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Review: Call Me Burroughs by Barry Miles

It feels like I’ve read too many Burroughs bios lately. I just checked the shelf, and there are a dozen and a half of them, and that wasn’t something I planned. I’m not writing a dissertation or making this my life’s work. I think it was because Road to Interzone came out and then went out of print so quickly, I now hoard books about Burroughs. I wasn’t in the mood to read another bio, especially a 600-page one, so this book sat for a minute before I got into it, but I’m glad I did.

Burroughs is a strange nut, because the ratio of people who are fans to people who have actually read his work is staggeringly high. As someone who writes strange, experimental, nonlinear fiction, it’s something that’s always perplexed me, something that I’ve studied, as I’ve tried to find a way to get people interested in my own books.  Burroughs himself is a brand. People are more interested in his life than his work. The work is important, but the myth behind what he did with his life, both for good and for bad, is what makes him persist in our culture.  I’ve met many, many people who told me some variation of “I didn’t understand a single word of Naked Lunch, but I’m a huge fan.”  So the life of this guy is the gimmick: the addiction, the shooting of his wife, the moving to strange foreign countries, and the persona is what makes people interested in Burroughs.

This means that biographies of the man are paramount. And the last solid bio of the man was Ted Morgan’s Literary Outlaw, which was published in 1988 and which Burroughs hated.  (Side note: something I didn’t know until recently, because I’m an idiot or maybe because I read his book pre-wikipedia, is that Ted Morgan is a pen name used by Comte St. Charles Armand Gabriel de Gramont.  It’s an anagram for “de Gramont” and he changed his name to this when he became a US citizen.)  There have been plenty of other biographies covering parts or pieces of his life, but not a solid end-to-end book since his death, at least that I’ve read.  (I’m sure there are – there are so damn many books about him.)

There’s not much for me to say about Miles’ work in the bio, except to say he’s fairly thorough, and the book doesn’t skip over much. There are bits where I found his structure confusing.  Like there’s one bit where he mentions Cronenberg visiting, finishing a final script of the movie in 1989, and then taking six years to finalize the script.  At first read, I thought “wait, that movie came out in 1991 – he’s saying the script was finalized in like 1995?” But really, after I read the paragraph nine times, I realized he meant he visited around 1983, labored on the script for six years, and completed it in 1989.  There was nothing technically or grammatically wrong with how he wrote the paragraph; it was just backwards and upside-down to me.  This happened in a few places; otherwise, it’s a pretty smooth read.

I’m trying to think of any new ground covered in this book, and there’s not much, but maybe a few minor points.  I don’t remember reading elsewhere that Burroughs was a bottom, which he mentions several times. His methadone treatment late in life might be news to some. He paints the picture of Burroughs having money issues late in life – not issues per se, as much as having worries, and not sitting on a giant pile of cash as some may expect from a famous writer.

Overall, I don’t have too much to say about the book.  It’s worth a read if you’re into him, but I’m a bit Burroughs-ed out at this point.  I’m also down on a new wave of Burroughs fans that haven’t cracked open any of his books outside of Junky and Interzone, and who don’t know the joy of when a book like The Soft Machine finally clicks and starts firing on all cylinders.  This is a very well-done history, but I’d urge readers not to get too mired into the history and get back to the actual work.

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The long walk to W384 Intensive Writing

I love it when it’s cool in the early morning after a hot day. There’s a certain charge in the air that’s unexplainable, not just the relief from the heat, but a somnolent, undisturbed feeling.  It was 83 yesterday, and I woke up to 55, and it was wonderful, even if it will be back to the high 70s in a bit.

In the summer of 1992, I had this 8AM writing class.  I was one of the only guys in the class and we talked about metaphor and Susan Sontag and I wrote a paper about the Pink Floyd song “Two Suns in the Sunset” that I’m glad I lost a long time ago.  (I wrote about this fictionally in Summer Rain.)  I used to stay up late every night, meeting people at midnight at Showalter Fountain, then wallowing in depression, sitting on computers or just walking around campus.  I’d maybe sleep a few hours in my pizza oven of a flophouse room, and wake up for the quick walk across campus to Ballantine for the writing class. During the day, the temperatures would hit the 90s, but in the early morning, the temps would sometimes drop into the 60s, and campus would be empty at that time of day. Those walks have permanently burned into my brain, and I think about them every time there’s a morning like this, and I feel that mixed state emotion of fulfillment and emptiness that a quiet, early morning can bring.

I think this work of progress is now paused.  Still not talking about it, except to say that I got a third of the way through the first draft and felt like the writing was too wooden and not me, and I needed a break to pick up some steam.  I think I need to watch a bunch of David Lynch movies in a row and get back to it later.  It’s still a good idea, and it’ll keep, but I need something else right now.

I’m still more or less writing daily stuff, automatic writing, brain dumps of whatever happens to hit at the time I sit down to write.  Sometimes, these are absurd and hilarious and end up in a book like Atmospheres, but they also become these nostalgic things that make me think about writing another book like Summer Rain, which I feel like I can’t do.  Maybe it will end up being a chapbook of some sort.

I was going to write more about nostalgic writing, but I should probably just go do some.

