I obviously have not been up to the task of writing here very often of late. As it were, I have been temporarily and voluntarily evicted from my bedroom by my sister and her husband visiting. What I have to use as a desk is just a TV dinner tray and my old room is infamous for being inhospitable climatically. Not to mention the chores and tasks I have had to occupy me lately, I have been distracted.
This is in the vein of a series of meditations I consider on my rides home. Late nights, weariness, wind against one's face, the flash of lightning bugs, the whir of engines made distant by trees, the shear sense of movement, of velocity all provide a fantastic vantage upon not only the recently passed hours, but on the past months and years. Often, I am struck with the desire to write when I get home, but the impetus to satisfy hunger, thirst, cleanliness, and fatigue can be too much when one is undercommitted, the thoughts inadequately formed. All the same, I want to make an attempt now.
Being home--my mother's house, Lincoln, Nebraska, and in the company of old friends and acquaintances--has given me a different and decidedly convoluted perspective on place. In a very real way, I see myself as a time traveler, revisiting a life, place, time, or people (likely some synthesis of those) that has become foreign despite its familiarity. Changed hair colors and styles, new glasses, different fashion styles, facial hair come or gone, new tattoos; these all obscure the frustrating reality that I am back somewhere I associate strongly with being past, being gone. I am confronted with this potent juxtaposition of the old with the current.
Chatting outside the Bourbon Theater with Mr. Chris Bowling--amongst others, but Bowling himself is a powerful composition of past and present characteristics--he pointed out a number of passers-by, some of whom were old classmates or acquaintances. Most of those I think of as friends were inside at just that moment, though Miss Allison G. and Miss Paige N. did join us for a spell here and there. Well, what I mean to say is that Mr. Bowling is an acquaintance, a well-established acquaintance but distinctly not a personal friend. This is of no insult to Mr. Bowling, only that our rapport has been conversational when our paths cross and only of late; when it comes to high school, we hardly spoke at all. Now, I can recognize in him and in myself a much greater self-assurance, a certainty of self that definitely manifests in how we handle ourselves around others. In a way, Mr. Bowling's success is very satisfying to behold simply because of his mostly shed discomfort. Nevertheless, his body language, eye contact, jittery speech all link him to that person he was but no longer exactly is; that is, I have no doubt that he remains Chris Bowling despite him no longer being the person I used to think of as Chris Bowling.
What I mean to get at is my description of Mr. Bowling is apt for my experience in Lincoln overall. Lincoln is a place I cannot help but treasure, but I left it eagerly because of the despondence I felt over my senior year in high school. Emotionally and physically distant friends, playful but condescending euphemisms, exhausting the fruits of the Lincoln Public Schools, and getting the bug of exploration and travel provided ample preparation if not downright encouragement for leaving. With my return, which has been a frustratingly slow but clearly educational submersion, I must resolve this peculiar tension between a moment in my personal history I wanted to leave and a present I want to understand and develop.
Which does not exactly leave me with a great deal of understanding. If anything, and rather appropriately, I feel as if I am revisiting old epiphanies, old understandings, but with my new vantage. It is as if I have uncovered a collection of old coins, collected in one's youth, and forgotten; upon their rediscovery, not only are they remembered vividly, but I finally flip them over to see them in new ways. This novelty of old things is not perfect newness, but rather heavily accented with the recognition of things of the past.
I do not want to demean those people, those experiences that are perfectly new to me--my friendships with Misses Paige and Allison are part of that lovely novelty. What I want to articulate is that I have made an especial attempt to explore Lincoln in ways that any city makes me uncomfortable. Later nights, more drinks in different locales, conversations with and proffering drinks to strangers, and other activities have never been my cup of tea. In fact, the best nights are still those long-lived evenings with tea or wine or beer with friends in a warm space, music floating scent-like in the air, discussing philosophies or politics or ourselves; those are the places I feel closest to other people, to knowing them in that ineffably private way. All the same, I ought to practice means of developing those sorts of connections and similar ones with strangers and acquaintances, especially with my rapidly approaching move.
I have been unable to exactly articulate the synthetic reality of oldness and newness that I recognize all over me in Lincoln. It is a richly textural and often bizarrely satisfying experience. Sometimes it is painfully distancing, divorcing me from the moment in a way similar to and rarely directly associated with my own negative sensations when I experience deja vu. This juxtaposition is any many ways a grand deja vu; I am experiencing what has come and gone in a new way that neither solidifies the present nor affirms my past, but somehow cuts between those two potentials. It is neither a delight nor a disparagement, but almost something frustratingly neutral and highly uninterpretable.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Re-Emergence
Following an unintended sabbatical, I am back and writing here again. Up to Miss Linnea McCully's arrival last week, I was writing the Vincenzi story about every other day, although it was pretty slow going. I have been increasingly distracted by finding housing in Flagstaff, which I either have resolved or postponed for a good while. As Miss Linnea would confirm, the rhythms with which I am familiar are out of sorts and I look forward to righting them again, at least until I drive down to Flagstaff.
First order, I am anxious, excited, energized, agitated, irritable, quiet, and a dozen or so other dwarves that didn't make it into Disney's adaptation of Snow White. Linnea left what feels like minutes ago after a sometimes busy sometimes lackadaisical week (well, almost week) of her stay. I introduced her to about two dozen people, very few of whom I imagine she will be able to recall just from sheer magnitude. Really, it was time to spend together, and I am happy for that. I managed to find a few distractions in the housing situation and felt the buildup of unused energy without my customary bikerides, followed by a weird malaise due to inaction. I did not realize how much I had ordered my life until those rhythms felt out of synchronicity. Unfortunately, I let that disharmony foul up some of Miss Linnea's stay, but she is ever-patient with me, for which I am always grateful.
Other news would include a redoubled effort to keep up with blogs, news, and others' writing which will show up as further posts to the Tumblr. I linked a few things recently, but want to draw special attention to this bit about bikes and this article with its sweet 8-bit fx boarding video. (Both are from FastCompany and the latter references AR and ARG, which stand augmented reality and augmented reality games, in which you see the usual world more as a playground for your game experience rather than seeing the game world through some screen or other. Sometimes the "A" stands for alternate rather than augmented.) Also, having Miss Linnea about to distract me--not to mention Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert being on vacation--has pointed out to me how much time I spend in front of the TV normally. At school, this was not at all true and I want to return to going without TV again, especially in order to read more. I have seriously slacked off on reading, despite finding so many addictive books. Television lends itself to multi-task distractions, thus avoiding doing anything constructive. I want to finish all the books I am reading presently before leaving, which shouldn't be hard if I am the least bit faithful to them.
And of course, a few words on what I am reading. Most delectable of all is Gary Snyder's A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds, a collection of concise and clear-headed essays that draw me back to myself every time. I have read The Smokey the Bear Sutra aloud to a handful of friends and just can't get enough of it. You may also notice a few snippets on the Tumblr. As a result of reading Snyder, I finally picked up William S Burroughs and am well into Naked Lunch, but have yet to finish it. This has first priority. In short, Naked Lunch picks you up, loses you in the sofa, shoots you up, spits you out, points this way and that, walks in neither direction, and makes good fun of the trip the whole way. I can't say that this is a read I am really understanding, but it is certainly one I am enjoying. I can only affirm mentions in my previous post, especially now that I may be passed the more explicit graphic and violent sexuality of the book. I also have both of those writers' collected works "readers" laying about, which I am not making much of an endeavor to work through, but always find satisfying. In short order, I will read Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Daniel Clowes Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon; which are on the backburner presently. When I am in the mood for more earnest SF, I'll return to Makers by Cory Doctorow, but not at the moment.
Expect something more insightful, likely a review/blurb of Inception which I saw last night and sort of drooled at. Not to say it was perfect, I heartily recommend it. More on that later. Movie-wise, I also plan on watching Performance (anyone seen it?) and Out of the Past. Expect an announcement for a movie night for the A&E production of The Lathe of Heaven in short order as well.
And many happy returns.
First order, I am anxious, excited, energized, agitated, irritable, quiet, and a dozen or so other dwarves that didn't make it into Disney's adaptation of Snow White. Linnea left what feels like minutes ago after a sometimes busy sometimes lackadaisical week (well, almost week) of her stay. I introduced her to about two dozen people, very few of whom I imagine she will be able to recall just from sheer magnitude. Really, it was time to spend together, and I am happy for that. I managed to find a few distractions in the housing situation and felt the buildup of unused energy without my customary bikerides, followed by a weird malaise due to inaction. I did not realize how much I had ordered my life until those rhythms felt out of synchronicity. Unfortunately, I let that disharmony foul up some of Miss Linnea's stay, but she is ever-patient with me, for which I am always grateful.
Other news would include a redoubled effort to keep up with blogs, news, and others' writing which will show up as further posts to the Tumblr. I linked a few things recently, but want to draw special attention to this bit about bikes and this article with its sweet 8-bit fx boarding video. (Both are from FastCompany and the latter references AR and ARG, which stand augmented reality and augmented reality games, in which you see the usual world more as a playground for your game experience rather than seeing the game world through some screen or other. Sometimes the "A" stands for alternate rather than augmented.) Also, having Miss Linnea about to distract me--not to mention Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert being on vacation--has pointed out to me how much time I spend in front of the TV normally. At school, this was not at all true and I want to return to going without TV again, especially in order to read more. I have seriously slacked off on reading, despite finding so many addictive books. Television lends itself to multi-task distractions, thus avoiding doing anything constructive. I want to finish all the books I am reading presently before leaving, which shouldn't be hard if I am the least bit faithful to them.
