I'm back from a perfectly lovely weekend in DC! It was hotter than the devil's asscrack and more fun than a ride at the fair. It's also the reason for my blogular absence these past few days, and for that I apologise to you, my dear blog. But it's okay, I have come back to you, back into your welcoming arms to hold you close and nuzzle your neck and whisper in your ear that it'll all be all right.
It'll all be all right.
And here I sit in a Brooklyn back yard, slowly broiling in the 73-degree nighttime heat (that's 23 degrees in Real Measurements), sipping a beer - I'll be exact, a Samuel Adams Summer Ale - and breathing in the scents of a suburban evening while Miles Davis rolls through a rendition of Bye Bye Blackbird; and life is pretty sweet.
Whenever I read a really good book - by a really good author with a really good voice - I usually find myself trying to mimic his or her style. Not parroting in any way... more like trying it on to see what fits. While taking a screenwriting class in Junior year I was concurrently working my way through the early seasons of The West Wing, and I found myself trying desperately to capture - however poorly, through however warped a lens! - some of that beautiful run-on style of Aaron Sorkin's, the way his conversations ebb and flow in a way that seems so beautifully crafted and yet so natural. It's certainly something to aspire to.
I mention this because I've literally just finished reading Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie. It's utterly fantastic, like reading long-form poetry, and I highly recommend it. And the style, with its sense of narrative propriety that opens the door to all sorts of questions of reliability and truth and interpretation and objectivity, fits itself well to a blog. I'm trying to capture some sort of sense of that book's exactitude - the fastiduous attention to detail in a desperate attempt to nail down some larger truth that defies conventional explanation. It's really magnificent... reminded me of Murakami, the way Rushdie will not only explain a thing but also weave a gleaming narrative around it, cocooning the unknowable truth in fact and fiction until you can see the shape of it if not the substance.
And also the way he leaves you hanging - blunt explanations one minute, tantalising hints and glimpses and sensations the next. So in the spirit of fictional truth and factual stories, of substance and essence, and - above all - of long-winded brevity, I'll leave here some thoughts on what I want to make my next short story (short, but longer than most I've written lately!), jotted down on my phone during a long bus ride through twilit Delaware fields.
It will be about fish out of water and flannel jackets. It will be about pasts and presents and futures and fireflies. It will be about longing and hoping and the sweetness of disappointment. There will be running and hiding and seeking. There will be footnotes and police chases, and a certain detached, Morpokian, chicken-bashing style of humour. But most of all, it will be about how damnably, horribly easy it is to fall hopelessly in love on a stifling summer's night in America.
It might even be about letting go - about acceptance and peace. But I'm not sure about that quite yet... they say you should write what you know.
I'm not who I was last summer / Not who I was in the spring
31 May, 2011
26 May, 2011
An Explanation
There is a truism in New York City that you often hear repeated: city-dwellers are prettier in the summer than in the winter. We've seen the evidence in front of us here. Over the past few weeks, like daffodils springing up from the thawing earth, gorgeous women and hunky men have been appearing everywhere. Tentatively at first, in ones and twos, as if testing the waters... now they're out in droves, and everybody is very appreciative of this beautiful example of nature's bounty.
The explanation you usually hear is that it's simply a selection bias. Your eye is more drawn to the Pretty People, so of course they're the ones you notice. In the cold winter months these callipygian figures are all bundled up against the cold, hiding their assets from the world; as cherry blossoms come out, so do the booty shorts - oh, the booty shorts! - and tank tops, dragging our eyes and attention to the supple delights contained within.
This explanation is false.
What actually happens is far more elegant. You see, New York's population is actually entirely migratory. Overcrowding has been such an issue that six months out of the year, half of us city-dwellers are whisked away and relocated to a small city about an hour outside of Brisbane, Australia. It's a massive undertaking that's performed with the utmost professionalism and discretion by many thousands of volunteers and government workers. The Pretty People are sent off to spend summers in Oz and return to the States in April - in trickles at first, but quickly turning into a flood so intense you can't turn your head on Broadway without some selfish, nubile young thing leaving nothing to the imagination.
The uggoes get winters. Sorry, homely denizens... you need to keep that shit wrapped up.
My point, you ask? My point is, it's May, and here I am. Draw your own conclusions. Oi, eyes up here.
Hello sucker, we like your money just as well as anybody else's here
24 May, 2011
An Aftermath
"We couldn't have done it without you, Mister Raynes."
The world expanded, the prone figure in front of him no longer filling his vision. There were things - people - swarming around, and someone standing behind him. His hand shook. There was a harsh smell of ozone in the air. The gun was so heavy.