 

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I don’t know that people take walks of any length on piers these days, short or long

I walked four miles yesterday, in a sudden fit of “I am going to be fucked when I go on vacation and have to walk all day.” I brought my old iPod and left my phone and wallet at home, so I would not lose them in a mugging (I’d just lose my own life when I got shot for being cheap enough to only have an iPod that’s 17 generations old, which is like two steps better than walking around with an old Victrola that only plays 78s.)  Anyway, the iPod had a Henry Rollins spoken word album I’d forgotten I had, his first, called Short Walk Off a Long Pier, which Rollins himself says “It’s just awful.”  I would agree, but it was entertaining to hear, because at the very start of my writing career, I spent so much of my waking time walking, and listening to early Rollins spoken word, and it was interesting to revisit that, twenty years later.

I have been writing.  I don’t like to talk about works in progress, but maybe if I mention it, I will keep going.  I am writing something completely different, and it is very plotted, and is more or less a genre book.  I spent a few weeks on a complete start-to-finish outline of this incredibly linear and non-Konrathian plot, and a week and a half ago started the actual writing.  I just crossed the 20,000 word mark, and am past Act I, so that’s the good news.  The bad news is that I’m certain the writing is very wooden and passive and scary.  But I need to get a framework down, then I will go back and weird it up.  It’s very different writing this genre stuff, and it’s in third person, which I have little experience with, so it’s working a very different set of muscles. But it’s getting there.

Still have not planned much in Germany yet.  I was at Barnes and Noble the other day and looked to see what Germany books they had, and other than those “learn German in 12 seconds” CD sets, they had either books on Berlin, or books on all of Germany, of which like 12 pages of a 500-page book covered the towns I would be in.  There’s more online, but I am lazy and have not gotten to that point yet.  I did briefly fall down the k-hole of thinking I needed a new computer bag, and then needed all of this various travel tactical gear.  It’s too easy for me to spend all day on Amazon, thinking “hey, this alcohol stove only weighs 8.2 ounces” when of course I’m going to eat all of my meals at KFC and it’s not like there will be a sudden snowstorm and I’ll have to produce my own fold-up titanium cot and deep-sea fishing kit including shark knife and wind-up emergency weather band radio.  All I really need to bring is cash, and lots of it.  And headphones, I guess.

Do not download the game 2048.  Do.  Not.  Do.  It.

 

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My Writing Process, 2014 Edition

Okay, so there’s this thing going around, a #MyWritingProcessTour thing, and you know how these memes work – someone nominates you to answer a bunch of questions, you nominate a few other people to do the same, and so on.  I’ve written a lot about process here, and I talked about it in an interview last year, but the tools always slightly change, and so does the writing structure, so maybe it’s a good time to visit the topic again.

I was nominated by Sam Snoek-Brown – go check out his answers there, and also take a look at his latest chapbook, Box Cutters, over on Amazon.  Okay, on to the questions.

What Am I Working On?

I just published Atmospheres in the beginning of March, and I should be publicizing that, but that didn’t work out and I fell into a deep post-partum depression, like I always do.  I stumbled with writing something similar, which started to catch, but it’s hard to plod forward on a book that’s essentially the same as one you just wrote that didn’t sell.  (And I know this isn’t about how many books I sell, but it wouldn’t be bad if a few people actually read them.)

Anyway, I sat around the house watching old movies and taking notes.  Even though I’ve burned a lot of cycles writing about how books don’t need plot and we’re all fucked because plot is a crutch for dumb readers and eventually all novelists will be doing nothing more than writing the book equivalent of stupid half-hour sitcoms, I still have this sick desire to write a well-crafted, heavily-plotted novel.  About once a year, I get this bug stuck in my ass and come up with a half-baked idea and start writing it and then flame out after 50,000 words, a solid Act 1, a broken Act 2, and 17 words of an outline of an Act 3.

(I don’t know what the desire is on doing this.  I think part of it is that I get so much shit for writing “plotless” books, as if that’s a pejorative term, and I think it isn’t.  But every time I get that, I feel like writing a heavily plotted book as a big fuck-you to show that I can do it, and then I’d write another ten books that didn’t do this.  Because I can; it’s just I feel like I’m not pushing the envelope when I do.)

Well, right now I have an 80%-baked idea, and just started work on it, and have a much more solid outline and the first 10,000 on it.  That’s about all I can say about it right now, but if it still has momentum in a month, it could be good.

How Does My Work Differ From Others of its Genre?

I don’t really fit into any particular genre, so I don’t know how to answer this.  I can probably answer by saying why my work doesn’t fit into specific genres or communities, and that would define the differences in my writing.  So:

  • I don’t write genre fiction, so I don’t write high-concept stuff that can easily be pitched.
  • I feel like most experimental writing is an academic study in form, and not necessarily written to be entertaining. While I think that kind of writing is important, I’m not an academic, and I write to entertain, so I think the readability level is much higher in my work.
  • I’m often called an absurdist, but there’s a fine line between satirists and absurdism (i.e. Vonnegut, Heller, Tom Robbins, etc.) and I think when people think of absurdism, they’re really thinking satire. I think more of the Dada and surrealism movements in art, but the word surrealism has been overloaded and destroyed in modern culture to the point of meaningless, and I think any time someone sees something weird or freaky or psychedelic, they call it surreal, (i.e. locking a bunch of has-been celebrities in a house and making a reality TV show is “surreal” now.)
  • I’m often lumped into the Bizarro fiction world, but I haven’t published anything with Eraserhead or their imprints, which is the difference between bizarro and Bizarro.  I also feel like at this point, half of bizarro is horror fiction with a certain Troma-esque sense of humor, or it’s a very set form of “let’s take Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and make Tom Sawyer a talking anthropomorphic penis, and it’s set in Nazi Germany” and that’s that.  There are exceptions to the rule, but I’ve never fell into the groove with that, and I don’t write horror.