And of course, a few words on what I am reading. Most delectable of all is Gary Snyder's A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds, a collection of concise and clear-headed essays that draw me back to myself every time. I have read The Smokey the Bear Sutra aloud to a handful of friends and just can't get enough of it. You may also notice a few snippets on the Tumblr. As a result of reading Snyder, I finally picked up William S Burroughs and am well into Naked Lunch, but have yet to finish it. This has first priority. In short, Naked Lunch picks you up, loses you in the sofa, shoots you up, spits you out, points this way and that, walks in neither direction, and makes good fun of the trip the whole way. I can't say that this is a read I am really understanding, but it is certainly one I am enjoying. I can only affirm mentions in my previous post, especially now that I may be passed the more explicit graphic and violent sexuality of the book. I also have both of those writers' collected works "readers" laying about, which I am not making much of an endeavor to work through, but always find satisfying. In short order, I will read Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Daniel Clowes Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon; which are on the backburner presently. When I am in the mood for more earnest SF, I'll return to Makers by Cory Doctorow, but not at the moment.
Expect something more insightful, likely a review/blurb of Inception which I saw last night and sort of drooled at. Not to say it was perfect, I heartily recommend it. More on that later. Movie-wise, I also plan on watching Performance (anyone seen it?) and Out of the Past. Expect an announcement for a movie night for the A&E production of The Lathe of Heaven in short order as well.
And many happy returns.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Writing, Word Viruses, Burroughs, Vincenzi
I have finally summoned the courage to start reading William S. Burroughs. Perhaps it sounds silly, but Burroughs was one of those writers who distinctly intrigued and frightened me. I have this image of Naked Lunch in my head that is some sort of horror story about highly detailed intravenous drug use. Without a doubt does Burroughs go into some pretty stalwart detail about drug use--he claims to have written Naked Lunch while he was going through withdrawal from junk/opium derivatives--but taking the work as simple some drug-laden chronicle is a pretty shallow interpretation.
I have read a few excerpts from Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader from his other work (Junky, Nova Trilogy, and letters), not to mention a few excellent essays on him. Admittedly, Burroughs is not a writer I would have gone to without some background to encourage and define his particular style for me. This may have, in the end, provided me with too many other ideas before exploring his work, but his endeavor to redefine narrative and develop an alternative imagery takes center-stage whatever I pick up of his, regardless of whatever assumptions I have of the work itself. The reader title itself, "Word Virus," has this rich, creative, fluid identity in his work. In The Nova Trilogy in particular, the spread of (pseudo-)sentient memes (called nova criminals) through the population, their criminal-epidemic characteristic, and the usurpation of others' bodies or behaviors functions as a sort of accurate metaphor for powerful sociocultural memes today. (For those who have read Naked Lunch, the shoggoth-esque entity of the "buyer" as himself a user of junkies is a sort of early form of the nova criminal's victim; the nova criminal itself being the ritualistic obsession the buyer has with being around junkies.)
I have been working diligently if not regularly on my Lorenzo Vincenzi detective story. Working on it is rather steady, but I prefer to write it once it is dark, but with closing shifts at Ivanna Cone, I mostly lose the opportunity. During the daytime I have little problem developing in greater detail and scope the lives of the characters and the plots and subplots at stake. Getting it onto paper is just a sort of exercise I need a certain setting to do. More and more I feel that the ideas Burroughs deals with--possessive memes, complicated and tyrannical language games, subverted persons, voluntary and involuntary participation with maniacal non-human entities--are exactly where I want to go with Vincenzi and his participation in the Cthulhu Mythos. Later work and style I think will hinge increasingly on my own deep reading of The Nova Trilogy because of its direct confrontation (nova police and nova criminals) between more or less human persons with non-human intelligent infections.
Oddly, this doesn't feel the least confusing to me. Burroughs himself is heavily influenced by pulp literature (both horror/weird fiction and hard-boiled) in his work. His skill with slang and vernacular is incredible and often--at least in Naked Lunch--beyond me. Most of his references, I understand, are to drugs, sex, and sex industry, so I can easily get the gist of them. Nonetheless, I also notice I miss more than a little. Naked Lunch is rapidly finding is place among books I will reread and refer to often in the future. In a way, it has just exploded in its fiery liveliness, humor, sincerity, and criticism directly in front of me. Reading it, you cannot help but have it seep into more and more of your life.
~~~
Note: This entry connects strongly to my previous post concerning the notion of underworld, that is, of reality being more richly textured than by the well-accepted physical laws/expectations. I don't think of science as wrong, but as incomplete and inadequate. Anyway, look those up if you're interested.
I have read a few excerpts from Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader from his other work (Junky, Nova Trilogy, and letters), not to mention a few excellent essays on him. Admittedly, Burroughs is not a writer I would have gone to without some background to encourage and define his particular style for me. This may have, in the end, provided me with too many other ideas before exploring his work, but his endeavor to redefine narrative and develop an alternative imagery takes center-stage whatever I pick up of his, regardless of whatever assumptions I have of the work itself. The reader title itself, "Word Virus," has this rich, creative, fluid identity in his work. In The Nova Trilogy in particular, the spread of (pseudo-)sentient memes (called nova criminals) through the population, their criminal-epidemic characteristic, and the usurpation of others' bodies or behaviors functions as a sort of accurate metaphor for powerful sociocultural memes today. (For those who have read Naked Lunch, the shoggoth-esque entity of the "buyer" as himself a user of junkies is a sort of early form of the nova criminal's victim; the nova criminal itself being the ritualistic obsession the buyer has with being around junkies.)
I have been working diligently if not regularly on my Lorenzo Vincenzi detective story. Working on it is rather steady, but I prefer to write it once it is dark, but with closing shifts at Ivanna Cone, I mostly lose the opportunity. During the daytime I have little problem developing in greater detail and scope the lives of the characters and the plots and subplots at stake. Getting it onto paper is just a sort of exercise I need a certain setting to do. More and more I feel that the ideas Burroughs deals with--possessive memes, complicated and tyrannical language games, subverted persons, voluntary and involuntary participation with maniacal non-human entities--are exactly where I want to go with Vincenzi and his participation in the Cthulhu Mythos. Later work and style I think will hinge increasingly on my own deep reading of The Nova Trilogy because of its direct confrontation (nova police and nova criminals) between more or less human persons with non-human intelligent infections.
Oddly, this doesn't feel the least confusing to me. Burroughs himself is heavily influenced by pulp literature (both horror/weird fiction and hard-boiled) in his work. His skill with slang and vernacular is incredible and often--at least in Naked Lunch--beyond me. Most of his references, I understand, are to drugs, sex, and sex industry, so I can easily get the gist of them. Nonetheless, I also notice I miss more than a little. Naked Lunch is rapidly finding is place among books I will reread and refer to often in the future. In a way, it has just exploded in its fiery liveliness, humor, sincerity, and criticism directly in front of me. Reading it, you cannot help but have it seep into more and more of your life.
~~~
Note: This entry connects strongly to my previous post concerning the notion of underworld, that is, of reality being more richly textured than by the well-accepted physical laws/expectations. I don't think of science as wrong, but as incomplete and inadequate. Anyway, look those up if you're interested.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Dystopic Jam Session - 23 April 2007
I had forgotten writing this. I must have just finished something cyberpunk (likely the Mirrorshades anthology) and wanted to earnestly emulate it. This has some of the really satisfying momentum that good (post-)cyberpunk SF has. I had expected it to age poorly, to lose that energy that I was going after to begin with. Surprisingly, having reread it just now after a few glasses of wine and quieting the music (Silver Apples Radio on last.fm), it maintains itself very well. It has a few unintentional errors and gross confusions, but I can still pick out many of the references I had first aimed for. (Robes, for example, is named after Roberspierre.) This still has a surprising "fresh-ness" to it that I don't think my writing generally retains.
Why do I post this now? Well, I have all my past writing ready at hand on my current computer and it came to mind. Why did it come to mind? In Lorenzo Vincenzi's search for understanding his macabre case, he stumbles dreamily into a music shop. I needed some inspiration and "Dystopic Jam Session" came to mind almost immediately. I did not expect much from rereading it and was pleasantly surprised. Afterward, I felt that posting it might be satisfying for any fellow SF readers. If you are entirely unfamiliar with cyberpunk, then it may be a bizarre mixing of run-on sentences and onomatopoeia. If that is the case, then check out William Gibson's Neuromancer or Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (which is technically post-cyberpunk) and everyone should watch Ridley Scott's Bladerunner, as long as its not the theatrical version.
If it happens to be your flavor, enjoy "Dystopic Jam Session."