"Mister Raynes?" He turned, and that familiar figure was there again, impossibly crisp and utterly incongruous in his suit. "Are you quite all right, Sir?"
"Not sir..." he muttered. They were swarming everywhere now; chattering, collecting, analyzing. Worker bees in the hive. His head hurt from the sheer volume of activity, it was too much to process.
"Mister Raynes, perhaps you should come with me." A hand on his shoulder now, almost comforting, turning him around and leading him outside, away from the - don't look back don't look back don't look back - and through the low-roofed halls and corridors. His hand was still shaking - the same hand as before, the same aching vibration shooting through the arm - as he was bundled into the waiting shuttlecar and whisked away through the warrens, back to the City, back to the vaulted spaces. Open air, if you could call if that.
And there was that crisp bastard seated across from him, a look of concern on his face. Oh good, thought Raynes. I've finally flapped the unflappable. He patted his pocket and pulled out a single precious bootleg cig. Somewhere between then and now he'd lost track of the gun.
"I must say, you've really come through for us, Sir." The man across from him suppressed a grimace as Raynes lit up, clearly past caring about air filtration. "We owe you a debt of gratitude."
The shuttlecar dipped into another tunnel, and Raynes took a deep drag. Silence and darkness. For the longest moment there was nothing but the strange natural glow of the butt; nothing but the whisper-hum of the 'car speeding through vacuum-sealed rock. And then, with an explosion of light and sound, they burst back into the City. Raynes exhaled.
"It's not Sir." Eyes locked. "And you owe me a hell of a lot more than that. I want to see your boss."
Ashes to ashes, we all fall down
The world expanded, the prone figure in front of him no longer filling his vision. There were things - people - swarming around, and someone standing behind him. His hand shook. There was a harsh smell of ozone in the air. The gun was so heavy.
"Mister Raynes?" He turned, and that familiar figure was there again, impossibly crisp and utterly incongruous in his suit. "Are you quite all right, Sir?"
"Not sir..." he muttered. They were swarming everywhere now; chattering, collecting, analyzing. Worker bees in the hive. His head hurt from the sheer volume of activity, it was too much to process.
"Mister Raynes, perhaps you should come with me." A hand on his shoulder now, almost comforting, turning him around and leading him outside, away from the - don't look back don't look back don't look back - and through the low-roofed halls and corridors. His hand was still shaking - the same hand as before, the same aching vibration shooting through the arm - as he was bundled into the waiting shuttlecar and whisked away through the warrens, back to the City, back to the vaulted spaces. Open air, if you could call if that.
And there was that crisp bastard seated across from him, a look of concern on his face. Oh good, thought Raynes. I've finally flapped the unflappable. He patted his pocket and pulled out a single precious bootleg cig. Somewhere between then and now he'd lost track of the gun.
"I must say, you've really come through for us, Sir." The man across from him suppressed a grimace as Raynes lit up, clearly past caring about air filtration. "We owe you a debt of gratitude."
The shuttlecar dipped into another tunnel, and Raynes took a deep drag. Silence and darkness. For the longest moment there was nothing but the strange natural glow of the butt; nothing but the whisper-hum of the 'car speeding through vacuum-sealed rock. And then, with an explosion of light and sound, they burst back into the City. Raynes exhaled.
"It's not Sir." Eyes locked. "And you owe me a hell of a lot more than that. I want to see your boss."
Ashes to ashes, we all fall down
23 May, 2011
An Editorial Eye
Here's a question... how much should you edit yourself when you write?
On the one hand, when you're trying to get something started, your inner censor can be your worst enemy. You try to put something down, and nothing seems good enough. And then you get it into your head that you simply can't continue from such inauspicious beginnings; nothing good could ever come of it! The way to get around this has been repeated by writers since time immemorial... just put down anything. Any old crap. The important part is the process of writing, of getting stuff from brain to page. If you can shut off that inner censor, forgo any kind of editorial process, then you can actually get things done.
But when do you start to get critical? Do you power on through until you've reached some kind of end? Or do you catch yourself as you go, dancing back and forth between sentences and paragraphs, not letting yourself go on until you've cornered that perfect turn of phrase?
There's something to be said for perfectionism. For the longest time, my writing strategy was just to go without pause. And it worked very well for me, especially with creative writing. I could feel the flow of the story as I was writing it, and to interrupt that would just completely derail me. So it was all or nothing, and the end result was usually passable.
But 'passable' shouldn't really ever be good enough, right? Reading back on some of my papers from college there are plenty of examples of awfully-constructed sentences; torturously-winding things that start out in one thought and end in quite another. Because that's what happens when you have no editorial process! There's got to be some give and take.