Why Do I Write What I Do?

I wrote a big post called Why I Write, which partially answers this.  If I were to riff on this for a minute, I’d give the stock answer of “I write what I would want to read” which is a bit of a cop-out, but is true. I mean, when I read or re-read a classic book like Naked Lunch or a more contemporary one like any of Mark Leyner’s stuff, I always think “I really like this — who is writing more stuff like this?” and the answer is nobody.  So, that’s what I need to write.

How Does My Writing Process Work?

Okay, here is the rundown, 2014 edition.

First, I write here and write on Facebook and twitter, and those don’t really feed into my actual writing; they are just distractions.  I also keep a personal journal, handwritten in little moleskine books, and I try to write in that every single day, but it’s mostly just about day-to-day happenings and not about writing, except maybe how much I did or did not do.

I use a MacBook Pro, iPhone, and iPad, and I use the Notes app to keep track of ideas or write down things as they happen in the wild, like little phrases or title ideas or things to research later.  These sync across all of the devices, and I currently sync them through Gmail, which means in theory I can access them even if I’m somehow away from all three things but still at a computer.  (I might research how to change this to iCloud, because every time I rely on a Google service for something, they decide to cancel it.)

I use Scrivener for everything.  So I have a big Scrivener catch-all project that contains nothing but bits and pieces, leftovers from published books and ideas for characters and lists of random objects and places and little phrases I want somebody to say at some point and title ideas.  It’s basically a hoarder’s house of words.  Every month or so, I scoop out the running Notes file of ideas and drop it in there.  When I have time, I sometimes move the pieces into the proper places, and if I was smart, I’d do that religiously.  But I’m not.  I am about 17% confident that the best ideas float back out of the scratch project when I skim it looking for things to rip off in a current project.  And I’m learning that not every idea that comes out of my head is golden and 90% of them should probably die.  But that’s always a struggle.

For writing plotted stuff: I will probably go into this in greater detail after the book is done.  But I’m using a program called Scapple, which is by the same company as Scrivener, and it’s a sort of mind mapping thing.  You draw little circles on a big blank canvas and put text in them and connect them together and shuffle them around.  Once you get the order correct, you can either export it into OPML, or just drag and drop it into Scrivener.

Scrivener uses this concept of scrivenings, which are little chunks of text.  You can view all of the scrivs sequentially, like a big, flat file.  You can then create folders and a hierarchy and move them all around and give each one a cute title and have them be your chapters or parts of chapters or scenes or whatever.  You can also switch to an outline mode, or to an index card mode, that uses a different piece of text per scriv (a short description) so you can plot your story and move things around.  It’s confusing until you get the hang of it, and then you never want to go back.

For plotted stuff, I moved the Scapple map I plotted out and dropped it into Scrivener, where each little scene bubble became a scriv.  Then I organized things by Act and got the order all correct, and started writing from page one, sequentially.  When I get done, I can shoot the whole thing out in .DOC format or whatever.  I use Apple Pages instead of Word for layout, because I hate word.  And Scrivener is able to output eBooks pretty much perfectly, so that’s what I do.

When I do the more non-linear writing, I typically have a project and I free-write every day, 500 or 1000 words.  When I wrote Atmospheres, I would listen to the Sleep album Dopesmoker all the way through every day, and write, with my only rule being that I couldn’t write about not writing. I mix in pieces that are in that scratch project, and I later cut out bits and pieces and split things up.  Sometimes, I’ll write for a given day, and I’ll split out a single paragraph or even sentence from that entry, and create a new scriv from it, maybe gluing in pieces from another one, and eventually fill it out until it’s a longer piece.  It’s like songwriting, collecting riffs and eventually gluing them together and smoothing them out until something larger appears.  This takes forever, but it would take longer if I was doing it in another program.

I usually have a hair-brained scheme involving color tags on the project outline that determines what’s part-done and what’s almost-done and what needs a total redo.  I also set up a NO folder outside the project and start chucking things into it that I can’t look at anymore.  Eventually it comes down to PDFs that are printed and red-penned and mailed to readers for comments.

Okay, I’m supposed to tag a bunch of people here to answer the same questions.  I have not asked any of them to do it, so they probably won’t but here you go:

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The market for YA books about euthanasia is going to be huge someday, so get on that now

So I booked my trip to Germany this week, which was a huge hit on the credit card, but at least I figured out the dates and times.  I’m going to be in Nuremberg for basically a weekend, and then Frankfurt for a week.  Travel times screw with that a bit, though.  I couldn’t figure out a flight to Nuremberg on a Thursday, and my first strike on all of the deal sites ended up looking like this: Wake up early for work on Thursday, work all day, take a twelve-hour flight from SFO to Zurich, then sit for eleven hours until I took an hour-long flight to Nuremberg.  Um, no.