~~~
Dystopic Jam Session
23 April 2007
Jakki started out on the drums, blasting away with her toothbrush in her left hand and the two sticks in her right. She’s a leftie so it made more sense that way. Intoxed on her retro-hardcore bands, she pounded and grilled and ran holes, or nearly did, thru those second time round thrifted drums. She scared the bejeezus out of me starting up out of nowhere like plastique under a desk. I thought I knew her as a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, and so we were like pseudo-fammed together. Her faded-jaded tie-dyed dreads flew in all spherical head-bobbing directions and damn if she didn’t know hot to play a toothbrush on a drum set.
Robes hopped up next, hitting strings on a half-stolen half-homemade bass hybrid, roughing up tables and breaking chairs on his way in, while he was in it, and out again one-oh-five mins later. Robes’ hair is the color of a lightning bolt, and I don’t mean white-yellow, but fucking luminous. He got some cosmo-headjob with fiberoptics that he programs with from an integrated wristpad and can set to moody-lights, fluxing up-down based on his neural activity, a basic straight-uplink. Robes beats shit up; people, cars, walls, screens, himself, but not animals. He played like an animal, like some fuckin’ lycanthrope jaguar beastie boy. He swears genies are bad shit and bat shit stupid and he ain’t one; he doesn’t fuck with building blocks, just rearranges them into things like electrical hair on which you could see a Bowl game.
Jakki spat at Robes when he began playing drums with elbows, ankles, toes, knees, and more spit. Robes kicked up tiles and jammed his metal shoe parts into the ground. People started watching, regulars and aimless amateurs, who wanted to condescend but were busy shitting with being-blown-away-ness. Some kid tore away from his handholding matron and began breakdancing in the midst of it. She screamed which led to four others screaming out majestic zealous notes like fundamentalist fools. The kid moved fast, encouraged by the screaming and the respectful space Robes gave him.
Inward I leapt, first getting kicked in the left cheek by Robes and then playing an amped trumpet into Jakki’s face so that I could see the color of her eyes in the off-chance I might want to screw her later. She whipped her long orange-red-green-blue-magenta-yellow-pink dreads at me. Yeah, she was a fox featuring tightstrapped goggles like wartime Brit comix, screaming and hitting me. Lips smiled around the mouthpiece and teeth clanked against the brass and silicon, fingers warping and winding the notes this and that-a way.
The kid had started trying to freestyle, using pop-lines and nostalgia rhymes from his ma’s tunes who had given up and was window-shopping for scandalous electro-items in alley-facing windows. Robes set down his bass atop the drums—Jakki didn’t miss a beat; that made me hard—before walloping me under my ribs to my right. I swung the trumpet at his nose, hitting him before he tore it from my hands and began playing like a pre-king jazz maestro. Jeeee-zus! I began swinging and shouting bullshit nonsense political manifesto gobbledygook before taking a retrofitted keytar when Lianna pushed in with her post-hippie double peaces and moons with Band-aid™ charms.
Lianna Mother Earth-hip checked me into the crowd and she rammed herself towards the pile of toys, from which she triumphantly pulled a kid-friendly electric harp she slammed against her body. Playing with mashed, clay-laden fingers that must not be feeling anything at all, and tore the shit out of it. The breakdancing-freestylin’ youngster ran off with her swinging round and round and round with that oversized-string-menace hanging onto her like a vicious unloved formula-fed alien baby. Jakki spat on the harp and Lianna began pounding out waves below hearing we felt in our ribs and marrows—one less not harming Robes or me any. Spinning got her post-revolution peasant skirt all fangled in necks of other instruments and they trailed around her thrashing. Robes skipped over the trailing electro-zither, not missing a chord in the discord of his mutualist solo. Something like bagpipes plomped exasperatedly against my back and I tried to get out of Lianna’s radius as best I could. Peddies ran back in waves like rad warnings came off the earth tone hued and patchouli—which mingled with her B.O.—smelling girl. Lianna played something fierce, though it lacked rhyme, beat, and harmony, and logic had fled at the sight of her tawny, flowered-over skin.
Something synced between Lianna and Robes like French Revolutionary groupthinking zeal in all the right places, not that a precedent comes to mind, and the sharp metallic squeals and clangs of the trumpet isolated and enriched the infrasound twanging of the electroharp. Lianna’s turn focused the sound on me and the grease in my hair jangled loose and my keytarring got out of hand in the alt-funkiest of ways, sneaking in and out and about their platonic-planetoid-Plutonian intermixed mastery. The motions of Charon entered my mind, the semi-orbital paths and the intermediary center of gravity, and my spinning and tap-tap-tapping like neighborhood machinegun warnings stealthily stole the show, but only for the fourteen or fifteen seconds before Jakki started pounding out again. She didn’t compete, didn’t jingle and jangle and dangle and dingle the drums and tophat and cymbals to overcome the racket of the three of us jamming. Out of the ash-gray clouds showing in via the skylight, her accents caught up like she was ahead of us the whole time and we were jamming no holds barred like real revolutionary underdogs, like forgotten zinester and locavore scenester beating proletarian elitists. We knew what was up and what was down and we were both.
The peddies and plasticized mothers with elastic cheeks and brows were mesmerized like dreamers unknowing, or the dreamers’ lucidities become overrated in the mystical visionary dreams brought on by damn good peyote. They hadn’t a clue. Robes was digging holes out of the ground with his feet, the clackity-clacking of the synthetic porcelain providing sharp, chaotic undertones. The breakdancing kid circled back and pounded his fist in the air threw his body into everyone else like a mosh pit-bound youngster asking for a fist or heel in the face. As Jakki doubled up on drums with toothbrush and sticks, the bristles flew into my eyes and I megalomaniac screamed, el presidente-style which spun tunes out of Lianna with long fingers tracing the strings up and down their lengths. Robes hair was crazy-on-fire, reds and yellows intermingling with his bleached blonde and the quasi-wrong of the image meant that I spat at him liberally and he screamed in my face and I spat in his face more and Lianna swung her fuckin’ harp and knocked the two of us over and tearing the strings out of the frame.
Robes and Jakki rebuilt the tunes, losing and regaining and pounding away at the mesmerized audience, sucking up the soundwaves like Vonnegutt’s harmonia, nearly glowing in powerful reproductive lights. They almost burst in succulent passion—the eyes a-glow and skin vibrating loosely, it was obvious—when Lianna shattered their inter-sensual minds with the zither that still hung loosely from her skirt. From the strewn out armaments of Lianna’s assault I hefted a heavily patched didgeridoo, making long low tribal sounds which were complemented immediately by high twin twittery sounds from Lianna who, all smiles and chasing laughter, sucked up my rooted tribal spirit, thinking me more of something I’m not that what I am. I blew and sucked and blew making the deepdown madnesses well up in the crowd, rumbling away at the windows in their frames and the old-style glasses of the crotchety vinegar-aged undermasculine protectorate in the kiddie playground. Robes didn’t laugh but picked up my long breaths and shifted, pulling out the high astral sounds from the electric machine at his lips. Jakki tapped away at quick insect monster sounds, making skin on my legs and back and neck wriggle feverishly, ensuring her bestial nature and vicious teeth.
York, all two-hundred-some kilos of him, pounded into the tile debris behind Robes and he whipped out his lengthy harmonica linked to ultrathin speakers in the sides of his head and sang thru notes unheard outside of York’s padded basement dwelling. I avoided York up to this point, buffed up on soups he liberally borrowed from the pharmaceutical companies until they paid him for weekly testing. At one point he had C-cup tits, but by the next week they were gone without any surgery scars. The pharms paid for the amp-implants and he used them whatever he played, which was next to everything, and the double-harmonica made a point of that. York had apparently crafted it himself based on old school possibilities. He played under and over us, as if bird-lungs breathed and rebreathed constantly. Layered and intermingled notes shattered like storm windows and car crashes.
Lianna was the first to duel him out from under her strings. She pulled a hairclip from her endless masses and twittered away at different strings in slippery-sliding ways, making noise to a rhythm, summoning infernal chords that soared like fiery wings and soured wild-grape-like with near immediacy. Trying to reach under their interplay, my long bellows poked out opposite, rancorous rich spring water while Robes space-danced mindlessly to Jakki’s tit-tit-tittering which had nothing going on with his timorous shatter-sounds clashing like lightning on my long waving outward gushing streaming.
Robes took it away from us, bellowing with extraterrestrial-quasi-binary musical measurements, alien and earthen and I couldn’t keep with it. My long rhythms fell into asymmetries and they stayed there, riveting and welding and razing it all to the ground like napalm blasters on grass hut villages. My breaths thundered throughout but unmet and uninitiated in the rites that Robes was dishing out. My head was out, displayed under the suspended guillotine blade just like his namesake would have wanted. So I brought it down, nearly breaking the damn thing, and started haphazardly shouting, playing with the meter he was playing, mixing and remixing my own voice back with internalized equipment, like pounding peddles built into your feet. It wove into his brassy-ballsy-mindboggling-madness and I loved it. Lianna and Jakki faltered at my playfulness, at the unforeseen and unlikely blasting of molecular mechanics.