So I'm trying something new. Maybe it's possible to incorporate some measure of editorial rigour into the flow of writing. It's a purely mental thing, like seeing the schooner in the magic-eye picture... let yourself get swept along in the flow while maintaining enough of a distance to swim a little upstream every now and then.
Basically, I'm trying to find the happy medium between being able to write, and being able to write well. Because sure, I could put any old crap on the page, and maybe that's exactly what I need to get back into writing after something of a hiatus. But I think the key difference - one that I'm only really starting to learn - lies in being discerning enough to realise what's drivel and what isn't even as you're putting it down. Editing on the fly seems like a pretty good exercise in making that distinction.
Hummmm, maybe I'm not explaining this well. Maybe I'm skipping a step! First figure out how to get your thoughts down, then figure out how to make the words all fancy-like. To be honest, the difference seems pretty vague when you get too close.
Alright, enough introspection. Next time I'll try something fictional!
The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out
On the one hand, when you're trying to get something started, your inner censor can be your worst enemy. You try to put something down, and nothing seems good enough. And then you get it into your head that you simply can't continue from such inauspicious beginnings; nothing good could ever come of it! The way to get around this has been repeated by writers since time immemorial... just put down anything. Any old crap. The important part is the process of writing, of getting stuff from brain to page. If you can shut off that inner censor, forgo any kind of editorial process, then you can actually get things done.
But when do you start to get critical? Do you power on through until you've reached some kind of end? Or do you catch yourself as you go, dancing back and forth between sentences and paragraphs, not letting yourself go on until you've cornered that perfect turn of phrase?
There's something to be said for perfectionism. For the longest time, my writing strategy was just to go without pause. And it worked very well for me, especially with creative writing. I could feel the flow of the story as I was writing it, and to interrupt that would just completely derail me. So it was all or nothing, and the end result was usually passable.
But 'passable' shouldn't really ever be good enough, right? Reading back on some of my papers from college there are plenty of examples of awfully-constructed sentences; torturously-winding things that start out in one thought and end in quite another. Because that's what happens when you have no editorial process! There's got to be some give and take.
So I'm trying something new. Maybe it's possible to incorporate some measure of editorial rigour into the flow of writing. It's a purely mental thing, like seeing the schooner in the magic-eye picture... let yourself get swept along in the flow while maintaining enough of a distance to swim a little upstream every now and then.
Basically, I'm trying to find the happy medium between being able to write, and being able to write well. Because sure, I could put any old crap on the page, and maybe that's exactly what I need to get back into writing after something of a hiatus. But I think the key difference - one that I'm only really starting to learn - lies in being discerning enough to realise what's drivel and what isn't even as you're putting it down. Editing on the fly seems like a pretty good exercise in making that distinction.
Hummmm, maybe I'm not explaining this well. Maybe I'm skipping a step! First figure out how to get your thoughts down, then figure out how to make the words all fancy-like. To be honest, the difference seems pretty vague when you get too close.
Alright, enough introspection. Next time I'll try something fictional!
The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out
20 May, 2011
A Man Chooses, A Slave Obeys
I'm always telling people lately that I need to feel like a 'real person'. Now seems as good a time as any to explain that!
So I recently moved to New York. I'd say it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, but really it was more of a sieze-the-opportunity thing. A short notice employment offer and a long-running desire to get back out here meant that in the space of 10 days I went from having no prospects to standing bleary-eyed in Times Square, dragging along a suitcase and hauling a backpack and wondering murderously how anybody could get around in this goddamned place when the train lines have numbers instead of names.
Since then I've been incredibly lucky. I'm settling into a job, I found a place to live within a week, and I've got the most wonderful network of friends and family. But here's the thing... it's been so damn hectic that I've had no real time to do anything much more than work, eat, drink and sleep. Usually in that order.
In the past couple of years I've found myself craving structure more and more in my life. It's like a game of Minecraft; get some wood, make some planks, build a pickaxe, dig a cave, make a home. One thing after the other, and you can't skip a step. That's how it is with me these days. Before I can be productive, I need my things in order. Before I can put my things in order I need to be settled. Before I can be settled I need my own space. And so on.
Now, back in London, I had time to settle. And once I moved into my sister's old room, I was able to put my things in order. And once I had my things in order, I started being productive. And once I got used to being productive, I was able to step back and appreciate things. I got into this fantastic space where not only was I working, I was happy to be working. It made me feel good about myself, and this gave me the confidence and general affability to start considering my own projects.
So I gardened a bit. I went from dreading the early Friday mornings to actually looking forward to them. I wanted to learn to do more for myself, and actually got pretty proud of the stuff I'd worked on! I'd talk to my buddy Ben about what we could work on in the future. Assuming I was still around, we made plans to make a project out of renovating the back deck at my place over the summer. We'd work and pause for beer and work some more, and at the end of the day just appreciate a good job done... well, if not well, then at least competently!