I eventually found a trip where I left a little later on an SFO to Frankfurt flight, then sit around for almost seven hours until a half-hour flight to Nuremberg.  If I was smart, I’d skip the connecting flight and take a two-hour train ride, but I don’t know how to deal with the customs, luggage, tickets, etc.  I know everyone speaks English, but even in the same scenario in America, I’d get stressed out.  All of this means I have to sleep on the plane ride out, because there’s no way in hell I will be able to power through two days of no sleep and airports.  Sonata, take me away – I need to sleep on that flight.  And I will probably pay to get into one of those lounges at the airport and take a long shower and curl up with some WiFi and a power connection for the layover.  Hopefully there will be plenty of cased meat German goodness for me to consume during my wait.

Speaking of Germany, we bought a second car, actually a new primary car for S.  It’s the Jetta sportwagon, which is pretty nice.  It has all of the extras, like a huge moonroof, leather heated seats, and a whole armada of lights and motors and switches I will never understand.  I am fine with the Prius C as my daily driver, mostly because I don’t drive daily.  I’ve had the car for three months and put 800-some miles and only two tanks of gas in it.

I’ve started a new book, which is good.  It’s a lot different than my other books, and that’s about all I can say about it, except that it’s been a little slow out of the gate, but is very heavily over-outlined and planned from the start.  It takes place in Seattle, which has been interesting for me.  Although I’m only a few days into it, I am hoping to keep up with my current rate and maybe get a draft done before Germany.  Fingers crossed on that.

Atmospheres has not sold at all.  It hasn’t been reviewed or mentioned or purchased, aside from one or two brief blips on the radar.  It’s fallen completely flat, and I went into a huge post-partum depression over that.  There’s nothing I can do about that except go out and try to write another book, but it’s extremely depressing to finish something you really love and then realize you have no audience at all for it.  I realize it’s a hard book to read, but it’s got some of my favorite writing in it, and went in a new direction for me, with a lot of rawness and honesty I haven’t been able to work into other books.

But it’s a tough sell, and it’s not the kind of thing I can shore up with ads and targeted mentions to communities like it’s a YA vampire book, because there isn’t really a community for this kind of shit.  I’ve been greatly distancing myself from the Bizarro community and the literary fiction category, and have completely forgotten about the alt-lit thing, because I’ve realized I don’t fit into any of those, and I don’t feel welcome.  This shit is high school all over again, and I’d rather write.  So, that’s what I do.

Not much else is up.  Still taking bass lessons, which has been good, except that my teacher let me play his Precision bass, which is one of those 50s reissues made in Japan in the late 80s, and it’s such a phenomenally awesome bass that I immediately want one.  I’ve got four basses, three that are never played, and I’ve been scheming some way to arbitrage my way into something else, maybe sell three and build one.  I should just fucking practice and stop thinking about it, but those vintage frets and lightweight bodies full of punch make me jones for something else.

It’s quickly becoming summer here.  It’s gout season right now, and I’ve got stiff joints and fingers and a clicky neck that makes me think I should just move into my chiropractor’s office.  Been reading that new Barry Miles bio on Burroughs, which I’m enjoying.  I have read too many Burroughs bios in the last six months, but this one is pretty solid.

I’m starving and 1500 words in for the day, so I need to look into some waffles or pancakes or bacon or all three.

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Happy birthday, Wrath of Kon

This site has been here, in one form another, for 17 years now.

In 1997, I got together a couple of half-baked elisp scripts and installed them on my shell account over at Speakeasy. This was before the word ‘blog’ was invented.  Mark Zuckerberg was 13 and Facebook was nowhere near an idea yet.  Social networking consisted of AOL chat and not much more.  56K modems were just hitting the scene, and some people had moved up to 800×600 screens.  Google didn’t exist, and everyone used Alta Vista.  There were about a million and a half web sites, compared to the three billion we have in 2014.

Back then, WordPress was not an option. LiveJournal had not been invented. Blogger would not launch for a few more years.  But I wanted to keep an online journal somehow.  My friend Bill Perry helped me come up with a script in emacs so I could hit a key combo and it would open up a file, named with that day’s date, with all of the HTML at the top and bottom of the page, so I could easily type that day’s entry and have a page per day.  I then wrote the world’s shittiest C program to generate the index, which sat in the left frame of the page.  (Remember frames?  Shit.)  My goal was to telnet into Speakeasy every day, and use my lunch hour to practice writing, with little public entries about current projects or observations or whatever was going on in Seattle.  I’d have no way to write about my travels – laptops were huge and expensive; mobile internet was not a thing; phones were giant bricks; PDAs were either being figured out or were the Apple Newton.  And photos were not much of an option, unless I took them with my 35mm, scanned them with a scanner I did not own, and then smashed and flattened them so they’d download on a slow modem.  Text was king, and my plan was to keep writing short essays and updates, even if my life was boring and I didn’t have some hook or theme to the whole thing.

After I moved to New York in 1999, blogs became A Thing.  I resisted calling this a blog for a long time.  (“It’s a journal!”)  Teenagers started livejournals.  The Blogosphere happened. Due to the Iraq war and W and all of that, the news cycle became bloggy or gave blogs legitimacy or whatever.  Every engineer that got laid off during the 2000 NASDAQ crash and bubble bursting started a blog company and then sold it to Google for millions.  Professional blogging became a job.  All of these niche blogs happened, and if you were a twenty-something and had a quirky blog and were a Cool Kid, you’d get a book deal to scrape your text into print.  Maybe it would become a movie.  (A blog where someone cooks all of the crap in a cookbook?  Really?)