York halved his timing, interweaving it more clearly into the back-and-forth rhapsodies Robes and I were managing like tech’d up-lard ass CEOs. York—that big limey bastard—managed to match my wavelengths and make words appear that were not words and sayings that were unsaid. I wanted to punch the fucker for messing with my specs from the outside. Then I heard it, the bridging between Robes and me with the harmonized harmonica hermeneutics: York was playing in between Robes and me, linking us like one voice or one instrument, like one entity, the three of us gathering up nonsense into pseudo-intellectual-down-to-earth-lunar-wheat-synth-synced melodies. York was with Robes and with me, synchronicity or synergy, and with just the gaps left open for Lianna and Jakki to freeplay into it, the holes waiting for wholeness. York had found some major ‘grades somewhere that could link us or our wavelengths or some shit like that.
Jakki held her sticks tightly, knowing the opening before it exploded in a whisper, and she filled it, bursting out boogeyman/closet monster-like. No more tapping or tittering or cajoling the sounds gently, she filled the hard vacancies with majestic magnitudes of lengthy, shimmering brass echoes and the ash-flow-stampede-tectonic-thunders from her linked and interlinked with York’s bio-psi-neuro upheavals. Lianna took her zither and the stringy tunes leapt egomaniacally out, crashing heinously into York’s attempted harmonifications—whatever the hell you might call his playing—just to challenge the Anglo-Russian bastard. He swept back mighty reverberations and she filled the space guided Jujitsu-majestic-like into where he made it go, sound-bending or mending or grinding. Lianna only laughed in crazed hippie-dazed ways with both sets of vocal chords, transforming her chortles into magnificent possession orchestrations.
So Robes was jamming away blues master style with wailing pale-skin banshee types laying ruin to his southern roots. Jakki was ferociously purring extinct wild cat like as her toothbrush shattered on the cymbals, before tossing her stick apart and playing all sharp tooth and claw vicious, zombie-fighting insanity chucking a piece of broken brass at Lianna, nearly hitting York instead, before it shattered a scent boîte in some no-name’s shopping bag. Lianna fluidly jammed, flipping her feet madstyle bewitchin’ and coaxin’ out the steps from York’s goliath heels. York, the pharm-mutie-Übermensch-fuck, harmonized and mixed anything with which I voice-blasted him while tapping his toes to Lianna’s asymmetric offbeats. His notes did more interweaving and mixing than self-expression; he synergized and awoke the intercontextualities of our disparations. My doubletiming voice and re-voiced mixing exhausted my lungs and blood spat out when the static started bursting from the subsampled phonemes. Words-to-noise, noise-to-words, words-with-noise-to-nonsense-lyricism. Somewhere in the game I felt the tickle in my head like the semi-conductor buzz of a new ‘grade as it nestled down my spine and into my throat. I coughed, hacked, overloaded and blacked out. I thought:
You fuckin’ newb.
York laid a solid kick against my diaphragm while I was out, forcing a cough in backhanded Heimlich maneuvers, and when I woke the rough point of a rib somewhere dislodged jabbed at my insides. After the cough, Lianna had kindly prodded me with her foot, still strumming away, to double check my breathing. How sweet. No one missed a beat since my pallor didn’t change at all. Who needs enemies, aye?
The four of them sat above me, laying fetal on the supersmoothed tiles, drinking madly from stickered-up boîtes, smelling of sweat and compost and homebrew, but mostly of sweat. York spat on me, Jakki grinned and splashed some of her drink on me. Robes and Lianna chattered furiously over guerrilla tactics and mastermind tacticians; I could catch only every third or fourth word. York and Jakki weren’t saying much, mostly watching each other and the crowds, flummoxed by the debris from the show and frightened by my ill-composed posture. If this is what friends looked like, what does an enemy come out with (or without)?
Sitting up, half-lotus and breathing shallowly, I noticed the freestylin’ kiddo was circling us.
“Hey, come,” I shouted, hiding the expected rasp behind a croaking voice. The kid wandered up playing certain and sharp and not-too-giddy. “Take t’is,” I handed him a small jumper, “check out when t’e folks are away. Nothing naughty, just some smarts. Hide’t.” And he slipped in a slim pocket by his collar; well-done boy. He laid down a simple pound and I laughed low before he dashed off.
“What was’t?” Robes.
“Tunes, lit, ideas in concentrate.”
“T’ink’t’ll g’in?” Jakki, wondering at my foolishness.
“He needs t’em. We’ll see nex’time.”
“Nex’?” Lianna. From off the table I filched a smokeless stick, lit it with York’s chained lighter, and dragged long and rough.
“If y’up t’it.”
They laughed at my hoarse lines. I smiled vaguely and coughed.
Why do I post this now? Well, I have all my past writing ready at hand on my current computer and it came to mind. Why did it come to mind? In Lorenzo Vincenzi's search for understanding his macabre case, he stumbles dreamily into a music shop. I needed some inspiration and "Dystopic Jam Session" came to mind almost immediately. I did not expect much from rereading it and was pleasantly surprised. Afterward, I felt that posting it might be satisfying for any fellow SF readers. If you are entirely unfamiliar with cyberpunk, then it may be a bizarre mixing of run-on sentences and onomatopoeia. If that is the case, then check out William Gibson's Neuromancer or Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (which is technically post-cyberpunk) and everyone should watch Ridley Scott's Bladerunner, as long as its not the theatrical version.
If it happens to be your flavor, enjoy "Dystopic Jam Session."
~~~
Dystopic Jam Session
23 April 2007
Jakki started out on the drums, blasting away with her toothbrush in her left hand and the two sticks in her right. She’s a leftie so it made more sense that way. Intoxed on her retro-hardcore bands, she pounded and grilled and ran holes, or nearly did, thru those second time round thrifted drums. She scared the bejeezus out of me starting up out of nowhere like plastique under a desk. I thought I knew her as a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, and so we were like pseudo-fammed together. Her faded-jaded tie-dyed dreads flew in all spherical head-bobbing directions and damn if she didn’t know hot to play a toothbrush on a drum set.
Robes hopped up next, hitting strings on a half-stolen half-homemade bass hybrid, roughing up tables and breaking chairs on his way in, while he was in it, and out again one-oh-five mins later. Robes’ hair is the color of a lightning bolt, and I don’t mean white-yellow, but fucking luminous. He got some cosmo-headjob with fiberoptics that he programs with from an integrated wristpad and can set to moody-lights, fluxing up-down based on his neural activity, a basic straight-uplink. Robes beats shit up; people, cars, walls, screens, himself, but not animals. He played like an animal, like some fuckin’ lycanthrope jaguar beastie boy. He swears genies are bad shit and bat shit stupid and he ain’t one; he doesn’t fuck with building blocks, just rearranges them into things like electrical hair on which you could see a Bowl game.
Jakki spat at Robes when he began playing drums with elbows, ankles, toes, knees, and more spit. Robes kicked up tiles and jammed his metal shoe parts into the ground. People started watching, regulars and aimless amateurs, who wanted to condescend but were busy shitting with being-blown-away-ness. Some kid tore away from his handholding matron and began breakdancing in the midst of it. She screamed which led to four others screaming out majestic zealous notes like fundamentalist fools. The kid moved fast, encouraged by the screaming and the respectful space Robes gave him.
Inward I leapt, first getting kicked in the left cheek by Robes and then playing an amped trumpet into Jakki’s face so that I could see the color of her eyes in the off-chance I might want to screw her later. She whipped her long orange-red-green-blue-magenta-yellow-pink dreads at me. Yeah, she was a fox featuring tightstrapped goggles like wartime Brit comix, screaming and hitting me. Lips smiled around the mouthpiece and teeth clanked against the brass and silicon, fingers warping and winding the notes this and that-a way.
The kid had started trying to freestyle, using pop-lines and nostalgia rhymes from his ma’s tunes who had given up and was window-shopping for scandalous electro-items in alley-facing windows. Robes set down his bass atop the drums—Jakki didn’t miss a beat; that made me hard—before walloping me under my ribs to my right. I swung the trumpet at his nose, hitting him before he tore it from my hands and began playing like a pre-king jazz maestro. Jeeee-zus! I began swinging and shouting bullshit nonsense political manifesto gobbledygook before taking a retrofitted keytar when Lianna pushed in with her post-hippie double peaces and moons with Band-aid™ charms.
Lianna Mother Earth-hip checked me into the crowd and she rammed herself towards the pile of toys, from which she triumphantly pulled a kid-friendly electric harp she slammed against her body. Playing with mashed, clay-laden fingers that must not be feeling anything at all, and tore the shit out of it. The breakdancing-freestylin’ youngster ran off with her swinging round and round and round with that oversized-string-menace hanging onto her like a vicious unloved formula-fed alien baby. Jakki spat on the harp and Lianna began pounding out waves below hearing we felt in our ribs and marrows—one less not harming Robes or me any. Spinning got her post-revolution peasant skirt all fangled in necks of other instruments and they trailed around her thrashing. Robes skipped over the trailing electro-zither, not missing a chord in the discord of his mutualist solo. Something like bagpipes plomped exasperatedly against my back and I tried to get out of Lianna’s radius as best I could. Peddies ran back in waves like rad warnings came off the earth tone hued and patchouli—which mingled with her B.O.—smelling girl. Lianna played something fierce, though it lacked rhyme, beat, and harmony, and logic had fled at the sight of her tawny, flowered-over skin.
