So I open it up to Breyten Breytenbach’s essay, “Notes from the Middle World,” which, he says, “is, and is not, the same as the Global Village.
Let’s say that those of the Middle World—I think of them as uncitizens, the way you have un-American activities as opposed to non- or anti-American—are global village vagrants, knights of the naked star. They are defined by what they are not, or no longer, and not so much by what they oppose or even reject. They ventured into zones where truths no longer fit snugly and where certainties do not overlap, and most likely they get lost there.
Which was rather shockingly rendered obsolete five days before I first cracked the cover. (Except it wasn’t: nothing was changed that day, not anything like that, because the terrorists didn’t win after all, not yet, and the Middle World is still very much where we left it; what else is Eastern Standard Tribe about, if not life in the Middle World?) —Breytenbach quotes a letter from the poet Ka’afit:
The word “peace.” Ah, how voluptuous. Like “democracy.” It just fills the mouth with its familiar, well-sucked, inoffensive, satisfying taste. As if one were experiencing one’s goodness. No indigestion. No burnt lips. It won’t cause constipation and you won’t grow fat on it either. In fact, it carries no nutritional connotation whatsoever. And guaranteed to have no secondary effects: it won’t provoke a rash of freedom, let alone the aches of justice. Ah, “peace,” “democracy,” soft drugs of self-absorption—how we love to talk sweet nothings with them tucked in the cheek hard by the tongue, chew them, take them out at international conferences to lick the contours before plopping them back in the mouth…
And then I close the book, because that’s about all I’d want to say to anyone who seems to think it’s somehow unseemly to have an election as scheduled after a terrorist attack. —They’re sucking on different words, but the effect’s much the same.
Always remember that genre lies; that a division is made to keep apart that which would naturally flow together; that something there is that does not love a wall. (“Art in life is not life,” Ad Reinhardt is kind enough to remind us, at the end of that McSweeney’s. “Life in art is not life. People in art are not people. Dogs in art are dogs.”) The 60-year-old and the 16-year-old are the same person, really, for all that they’re at each other’s throats. I’ve put aside Breytenbach’s cosmopolitan utopia so I can read you some Dennis McBride—this is a poem called “The Future of Rome,” and I keep it clipped up on the commonplace board above my desk:
Let’s say having increases hunger,
that light makes it harder to really see.
Then suppose, like me, you don’t have eyes,
suppose you don’t have ears to hear
and there is no nose.
Imagine, like me,
you don’t even have a mouth
to put the sweet soft black berry in.
But suppose there are Red and Green and Yellow,
that you feel them.
Then suppose you had a lamp
bigger than you are to lean against,
a dark maroon red carpet to sit on
and a blue teacup large as your chest.
Then imagine, like me
you were made of gold,
that you were willing to be idle
and were the one to come after Man.
Think of having only to sit,
of the heart’s thoughts,
of fear leading finally to safety,
speech to silence.
Think of enough.
And so I do, I close my eyes and suppose for a minute, and then, well, that’s enough, right? And so I get up and head back out into—what?
I don’t know. It’s after midnight. I’m putting off other work.
But I’ll let you know as soon as I figure it out.