I had good years and bad years of blogging.  There were a couple of times I stopped, and went dark.  (1998, 2000)  There were years I barely entered anything.  And there were years where I had daily entries, huge essays, long trip reports, and pieces of fiction that ended up in books.  I did a book of blog entries from 1997-1999.  I like it, but nobody bought it.  (It’s out of print now.)  I often thought about doing another book, but the blog-to-book model is annoying to me, and nobody buys my books anyway, so it’s not worth the time.  I often struggle with what to write here and feel bad that I don’t blaze away daily like I did ten years ago, but I eventually do come back.

Those scripts went away a few years ago, and I switched to using WordPress.  And I eventually stopped resisting the term blog, although I did it just in time for blogs to be dead.  I guess I still have some readers here, but it hasn’t been about monetizing this, and it’s never been my main writing project.  It’s not here to sell my books (it doesn’t) and it doesn’t get the attention my other writing does.  But it’s been around long enough that it isn’t going anywhere.  Even if the blogging culture fully dies and everyone spends time on some new site where you just record a grunt and exchange them with friends who grunt back, I’ll still be here typing.

But yeah, 17 really puts the zap on things.  I remember when I was 17.  A lot of people I know were still shitting in diapers in 1997.  And there’s this strange wave of 90s nostalgia, a “hey, remember…” movement for a time that feels like it was a week ago to me.  Time’s strange.

Anyway, thanks for reading.  I’ll keep writing if you keep showing up.  And even if you don’t, I’ll probably still keep writing.

 

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AlphaSmart and distraction-free writing

It has been impossible for me to write lately without spending time fucking around, checking the web, reading through old email, whatever. So I am trying something new: writing on an AlphaSmart Dana word processor.

The Dana is essentially an overgrown Palm Pilot, glued to a full-sized keyboard.  It has a monochrome touch screen that’s about as big as two iPhone displays next to each other, and no moving parts other than the keyboard.  There’s some amount of flash memory inside, and two SD card slots.  It runs on AA batteries, which last about 25 hours, or you can use a rechargeable battery stick.  A USB plug on the back can charge it and lets you hook it up to a computer.

Because it runs PalmOS, it can run old Palm apps.  But I don’t care about that, and haven’t messed with it.  It comes with its own word processor, and I only need to use that.  I don’t care about the address book or calendar or any of the other things on it.  The word processor holds eight files that you cycle through with the F-keys, and has some basic formatting stuff.  It also does word count, which is about all I really need.

The keyboard itself is pretty nice, full-sized without any weird key combinations.  The entire unit weighs about two pounds, and is wide enough that it can sit on your lap without any trouble.  It’s bigger than an iPad, but smaller than a MacBook Pro.  (Maybe it’s about the size of a MacBook Air.)  The keys do have limited travel, but it’s about like typing on a Dell laptop. The screen itself isn’t great, but it’s functional.  I’m a little worried about looking down at it, since I have a bad neck, but I guess I can not look at it when I’m typing.  The touch screen is the kind that needs a stylus, and I’ve forgotten how much the old Palm screens suck, compared to a modern capacitive-touch glass screen.  The backlight is also the greenish kind the Palm had, which is not great and eats batteries, but it’s there if you are on a plane or in the dark.

The coolest thing about the Dana is how you get files to your computer.  It has an IRDA blaster for IR, not that any computer I have can use IRDA anymore.  You could also pop out the SD cards and put them in your computer, but I think it saves files in the *.PDB format, which would involve some dickery to convert them to something I could use.  You can also set up Palm Sync and sync the docs that way, but I don’t even know if they make Mavericks-compatible sync software anymore.  There are other word processors out there for Palm, and software on the Mac end to futz with it, but forget all of that.  I want it to just work, and it does.

Here’s the deal: when you hook this up to your computer, it looks like it’s a USB keyboard. You open a blank document on your computer, press a sync button on the Dana, and it beams over the current word processor document, as if the Dana is phantom typing it into your computer.  It takes a minute, but it dumps it straight into Scrivener (or Pages, or Word, or WordPress or whatever you have open) with no fuss.  I sat down yesterday and banged out a thousand-word journal entry, plugged it in, and done.

This doesn’t support a way to round-trip files back to the unit, but I don’t care about editing. I just want a text capture device, a way to sit in bed or on the couch, go into a trance state, and blow through the words, dumping them into a buffer.  It’s getting harder and harder for me to do this with old emails and book sales figures and wikipedia and everything else a click away.  I’ve tried turning off wireless, and installing blocker programs, but then I just end up reading through old files from 1997 or looking at old books of mine, and can’t get started.  So maybe this will work.

I thought about getting an actual typewriter, a Smith-Corona or whatever, but I don’t have an easy way to get the files into the computer, other than OCR scanning, which sucks.  Handwriting is an even worse proposition, unless I want to retype it, and I’d honestly rather slam my dick in a door repeatedly.  I’ve also thought about writing by dictation, but after listening to an hour of me saying “um um um” over and over, I’d jump off a bridge.  So this should work fine.