Something synced between Lianna and Robes like French Revolutionary groupthinking zeal in all the right places, not that a precedent comes to mind, and the sharp metallic squeals and clangs of the trumpet isolated and enriched the infrasound twanging of the electroharp. Lianna’s turn focused the sound on me and the grease in my hair jangled loose and my keytarring got out of hand in the alt-funkiest of ways, sneaking in and out and about their platonic-planetoid-Plutonian intermixed mastery. The motions of Charon entered my mind, the semi-orbital paths and the intermediary center of gravity, and my spinning and tap-tap-tapping like neighborhood machinegun warnings stealthily stole the show, but only for the fourteen or fifteen seconds before Jakki started pounding out again. She didn’t compete, didn’t jingle and jangle and dangle and dingle the drums and tophat and cymbals to overcome the racket of the three of us jamming. Out of the ash-gray clouds showing in via the skylight, her accents caught up like she was ahead of us the whole time and we were jamming no holds barred like real revolutionary underdogs, like forgotten zinester and locavore scenester beating proletarian elitists. We knew what was up and what was down and we were both.
The peddies and plasticized mothers with elastic cheeks and brows were mesmerized like dreamers unknowing, or the dreamers’ lucidities become overrated in the mystical visionary dreams brought on by damn good peyote. They hadn’t a clue. Robes was digging holes out of the ground with his feet, the clackity-clacking of the synthetic porcelain providing sharp, chaotic undertones. The breakdancing kid circled back and pounded his fist in the air threw his body into everyone else like a mosh pit-bound youngster asking for a fist or heel in the face. As Jakki doubled up on drums with toothbrush and sticks, the bristles flew into my eyes and I megalomaniac screamed, el presidente-style which spun tunes out of Lianna with long fingers tracing the strings up and down their lengths. Robes hair was crazy-on-fire, reds and yellows intermingling with his bleached blonde and the quasi-wrong of the image meant that I spat at him liberally and he screamed in my face and I spat in his face more and Lianna swung her fuckin’ harp and knocked the two of us over and tearing the strings out of the frame.
Robes and Jakki rebuilt the tunes, losing and regaining and pounding away at the mesmerized audience, sucking up the soundwaves like Vonnegutt’s harmonia, nearly glowing in powerful reproductive lights. They almost burst in succulent passion—the eyes a-glow and skin vibrating loosely, it was obvious—when Lianna shattered their inter-sensual minds with the zither that still hung loosely from her skirt. From the strewn out armaments of Lianna’s assault I hefted a heavily patched didgeridoo, making long low tribal sounds which were complemented immediately by high twin twittery sounds from Lianna who, all smiles and chasing laughter, sucked up my rooted tribal spirit, thinking me more of something I’m not that what I am. I blew and sucked and blew making the deepdown madnesses well up in the crowd, rumbling away at the windows in their frames and the old-style glasses of the crotchety vinegar-aged undermasculine protectorate in the kiddie playground. Robes didn’t laugh but picked up my long breaths and shifted, pulling out the high astral sounds from the electric machine at his lips. Jakki tapped away at quick insect monster sounds, making skin on my legs and back and neck wriggle feverishly, ensuring her bestial nature and vicious teeth.
York, all two-hundred-some kilos of him, pounded into the tile debris behind Robes and he whipped out his lengthy harmonica linked to ultrathin speakers in the sides of his head and sang thru notes unheard outside of York’s padded basement dwelling. I avoided York up to this point, buffed up on soups he liberally borrowed from the pharmaceutical companies until they paid him for weekly testing. At one point he had C-cup tits, but by the next week they were gone without any surgery scars. The pharms paid for the amp-implants and he used them whatever he played, which was next to everything, and the double-harmonica made a point of that. York had apparently crafted it himself based on old school possibilities. He played under and over us, as if bird-lungs breathed and rebreathed constantly. Layered and intermingled notes shattered like storm windows and car crashes.
Lianna was the first to duel him out from under her strings. She pulled a hairclip from her endless masses and twittered away at different strings in slippery-sliding ways, making noise to a rhythm, summoning infernal chords that soared like fiery wings and soured wild-grape-like with near immediacy. Trying to reach under their interplay, my long bellows poked out opposite, rancorous rich spring water while Robes space-danced mindlessly to Jakki’s tit-tit-tittering which had nothing going on with his timorous shatter-sounds clashing like lightning on my long waving outward gushing streaming.
Robes took it away from us, bellowing with extraterrestrial-quasi-binary musical measurements, alien and earthen and I couldn’t keep with it. My long rhythms fell into asymmetries and they stayed there, riveting and welding and razing it all to the ground like napalm blasters on grass hut villages. My breaths thundered throughout but unmet and uninitiated in the rites that Robes was dishing out. My head was out, displayed under the suspended guillotine blade just like his namesake would have wanted. So I brought it down, nearly breaking the damn thing, and started haphazardly shouting, playing with the meter he was playing, mixing and remixing my own voice back with internalized equipment, like pounding peddles built into your feet. It wove into his brassy-ballsy-mindboggling-madness and I loved it. Lianna and Jakki faltered at my playfulness, at the unforeseen and unlikely blasting of molecular mechanics.
York halved his timing, interweaving it more clearly into the back-and-forth rhapsodies Robes and I were managing like tech’d up-lard ass CEOs. York—that big limey bastard—managed to match my wavelengths and make words appear that were not words and sayings that were unsaid. I wanted to punch the fucker for messing with my specs from the outside. Then I heard it, the bridging between Robes and me with the harmonized harmonica hermeneutics: York was playing in between Robes and me, linking us like one voice or one instrument, like one entity, the three of us gathering up nonsense into pseudo-intellectual-down-to-earth-lunar-wheat-synth-synced melodies. York was with Robes and with me, synchronicity or synergy, and with just the gaps left open for Lianna and Jakki to freeplay into it, the holes waiting for wholeness. York had found some major ‘grades somewhere that could link us or our wavelengths or some shit like that.
Jakki held her sticks tightly, knowing the opening before it exploded in a whisper, and she filled it, bursting out boogeyman/closet monster-like. No more tapping or tittering or cajoling the sounds gently, she filled the hard vacancies with majestic magnitudes of lengthy, shimmering brass echoes and the ash-flow-stampede-tectonic-thunders from her linked and interlinked with York’s bio-psi-neuro upheavals. Lianna took her zither and the stringy tunes leapt egomaniacally out, crashing heinously into York’s attempted harmonifications—whatever the hell you might call his playing—just to challenge the Anglo-Russian bastard. He swept back mighty reverberations and she filled the space guided Jujitsu-majestic-like into where he made it go, sound-bending or mending or grinding. Lianna only laughed in crazed hippie-dazed ways with both sets of vocal chords, transforming her chortles into magnificent possession orchestrations.
So Robes was jamming away blues master style with wailing pale-skin banshee types laying ruin to his southern roots. Jakki was ferociously purring extinct wild cat like as her toothbrush shattered on the cymbals, before tossing her stick apart and playing all sharp tooth and claw vicious, zombie-fighting insanity chucking a piece of broken brass at Lianna, nearly hitting York instead, before it shattered a scent boîte in some no-name’s shopping bag. Lianna fluidly jammed, flipping her feet madstyle bewitchin’ and coaxin’ out the steps from York’s goliath heels. York, the pharm-mutie-Übermensch-fuck, harmonized and mixed anything with which I voice-blasted him while tapping his toes to Lianna’s asymmetric offbeats. His notes did more interweaving and mixing than self-expression; he synergized and awoke the intercontextualities of our disparations. My doubletiming voice and re-voiced mixing exhausted my lungs and blood spat out when the static started bursting from the subsampled phonemes. Words-to-noise, noise-to-words, words-with-noise-to-nonsense-lyricism. Somewhere in the game I felt the tickle in my head like the semi-conductor buzz of a new ‘grade as it nestled down my spine and into my throat. I coughed, hacked, overloaded and blacked out. I thought:
You fuckin’ newb.
York laid a solid kick against my diaphragm while I was out, forcing a cough in backhanded Heimlich maneuvers, and when I woke the rough point of a rib somewhere dislodged jabbed at my insides. After the cough, Lianna had kindly prodded me with her foot, still strumming away, to double check my breathing. How sweet. No one missed a beat since my pallor didn’t change at all. Who needs enemies, aye?
The four of them sat above me, laying fetal on the supersmoothed tiles, drinking madly from stickered-up boîtes, smelling of sweat and compost and homebrew, but mostly of sweat. York spat on me, Jakki grinned and splashed some of her drink on me. Robes and Lianna chattered furiously over guerrilla tactics and mastermind tacticians; I could catch only every third or fourth word. York and Jakki weren’t saying much, mostly watching each other and the crowds, flummoxed by the debris from the show and frightened by my ill-composed posture. If this is what friends looked like, what does an enemy come out with (or without)?
Sitting up, half-lotus and breathing shallowly, I noticed the freestylin’ kiddo was circling us.