Then I came out here. And while I'm so happy to be back, while it's been such a fantastic opportunity and experience, I do miss being in that space. It's a space that I associate with pride in accomplishment... with making something, and being proud of the job you've done. It's why I've started this blog! I'm trying to do something - even if it's just masturbatory musings and idle scribblings - that I can call my own.
So that's what I mean by being a 'real person'. It's been like a mantra in my head lately, riffing off the Bioshock quote in the title: "A Man Creates, A Slave Consumes". I've been doing far too much of the former, and it's time to do some of the latter.
Feels good, man.
I can see it in your eyes, when the fire dies, you think it's over but it's just begun
So I recently moved to New York. I'd say it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, but really it was more of a sieze-the-opportunity thing. A short notice employment offer and a long-running desire to get back out here meant that in the space of 10 days I went from having no prospects to standing bleary-eyed in Times Square, dragging along a suitcase and hauling a backpack and wondering murderously how anybody could get around in this goddamned place when the train lines have numbers instead of names.
Since then I've been incredibly lucky. I'm settling into a job, I found a place to live within a week, and I've got the most wonderful network of friends and family. But here's the thing... it's been so damn hectic that I've had no real time to do anything much more than work, eat, drink and sleep. Usually in that order.
In the past couple of years I've found myself craving structure more and more in my life. It's like a game of Minecraft; get some wood, make some planks, build a pickaxe, dig a cave, make a home. One thing after the other, and you can't skip a step. That's how it is with me these days. Before I can be productive, I need my things in order. Before I can put my things in order I need to be settled. Before I can be settled I need my own space. And so on.
Now, back in London, I had time to settle. And once I moved into my sister's old room, I was able to put my things in order. And once I had my things in order, I started being productive. And once I got used to being productive, I was able to step back and appreciate things. I got into this fantastic space where not only was I working, I was happy to be working. It made me feel good about myself, and this gave me the confidence and general affability to start considering my own projects.
So I gardened a bit. I went from dreading the early Friday mornings to actually looking forward to them. I wanted to learn to do more for myself, and actually got pretty proud of the stuff I'd worked on! I'd talk to my buddy Ben about what we could work on in the future. Assuming I was still around, we made plans to make a project out of renovating the back deck at my place over the summer. We'd work and pause for beer and work some more, and at the end of the day just appreciate a good job done... well, if not well, then at least competently!
Then I came out here. And while I'm so happy to be back, while it's been such a fantastic opportunity and experience, I do miss being in that space. It's a space that I associate with pride in accomplishment... with making something, and being proud of the job you've done. It's why I've started this blog! I'm trying to do something - even if it's just masturbatory musings and idle scribblings - that I can call my own.
So that's what I mean by being a 'real person'. It's been like a mantra in my head lately, riffing off the Bioshock quote in the title: "A Man Creates, A Slave Consumes". I've been doing far too much of the former, and it's time to do some of the latter.
Feels good, man.
I can see it in your eyes, when the fire dies, you think it's over but it's just begun
19 May, 2011
Back to the Drawing Board
Hello there. Let's try this again.
I made a blog by this name back in 2009. It was supposed to be a place where I could post thoughts, sketches, story ideas and creative writing snippets.
It lasted for two posts. Separated by months.
But now I figure I'm a little older, a little wiser, and a little more disciplined! And if nothing else, maybe this will help me become so. Lately I've been feeling the strongest urge to start writing again, to find a style or a voice or even just to write something worthwhile!
I want to be someone who writes. Maybe not a writer, but I want to be a person who has thoughts worth expressing and knows how to express them. In the course of things I'm sure I'll wind up sounding like an utter ass more often than not, but I'll try to work through that.
So! Round two. Back to the drawing board.
...god, it's like I've been setting that one up for 2 years.
Stranger, baby, always keep me in your sweet memory
I made a blog by this name back in 2009. It was supposed to be a place where I could post thoughts, sketches, story ideas and creative writing snippets.
It lasted for two posts. Separated by months.
But now I figure I'm a little older, a little wiser, and a little more disciplined! And if nothing else, maybe this will help me become so. Lately I've been feeling the strongest urge to start writing again, to find a style or a voice or even just to write something worthwhile!
I want to be someone who writes. Maybe not a writer, but I want to be a person who has thoughts worth expressing and knows how to express them. In the course of things I'm sure I'll wind up sounding like an utter ass more often than not, but I'll try to work through that.
So! Round two. Back to the drawing board.
...god, it's like I've been setting that one up for 2 years.
Stranger, baby, always keep me in your sweet memory
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