One thing that gets me about this is the Palm OS itself.  It reminds me so much of the late 90s and early 00s, my time with a Palm IIIx, standing on the subway reading early drafts of Rumored on the little screen and playing Dope Wars.  I tried writing with that, with a little clicky keyboard that folded up and was useless, and just journaling with the pen and the Graffiti function, which I never fully mastered.

I was just digging and found a backup of my Palm from 2002, a bunch of .pdb files.  I should figure out how to do something with them.

 

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general

A Stupid Nostalgia Listicle (Or, You Won’t Believe these 15 Things From The Nineties That Will Help You Lose Weight That The IRS Doesn’t Want You To Find Out About!)

I have been binge-watching the show West Wing lately, because S has never seen it, and I watched a lot of the first few seasons until it got stupid, back when I was supposed to be writing the follow-up for Rumored to Exist, which never happened. So I remember bits and pieces of the show, and then hit a long patch when I was out of town in 2002 or whatever and didn’t see those episodes.

What’s odd is that the show doesn’t remind me of the early 00s when it aired, but instead gives me strange nostalgia for the mid/late 90s.  I guess it’s supposed to be an idealized version of the Clinton presidency, spun up with some of the torn-from-headlines scenarios taken out of the W years.  It hasn’t aged well, and it’s humorous to see someone whip out a giant cell phone you could beat someone to death with in less than three blows.  And Sorkin’s choir-preaching sermons get a little wooden at times.  But, it’s more entertaining than watching some limey chef scream at interns or a dozen sluts fighting over a dork with money, or whatever the hell else is on the tube these days.

(Side note: there’s this Slavoj Zizek theory I ran into the other night that might or might not encapsulate the zeitgeist of West Wing‘s popularity with the left in those Dubya years.  His essay Denial: the Liberal Utopia talks about the left’s need to look at or analyze only failed leftist regimes in order to dismiss those in progress, because you can fetishize the failed regime/government/plan/whatever as being utopian and perfect, if it had only worked.  (It’s possible I linked to the wrong essay here; I read this right before falling asleep, and the book’s upstairs and I’m too lazy to double-check it.)  Basically WW was popular because Al Gore lost and the Clinton era crashed to a halt and W fucked everything up and 9/11 happened and the left could wring their hands and reminisce about how if those chads hadn’t hung in Florida, the whole world would be a utopia and perfect.  That Michael Moore movie F911 even begins this way more or less.  I’m not making this point to defend W, because I think he was more than harmful; I’m just saying I don’t think Gore would have cured cancer and gave us jetpacks in his first 90 days, and I found the Zizek thing to be an odd coincidence for me.)

OK, so I was thinking about it, and here’s a partial list of a bunch of stupid nostalgia touchstones that keep coming up in my brain during k-hole falling:

  • Everyone’s forgotten those giant CRT monitors by companies like ViewSonic that were like three feet deep and could heat an entire office, and they did that degaussing wavy lines effect when you powered them on, and it took like three seconds for the screen to flicker on.
  • The Mac OS was horrible, and even though it was probably better than the clunkiness of Windows, it didn’t multitask well and always hung up when one program crapped out.  And the hardware was much worse, and you’d pay like $5000 for a decked-out Centris that had about as much RAM as a TV remote control has now, plus a hard drive that spun up and sounded like the turbocharger in a Japanese sports car.
  • (Aside: I was just googling to see how much a Mac IIfx cost, and found this weird story about someone who bought one from a scrapper on eBay, and it turned out to be Douglas Adams’ old machine.)
  • I used to read CNN.com constantly back in the late 90s, and I’m sure that now if you saw their 1998 site, it would look like a Commodore 64 game, but it was a clear portal to the world for me as I killed time in my office.
  • I didn’t use a phone book app or some cloud-based thing to sync my contacts, and this was before I got a Palm Pilot.  I’d keep a sheet of paper in my wallet and write down phone numbers on it.  I found one of these recently, almost torn apart at the creases.  What’s interesting is that few of the numbers had area codes, because I instantly knew that someone in Indiana was 219, 317, or 812 based on where they lived in the state.  And all of Washington, or at least the western part, was 206.
  • The Onion’s online edition only published like seven articles a week, and they were always on one day (Wednesday?) so you could stay up late the day before and keep reloading the page and you’d magically get the latest from them.  Now they publish about seven articles a second and I can’t follow it anymore.
  • I used to spend an incredible amount of time in a command line window, telnetted to a unix machine that held my mail and news.  For maybe ten years, I read my email in emacs in a central machine on a server, usually at speakeasy.org when they did that sort of thing.  This was when you used actual telnet, and not ssh, or at least I did.  It was one of the last throwbacks to my IU days, when I mostly did the same, back to Ultrix machines that held my unix mail.
  • I could tell what day of the week it was by what feature was on Suck.com, which I read religiously.
  • I actually used the CD player in the computer to play audio CDs.

I thought I had more of these but I don’t.  I’m almost done with WW too because it’s getting to the point where everyone quit over the salary dispute, so I will move on to another show.

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general

RIP, Oderus

I woke up this morning and found the start of a flood of Facebook posts that I thought had to be a hoax, but they were true:  Dave Brockie, also known to many as Oderus Urungus of Gwar, had been found dead last night.  He was only 50.