“Hey, come,” I shouted, hiding the expected rasp behind a croaking voice. The kid wandered up playing certain and sharp and not-too-giddy. “Take t’is,” I handed him a small jumper, “check out when t’e folks are away. Nothing naughty, just some smarts. Hide’t.” And he slipped in a slim pocket by his collar; well-done boy. He laid down a simple pound and I laughed low before he dashed off.
“What was’t?” Robes.
“Tunes, lit, ideas in concentrate.”
“T’ink’t’ll g’in?” Jakki, wondering at my foolishness.
“He needs t’em. We’ll see nex’time.”
“Nex’?” Lianna. From off the table I filched a smokeless stick, lit it with York’s chained lighter, and dragged long and rough.
“If y’up t’it.”
They laughed at my hoarse lines. I smiled vaguely and coughed.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
A Place in Space
I have just begun reading Gary Snyder's "A Place in Space" and instantly love it. The edition is firm and vaguely sharp and sturdy in my hands, slightly smaller than expected but thick and substantial like a hunk of cheese. The prose is atypical, often broken but so simply rich. He relies on his own insight, experience, knowledge to encounter the world and share it with others. He is candid and warm and welcomig and I don't know what I expected but wonder why I had to order it after a year or two of looking for a copy in a bookstore. Immediately one identifies his beat (post-beat?) sensibilities and puts his Buddhist disposition out in front, like a sensing hand or sniffing nose.
I am working steadily through "Blessed Unrest" and James Tiptree, Jr.'s "The Starry Rift" besides, but with a few of Snyder's books laying around, I may get distracted.
I am working steadily through "Blessed Unrest" and James Tiptree, Jr.'s "The Starry Rift" besides, but with a few of Snyder's books laying around, I may get distracted.
More Views From My Bike
Summer in Lincoln is not altogether a pleasant affair. The other day it was in the upper nineties--where it stayed into the night--with simply awful humidity. Now, I don't tend to have much sympathy for the average exercise/sleeveless jersey shirt wearer. They simply aren't evening wear and if your body is such that it bursts out of its clothing, drop the car and get a bike, it'll help with the farmer's tan. So, it was with some dismay that I realized how tired I was with rolling up my shirt sleeves when I was biking, so I tore off the short sleeves of one and then two of my more threadbare undershirts. (One has a bunch of small paint stains, but they are of similar mint.) Not only that, but with oil spill picking up again today (turns out a robot ran into the "capped" well and broke the contraption) and its prevalence in the news overall, I thought it wise to put something on the back of my biking shirts.
More than once I have been accosted by passersby for biking and, more recently, for biking in the road. First of all, commuter bikes belong in the road. Walking is generally avoided in South Lincoln--everything is too sprawled out unless you're feeling ambitious--but there and just about everywhere else, roads are likely to be in better repair, not have debris, and provide more dexterity if an obstacle presents itself. As a fantastic little poster once posited, "We are traffic." So stop bitching and share the road. Second, at least once someone threw trash at me and at least once some school kids tried to tease me for biking. I don't get it, really. And given that these interactions occur at about 20 mph, I decided to put something on my shirt to speak up for me.
The latter is partially inspired (or at least cited as the appropriate figure) by B-Cycle's video announcement (PSA? Ad? Whatever.) and the former is a little double entendre that I made up--as far as I know--and has the approval of Miss Lacie Doughtery and Mr Ryan Hansen. It isn't a shirt I would, say, pay for, but something I guess I would wear if it were free. Besides, the typeface and picture turned out quite clear and concise, which inspires me. If you have any pro-bike jokes, statements, double entendres, or whatever, let me know, I would love to make more. Oddly, I noticed a shirt on a customer at Ivanna Cone with a similar image as the former, that is small figures stating that bikes have infinite city and highway mileage. The images were a little too small for much use, but I enjoyed it.
So, hopefully I can get retort to a few derisive comments, make someone laugh, and be a little fresher than I otherwise would be on my rides now. I am glad I got around to writing these shirts, which isn't something I usually do. Most of my friends may take note that I am not much of a tee-shirt guy to begin with. At work, biking, and doing chores I am pretty likely to be wearing one these days, but at school and around the house I tend toward the button up shirts. What can I say? I am classy like that.
In other news, I put up my hammock from Brazil. It has the Brazilian tri-color in a plaid pattern and is hitched around a tree and a deck post. It is absurdly widespread because it is way too difficult to find appropriately spaced columns around one's home. I plan on doing some quality reading with the help of sunscreen before heading off to work. It is strange to feel proud of such small endeavors--hanging a hammock, writing on a shirt--but they feel so earnestly appropriate right now, to summer and to sun and to biking. It is a strange, oppressive, and awfully weighty summer in Nebraska, but accented with deliciously cool, sunny days with their own sense of openness, of friendliness, and you are just there, enjoying it despite knowing that in twenty-four hours it will turn around and backhand you across the face.
Oh Nebraska, I have to love how sincere your seasons are.
More than once I have been accosted by passersby for biking and, more recently, for biking in the road. First of all, commuter bikes belong in the road. Walking is generally avoided in South Lincoln--everything is too sprawled out unless you're feeling ambitious--but there and just about everywhere else, roads are likely to be in better repair, not have debris, and provide more dexterity if an obstacle presents itself. As a fantastic little poster once posited, "We are traffic." So stop bitching and share the road. Second, at least once someone threw trash at me and at least once some school kids tried to tease me for biking. I don't get it, really. And given that these interactions occur at about 20 mph, I decided to put something on my shirt to speak up for me.
The latter is partially inspired (or at least cited as the appropriate figure) by B-Cycle's video announcement (PSA? Ad? Whatever.) and the former is a little double entendre that I made up--as far as I know--and has the approval of Miss Lacie Doughtery and Mr Ryan Hansen. It isn't a shirt I would, say, pay for, but something I guess I would wear if it were free. Besides, the typeface and picture turned out quite clear and concise, which inspires me. If you have any pro-bike jokes, statements, double entendres, or whatever, let me know, I would love to make more. Oddly, I noticed a shirt on a customer at Ivanna Cone with a similar image as the former, that is small figures stating that bikes have infinite city and highway mileage. The images were a little too small for much use, but I enjoyed it.
So, hopefully I can get retort to a few derisive comments, make someone laugh, and be a little fresher than I otherwise would be on my rides now. I am glad I got around to writing these shirts, which isn't something I usually do. Most of my friends may take note that I am not much of a tee-shirt guy to begin with. At work, biking, and doing chores I am pretty likely to be wearing one these days, but at school and around the house I tend toward the button up shirts. What can I say? I am classy like that.
In other news, I put up my hammock from Brazil. It has the Brazilian tri-color in a plaid pattern and is hitched around a tree and a deck post. It is absurdly widespread because it is way too difficult to find appropriately spaced columns around one's home. I plan on doing some quality reading with the help of sunscreen before heading off to work. It is strange to feel proud of such small endeavors--hanging a hammock, writing on a shirt--but they feel so earnestly appropriate right now, to summer and to sun and to biking. It is a strange, oppressive, and awfully weighty summer in Nebraska, but accented with deliciously cool, sunny days with their own sense of openness, of friendliness, and you are just there, enjoying it despite knowing that in twenty-four hours it will turn around and backhand you across the face.
Oh Nebraska, I have to love how sincere your seasons are.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Morning Writes & Focaccia
I have begun to listen to the "Writing Fiction" podcasts that are care of the iTunes U, whatever that is. It may be from the Open University, but I am not positive. Though I am familiar with a good deal of the material--I have spent some time in writing courses and involved in similar discussions--I find it comforting to hear it again. Many of the comments made by writers are candid and warm, self-effacing and earnest. I refer especially to comments on Morning Writes: Getting up early, or staying up late, to write without much getting in the way. Though my Lorenzo Vincenzi weird fiction detective story is going well--I was delighted to hear that Miss Lauren Fulner has read all that I have posted thus far--I thought it wise to take up the morning writes practice. I have difficulty maintaining such good habits, but it is a drive to get me up in the morning and a nice replacement for the recent forgetting of dreams. (I keep a dream journal, but it has been rather sparse lately.)
Anyway, here is what I managed to just finish. I started it upon waking, but the need for a shower and breakfast--not to mention my brother and his wife's noisemaking upstairs--drove to delay its conclusion. It started out somewhat journalistic--the feel of a still groggy mind--but developed into a sort of magical realism-gaslight romance feel. I make light suggestions of the larger world, but it evolves more and more into the anxiety of feeling divorced from that world. I hope you find it enjoyable.
Also, I am baking focaccia today for dinner with a family friend. I may have posted this before, but it changes a little each time. Here is a rough and tumble recipe for it:
Garlic Herb Focaccia
2 cups warm water
2 cups white flour
1-2 Tbsp honey
2+ Tbsp dry yeast
Blend in a large bowl and allow to rest about 30 minutes.
1 & 1/2 cups cornmeal
2 cups wheat flour (I'm using fresh hard red wheat)
1 cup white flour
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4-1/3 cup dried herbs (thyme, oregano, basil, parsley, black pepper)
four cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbsp salt
Add ingredients--begin with olive oil and garlic for ease, end with salt to preserve the yeast--and stir until slightly firm. Turn out on floured counter and knead together. The olive oil takes time to absorb, so it ought to remain sticky. Return to the bowl, cover, and allow to rest for at least one hour.