I must have first heard about Gwar back in 1990 or 1991. I remember hanging out with Sid Sowder and Matt Reece over at their dorm room in Wright Quad, and them playing the Live from Antarctica videotape, while telling me the story of an infamous show in Indianapolis, where they played at an old Howard Johnson’s and completely destroyed their ballroom. They took on the role of the most extreme band in my head, this melding of Troma shock-horror movies and extreme metal, demonic costumes and fake blood. The lyrics were campy and meant to be offensive, and yet the music was nuanced and more sophisticated than most typical metal bands could belt out.

I didn’t really start listening to them until America Must Be Destroyed came out in 1992.  When I DJed at WQAX that summer, the station had it on CD, and I dubbed a copy and listened to it constantly.  The concept album told a story about censorship, blind patriotism, the gulf war, and predicted the dubya-ization of the country that would uncannily happen a decade later.  I loved the CD, and played the title track almost every week on my show.

I was never a loyal Gwar fan, and they were more of a thing I’d forget about and then fall into every few years, going down the rabbit hole and watching and rewatching the Phallus in Wonderland tape. But then five years would go by until I’d pick up another album.  The horror-metal category was always filled better for me by the band Haunted Garage, but they’d only released a single album on Metal Blade before completely vanishing from the scene.  (They’ve since reformed and have done local shows in LA, though.  Check them out over on Facebook.)

But Gwar still helped define that era for me, the early 90s.  I started listening to that album constantly when I was writing Summer Rain, and mentioned it a few times in there.  And one of the distinct memories I have of my cross-country trip in 1999 was this long and boring drive from St. Louis to Bloomington.  I had already listened to everything I owned 19 times in the last week or two of driving across the southwest, and was going through entire albums from this Summer Rain playlist, playing that game where you force yourself to not skip songs and go through the entire album from first to last track in order.  I was somewhere on I-70 and very clearly remember listening to “Rock N Roll Never Felt So Good” and thinking how amazing the authorship of the song was, how it wasn’t just some speed metal collection of noise, but had such a carefully crafted structure that showed a decent musical knowledge, even though the song was about fucking a 13-year-old quadriplegic with a piece of frozen shit.

John Sheppard just saw Gwar last year, which made me go back and buy their newest album, and we planned on going to see them again when they came back to the US for the next leg of their tour.  It was like a religious experience for him, and I really wanted to check it out, even if it involved flying to Alabama or something.  Unfortunately, that won’t happen, which really sucks.

Oh well.  I guess the lesson to be learned though is how you really need to chase down your creative extremes and beat them to the ground.  Gwar started out of a freaky group of artists who wanted to shock people and do weird out-of-this-world shit, and that’s exactly what they did.  They didn’t set out to win Grammies or sell albums, but instead decided to marry together extreme horror movies and the performance of loud music, and they did it balls-out for thirty years.  Given the choice of doing the ridiculous and pointless that you really want to do or doing the expected and formulaic, they chose the former, and it gave them unprecedented loyalty from their fan base.  There’s something to be said for that, and it’s something to keep in mind as I try to figure out what the hell I’m doing next.

Long live Oderus!  Antarctica will miss you.

Categories
general

The journal pit

I wanted to write a big post bitching about the new Facebook design, but it’s hopeless and a waste of time. I’ve wrung hands over the fact that I spend too much time there, and eventually that rug will be yanked from under me and it will become as fruitful as logging on to Friendster in 2014. Truth is, I like having a community online, and never feel like I can find one, and right now, FB is the closest I have to being in one.  But eventually everyone will grow up and drop out and who knows what will happen next.

All I do know is that this thing will be here until I decide it isn’t here, so I should point some more energy at it.  Blogging in 2014 can be a fruitless endeavor, as nobody reads and nobody plugs into a decentralized world of disconnected sites. But I can be guaranteed that my backlog here never goes away, and that any fruity ads that pop up in the sidebars only belong to my own products.

(Oh yeah, BTW, I published a book recently so go buy it.  That’s your ad for today.)

I recently finished filling up a journal.  It’s one of those Moleskine notebooks, a large-sized (digest, really: a hair under 8.5×5.5) with 240 pages.  The first entry is July 4, 2012 and I got it in a greeting card store in the Embarcadero while we were waiting to see the movie Bernie. I haven’t been religious about writing in paper journals every day, although it was a kinda-sorta new year’s resolution, so I’ve been getting better at it – I think the first half of this book was 18 months and the last half was three months.

I dug out the box of journals I’ve kept over the last twenty years, the “journal pit,” to file this one away, and could not resist digging through it.  It’s like a canker sore in the mouth I cannot not poke with my tongue, and I of course had to pop a claritin to fight off the dust mites and start digging into the old entries, just to see where my brain was at various points in time.

One thing that depresses me is that I fell out of the nightly habit of journaling for a long time, when my schedule changed away from that of a hardcore insomniac and the chronic depression backed off a notch or two.  I never, ever missed a day of writing in paper journals, and then my last 180-page spiral notebook goes from the end of 2006 to the beginning of 2011 or so.  Like the entire period of 2007-2008 when I worked my job in Denver, there were zero entries.  I have what I now call “the lost decade” which pretty much spans from when Rumored to Exist was published in 2002 up until Fistful of Pizza was published in 2011.  In that time, I published some half-ass projects, and had many false starts and failed attempts at big books, but in many ways, I have almost nothing to show for those years.  2011-2014, five books published; but that period was a long stretch of not knowing what the fuck I wanted to do.  The first half of it, I did pretty good in getting the pen to paper for personal journals.  The second half, not so much.