Flour for dusting
Olive oil for greasing
about 1 tsp course salt (optional)
Turn out on floured counter and knead, gradually adding just enough flour to prevent it from sticking. (You can use whichever flour you'd prefer; white for sweeter, wheat for heartier, cornmeal for sweet and slightly textured.) Divide into pieces (three or four loaves, probably), knead further and flatten into white circles or rectangles. Lightly grease baking sheets or pans (I've used round cake pans pretty successfully before), place loaves on sheets, then flip to grease both sides, and allow to rest. After thirty to forty-five minutes, indent the dough slightly and sprinkle in some salt. Let it rest about ten more minutes before baking at 400 F until golden brown, which is something like 30 minutes. Enjoy!
~~~
Now for a story...
First Mate,
23 June 2010
My mind is scattered, as if to the four winds. It is not that things are on it, but that it cannot support anything. I rest the simplest of figures, equations, notions on it and it just flattens and disperses like a cloud. The cloud mind. The cloud mind is a symptom of unpleasant things, a reality dealt with in the present that others have never detected, at least not to the prevalence of today.
I feel no duller than I did yesterday or the day before. In fact, friends and family can still remark on my wit and good humor, but it is all spoken ad hoc and when they remark on past conversations or jokes, it is all I can do to not burst out in tears. I cannot not summon it. The memories, the words, the depth, it escapes me altogether.
Only Jessica knows the truth and now I am frightened by her.
I have responsibilities. I am mate of a ship in the sky. We carry goods and people between the skyscraping cities. Many, many goods can be fired at lightning speed on electric currents over the land, they whiz and surge on their thin rails and make it where they need to go in a matter of minutes. Don't pack up the good china in them, it will probably only make it there in elegant little shards. Reception has contraptions for that to, if you let them use it, to mend the breaches in objects when you pick them up, leaving the faintest raised mark, like a forgotten scar over the porcelain or glass or what-have-you.
If you can afford it, you go for the dirigibles. The height, the view, the elegance, the excitement is unparalleled. We ascend higher and higher every year. In the thinness of the air, we go faster and faster, but without the bump and cajole of the trains. Here one can find a warm blossom of freedom, a flower that does not grow along tracks but where there are none and never will be.
It is in the sky that one must track a new course every time. Some routes are well-established, but with each new height and each returned season the currents change, the rivers in the sky transform. Early attempts were made to chart it, but the crew to do it was quick to discern its mercurial nature, its reinvention of itself over so short a period. Now, smaller craft dot the air and send out conditions, as fickle and unreliable as weather reports. Many have gardens on them—some with soil and others hydroponically in suspended marbles—to sustain the crews of one or two or three for their long expeditions to nowhere. I, on the other hand, need destinations.
To write, to dream, to recall; I cannot make sense of it. I am grasping at clouds, at straws, at the very sun and stars and moon in the sky. Something waits for us so high up, so far above the world. The more time I spend here the more I can feel it. The freedom of the winds is not the easiest of gifts to bear, and how I have borne it for so long.
This failure of mind, I suppose, is the result of some softness, some sensitivity to the world that the captain lacks. He is a hard man, determined to do his job and very little else. He has a locket with a print of his little wife back home. For a while she traveled with him, but it boggled her and she eventually confessed to hating it. She wondered where all the green had gone and asked everyone why they didn't miss it. She gardens, the captain would state, as I it were an explanation.
Those early flights when the captain was just starting and I still toddled after my mother and older siblings would go one for weeks, months. A global expedition was made by a crew from somewhere; they were short but fortified men, with the hard angles of mountains on their faces. They laughed easily, I heard. I met two working together on a flight when I was just a boy, eagerly throwing my weight into each tether, my fingers through each knot, my mind out in the rushing air. The men said the flight had made them all silent for months after their return, that it had gone just about as planned but no one has suspected the loneliness of such a sojourn. Even among friends, they said, it was all they could do to get out of bed. One man, with a week or so left in the expedition, flung himself overboard. He was a widower with a child, a daughter, who was cared for by his sister. The sister was distraught upon the telling of a story, an accident that had done it. They all knew otherwise.
We of the sky are far away from what makes us human on the Earth. I have read of evolution and out ancestors coming out of the trees and onto the plane, how our brains have developed to facilitate cohabitating in larger communities, about other mysteries of ourselves that I do not understand. Now, though, when I can muster the thought of it, I wonder what changes are afoot, what novel creatures we are making of ourselves in the sky.
I dread the silence of the long journeys of those early crews. We land frequently, sometimes multiple cities in a day. The captain is away from his little wife for such long stints, I wonder if she recognizes him anymore. I can think of her now, of her odd, almost child-like youthfulness; rosy cheeks, curly hair, fair complexion, short of stature, bouncing with energy—at least when she first boarded—and wonder why the captain does not return to her. Perhaps it was a marriage he did not desire, something hustled together in the wake of family tragedy or a surprise pregnancy—they have children, three I believe, of which the captain speaks little.
Our distance from the world at first bound us closer together. Richard, Germaine, Rose, Terrence, Keith, Julienne, Seville, Austin, Johann, Castor, Xin, and of course Jessica; these men and women have flown with my for years, my gales are theirs and my clear skies are theirs. We have adopted a silent language, one that includes the captain and one that does not. We accomplish our tasks, share meals in the galley, stroll about on deck, and appear in the infirmary when one of us is taken ill. Words, though, they continue to evaporate out of our hands, our mouths, our minds.
Jessica painted a mural in the galley on her off hours. It is a long cord, its individual threads coarse and defined and reminiscent of bulging muscle. It is set against a blue sky, light clouds to the left and malign thunderheads to the right. Where there are damages in the rope, Jessica painted complex knots to secure it. The mural is wide, filling the galley with a faintly blue light with its reflectivity. We applauded here and she smiled and nodded and said very little.
Afterward, she and I drank together. I have known her for many years and in fact recruited her for the Aspire when she first began to fly. I was not first mate then, but I had promise and the captain listened to me. That was still when the Aspire was a MkII; now it has become a MkXI, with very little of it remaining from those more rustic days. The new ship rises up around the old one, like a vine snaking all over, even inside where walls or frames or bars of metal are replaced with lighter material or sturdier girders. The captain aims to keep the mural in good repair throughout, which does cause some slight delay in the renovations.
After a few drinks, I confessed to her things that one addresses after drinks. My admiration, my satisfaction with her joining us on the Aspire, and then my anxiety about fading concentration. She smiled all the time, laughing a little at my earnestness. I thought of pushing her with affection, but her firm body language and slightly condescending grin deterred me. She spoke to, but mostly in the silent language of the crew that she had learned with indomitable speed.
That was months, maybe years ago. Time functions differently at these altitudes. It does not speak clearly anymore, but echoes and reverberates; dealing unforeseeable repercussions to the mind. Sometimes, between the clouds or in the stars, we fancy we can see the future or the past. These episodes give us chills and shivers and shudders. They are not alarming in their content, but by their reality. These images come with an unwholesome clarity, a dream-like certainty. We only acknowledge them with our silent language, movements of hand and suggestions of the eye; perhaps it is superstition, but to do anymore carries its own anxiety.
Jessica began to paint them. She keeps the canvases—made from spare wood, a sheet of steel, large shards of glass, a tightened length of sail—in her room, tucked into a wide, flat locker in the back of her cabin. She has less and less time to paint between the frequent landings and disembarkations, for which I am thankful. They are infused with that same certainty, that same unsettling reality. I wonder if she sees them more clearly. I attempted to speak with Germaine, Rose, and eventually Xin about them, each of whom I assumed had at least seen the image above her bed of a starflung walled city, but could identify in them a firmness of purposeful disinterest, took their cues, and avoided the subject.
I have spent eighteen months aerial. Eighteen months without more than an hour set foot on solid ground. I ignore the banister of the ship, what lies beyond; I make a point to not look upward, to see the invisible nations there. Jessica has taken up silence against me; not just the silence of words, which is nearly ubiquitous, but true silence. She speaks only sparingly to others, but makes eye contact and gestures to acknowledge others in passing. I fear her and, sometimes I fancy, she fears me.
We are skybound, always reaching greater heights and always becoming forgetful of the world beneath us. That world, after all, is so often displaced by its sisters seen like dreams through mist or between clouds or from impossible distances. The longer we are away the closer we approach them, the larger their renderings, the more fearful their actuality. My whispering mind, the flitting distraction of my every ghost of a thought, I wonder where it goes. I think that it is steps ahead of me, guiding me ever upward. Guiding me to places I refuse to see.
Anyway, here is what I managed to just finish. I started it upon waking, but the need for a shower and breakfast--not to mention my brother and his wife's noisemaking upstairs--drove to delay its conclusion. It started out somewhat journalistic--the feel of a still groggy mind--but developed into a sort of magical realism-gaslight romance feel. I make light suggestions of the larger world, but it evolves more and more into the anxiety of feeling divorced from that world. I hope you find it enjoyable.