I don’t write in paper journals as an early step in my “real” writing, like as some hipster way of unplugging or whatever.  It’s just personal observations and current events and leg-stretching.  It’s not designed for anyone else to see, so that anonymity offers me the ability to do what I want and capture the things I might self-censor here or in my books.  I sometimes think it might be worthwhile to scan them or scoop out pieces, but that’s too much work.  For now, they sit in a box.

One of the things I noticed when I looked back at the old, old notebooks the other day is the crazy amount I experimented with writing when I was trying to figure it out in the early 90s.  Flipping through some entries from 93, 94, there were little bits like the things that ended up in (or not in) Rumored.  There was a lot of poetry, little phrases that grabbed me, and a lot of bleakness captured in the writing.  All of it is painfully bad, or at least most of it, but some of it is hilarious and interesting to me.

The other thing that got me was the massive time warp I’m in now, the speed of things.  When I don’t think about it, Christmas was last week; I just bought a car ten seconds ago, but it was like two months ago today.  I was just in Germany a few months ago, but I guess that was in 2012.  Time is flipping past at this incredible rate, which is one of the reasons I get so freaked out about not being on a writing project right now, a couple of weeks after a book got released.  If I blink, I’ll have another lost decade and it will be 2023 and I won’t have anything done.  Not to get grim about it, but I don’t have forever to let this stuff sit.

In contrast, I was looking at a journal from 1995 where I was talking about all of the stuff that happened “way back” in 1993.  Here is a timeline for you, with names replaced by letters like a 19th-century British novel:

  • I got dumped by someone (A) I vaguely dated a couple of weeks, although it was one of those stupid holding deals where she dumped me, went to Florida with her ex-boyfriend, and then expected me to pine for her for a couple of weeks and then run back to her after the next semester started.  I didn’t, but I was depressed about it the entire break and wanted to jump off a bridge, and when she got back, we had these weird meta-arguments that nobody could win, like some kind of deranged 1970s Soviet arms conference.
  • Over the break, this girl I had a weekender with back in 1991 (B) came into town, and we went out to the lake, sat around, and then made out for a while.  She then dropped me off at Lindley Hall and I agreed to myself to never acknowledge that this ever happened because I was so infatuated with (A) and things would work out.  Last I heard, (B) is now a lesbian and just got married to her long-time partner, which is now legal for them, so good for her, but the memory of the various stuff that happened during that 1991 weekend that I did with a lesbian is a bit of a mindfuck.
  • Despite the (A) saga, I was emailing with (C) and that became an out-at-second date thing for me.  (C) ended up dating a friend of mine who also coincidentally messed around with (B) for a minute after I did.
  • I met (D) and cooked dinner for her and had another date or two and envisioned this happily-ever-after life with her and then it became this long string of broken dates and I got incredibly depressed about it and started slashing my arms with a razor, which I now recognize isn’t the best plan for coping with your feelings.  Until I wrote about it in a short story decades later, the only person I admitted this to was (A) who was then briefly sympathetic to me for about ten seconds.
  • In my book Summer Rain, I mentioned this girl I briefly dated (fictionally) named Jenn.  (See chapter 16.)  She (E) had just fallen out of some abusive relationship, but was also an unmedicated manic-depressive on a major manic cycle, and I was a hopeless insomniac, and we started hanging out again.  I’d go to her dorm late at night and we’d sit around and talk and sometimes sleep together – not sex, just sleep in the same bed.  But like I said, she was seriously manic, and I recognized that this could get ugly fast and somehow magically didn’t let my dick do all of the thinking on this one and sort of took a big step back from it.
  • Then I met on the computer with (F) and we hung out and messed around and flirted and did everything-but for a bit, before that sort of randomly ended (although we’re still friends to this day.)
  • And then I met (G) and we hit it off and ended up dating for about six months and then she dumped me and it completely fucking gutted me and I didn’t date again until like a year after leaving college.  (Not for a lack of trying.)

So the timeline for all of the above was between Christmas 1992 and spring break, or March, of 1993.  TEN WEEKS.

In the last ten weeks, I’ve… read a couple of books, and worked out twice.

And reading these journals is very dangerous for me, because I fall down this horrible rabbit hole of nostalgia.  I’m in that dangerous state where I’m trying to think of ideas for the next book, and it’s very easy to think I should just Bukowski it and take all of these old journals and twist together some kind of coming-of-age story set in the 90s blah blah blah basically what I did in Summer Rain, but again.  And I tried to do that with this book I was writing during the Lost Decade, which is this 120,000-word pile of suck sitting on my hard drive, with no plot and no flow, just fifty or so pieces of memory that are divided into “stories” that aren’t.  It’s so painful to think of all the times I’ve looked at that folder and though, “with a little elbow grease, I could…” and then I need to go slam my dick in the door and prevent myself from even going down that road.  There’s nothing more painful than writing a book about your life and then having it not sell.

Anyway, not sure where I was going with this, except to say I need to write in these little paper journals more, and of course I need to be writing on here more.  And you need to be reading it more, so maybe I should be making it better.  Let’s see what happens.