Also, I am baking focaccia today for dinner with a family friend. I may have posted this before, but it changes a little each time. Here is a rough and tumble recipe for it:
Garlic Herb Focaccia
2 cups warm water
2 cups white flour
1-2 Tbsp honey
2+ Tbsp dry yeast
Blend in a large bowl and allow to rest about 30 minutes.
1 & 1/2 cups cornmeal
2 cups wheat flour (I'm using fresh hard red wheat)
1 cup white flour
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4-1/3 cup dried herbs (thyme, oregano, basil, parsley, black pepper)
four cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbsp salt
Add ingredients--begin with olive oil and garlic for ease, end with salt to preserve the yeast--and stir until slightly firm. Turn out on floured counter and knead together. The olive oil takes time to absorb, so it ought to remain sticky. Return to the bowl, cover, and allow to rest for at least one hour.
Flour for dusting
Olive oil for greasing
about 1 tsp course salt (optional)
Turn out on floured counter and knead, gradually adding just enough flour to prevent it from sticking. (You can use whichever flour you'd prefer; white for sweeter, wheat for heartier, cornmeal for sweet and slightly textured.) Divide into pieces (three or four loaves, probably), knead further and flatten into white circles or rectangles. Lightly grease baking sheets or pans (I've used round cake pans pretty successfully before), place loaves on sheets, then flip to grease both sides, and allow to rest. After thirty to forty-five minutes, indent the dough slightly and sprinkle in some salt. Let it rest about ten more minutes before baking at 400 F until golden brown, which is something like 30 minutes. Enjoy!
~~~
Now for a story...
First Mate,
23 June 2010
My mind is scattered, as if to the four winds. It is not that things are on it, but that it cannot support anything. I rest the simplest of figures, equations, notions on it and it just flattens and disperses like a cloud. The cloud mind. The cloud mind is a symptom of unpleasant things, a reality dealt with in the present that others have never detected, at least not to the prevalence of today.
I feel no duller than I did yesterday or the day before. In fact, friends and family can still remark on my wit and good humor, but it is all spoken ad hoc and when they remark on past conversations or jokes, it is all I can do to not burst out in tears. I cannot not summon it. The memories, the words, the depth, it escapes me altogether.
Only Jessica knows the truth and now I am frightened by her.
I have responsibilities. I am mate of a ship in the sky. We carry goods and people between the skyscraping cities. Many, many goods can be fired at lightning speed on electric currents over the land, they whiz and surge on their thin rails and make it where they need to go in a matter of minutes. Don't pack up the good china in them, it will probably only make it there in elegant little shards. Reception has contraptions for that to, if you let them use it, to mend the breaches in objects when you pick them up, leaving the faintest raised mark, like a forgotten scar over the porcelain or glass or what-have-you.
If you can afford it, you go for the dirigibles. The height, the view, the elegance, the excitement is unparalleled. We ascend higher and higher every year. In the thinness of the air, we go faster and faster, but without the bump and cajole of the trains. Here one can find a warm blossom of freedom, a flower that does not grow along tracks but where there are none and never will be.
It is in the sky that one must track a new course every time. Some routes are well-established, but with each new height and each returned season the currents change, the rivers in the sky transform. Early attempts were made to chart it, but the crew to do it was quick to discern its mercurial nature, its reinvention of itself over so short a period. Now, smaller craft dot the air and send out conditions, as fickle and unreliable as weather reports. Many have gardens on them—some with soil and others hydroponically in suspended marbles—to sustain the crews of one or two or three for their long expeditions to nowhere. I, on the other hand, need destinations.
To write, to dream, to recall; I cannot make sense of it. I am grasping at clouds, at straws, at the very sun and stars and moon in the sky. Something waits for us so high up, so far above the world. The more time I spend here the more I can feel it. The freedom of the winds is not the easiest of gifts to bear, and how I have borne it for so long.
This failure of mind, I suppose, is the result of some softness, some sensitivity to the world that the captain lacks. He is a hard man, determined to do his job and very little else. He has a locket with a print of his little wife back home. For a while she traveled with him, but it boggled her and she eventually confessed to hating it. She wondered where all the green had gone and asked everyone why they didn't miss it. She gardens, the captain would state, as I it were an explanation.
Those early flights when the captain was just starting and I still toddled after my mother and older siblings would go one for weeks, months. A global expedition was made by a crew from somewhere; they were short but fortified men, with the hard angles of mountains on their faces. They laughed easily, I heard. I met two working together on a flight when I was just a boy, eagerly throwing my weight into each tether, my fingers through each knot, my mind out in the rushing air. The men said the flight had made them all silent for months after their return, that it had gone just about as planned but no one has suspected the loneliness of such a sojourn. Even among friends, they said, it was all they could do to get out of bed. One man, with a week or so left in the expedition, flung himself overboard. He was a widower with a child, a daughter, who was cared for by his sister. The sister was distraught upon the telling of a story, an accident that had done it. They all knew otherwise.
We of the sky are far away from what makes us human on the Earth. I have read of evolution and out ancestors coming out of the trees and onto the plane, how our brains have developed to facilitate cohabitating in larger communities, about other mysteries of ourselves that I do not understand. Now, though, when I can muster the thought of it, I wonder what changes are afoot, what novel creatures we are making of ourselves in the sky.
I dread the silence of the long journeys of those early crews. We land frequently, sometimes multiple cities in a day. The captain is away from his little wife for such long stints, I wonder if she recognizes him anymore. I can think of her now, of her odd, almost child-like youthfulness; rosy cheeks, curly hair, fair complexion, short of stature, bouncing with energy—at least when she first boarded—and wonder why the captain does not return to her. Perhaps it was a marriage he did not desire, something hustled together in the wake of family tragedy or a surprise pregnancy—they have children, three I believe, of which the captain speaks little.
Our distance from the world at first bound us closer together. Richard, Germaine, Rose, Terrence, Keith, Julienne, Seville, Austin, Johann, Castor, Xin, and of course Jessica; these men and women have flown with my for years, my gales are theirs and my clear skies are theirs. We have adopted a silent language, one that includes the captain and one that does not. We accomplish our tasks, share meals in the galley, stroll about on deck, and appear in the infirmary when one of us is taken ill. Words, though, they continue to evaporate out of our hands, our mouths, our minds.
Jessica painted a mural in the galley on her off hours. It is a long cord, its individual threads coarse and defined and reminiscent of bulging muscle. It is set against a blue sky, light clouds to the left and malign thunderheads to the right. Where there are damages in the rope, Jessica painted complex knots to secure it. The mural is wide, filling the galley with a faintly blue light with its reflectivity. We applauded here and she smiled and nodded and said very little.
Afterward, she and I drank together. I have known her for many years and in fact recruited her for the Aspire when she first began to fly. I was not first mate then, but I had promise and the captain listened to me. That was still when the Aspire was a MkII; now it has become a MkXI, with very little of it remaining from those more rustic days. The new ship rises up around the old one, like a vine snaking all over, even inside where walls or frames or bars of metal are replaced with lighter material or sturdier girders. The captain aims to keep the mural in good repair throughout, which does cause some slight delay in the renovations.
After a few drinks, I confessed to her things that one addresses after drinks. My admiration, my satisfaction with her joining us on the Aspire, and then my anxiety about fading concentration. She smiled all the time, laughing a little at my earnestness. I thought of pushing her with affection, but her firm body language and slightly condescending grin deterred me. She spoke to, but mostly in the silent language of the crew that she had learned with indomitable speed.
That was months, maybe years ago. Time functions differently at these altitudes. It does not speak clearly anymore, but echoes and reverberates; dealing unforeseeable repercussions to the mind. Sometimes, between the clouds or in the stars, we fancy we can see the future or the past. These episodes give us chills and shivers and shudders. They are not alarming in their content, but by their reality. These images come with an unwholesome clarity, a dream-like certainty. We only acknowledge them with our silent language, movements of hand and suggestions of the eye; perhaps it is superstition, but to do anymore carries its own anxiety.
Jessica began to paint them. She keeps the canvases—made from spare wood, a sheet of steel, large shards of glass, a tightened length of sail—in her room, tucked into a wide, flat locker in the back of her cabin. She has less and less time to paint between the frequent landings and disembarkations, for which I am thankful. They are infused with that same certainty, that same unsettling reality. I wonder if she sees them more clearly. I attempted to speak with Germaine, Rose, and eventually Xin about them, each of whom I assumed had at least seen the image above her bed of a starflung walled city, but could identify in them a firmness of purposeful disinterest, took their cues, and avoided the subject.
I have spent eighteen months aerial. Eighteen months without more than an hour set foot on solid ground. I ignore the banister of the ship, what lies beyond; I make a point to not look upward, to see the invisible nations there. Jessica has taken up silence against me; not just the silence of words, which is nearly ubiquitous, but true silence. She speaks only sparingly to others, but makes eye contact and gestures to acknowledge others in passing. I fear her and, sometimes I fancy, she fears me.
We are skybound, always reaching greater heights and always becoming forgetful of the world beneath us. That world, after all, is so often displaced by its sisters seen like dreams through mist or between clouds or from impossible distances. The longer we are away the closer we approach them, the larger their renderings, the more fearful their actuality. My whispering mind, the flitting distraction of my every ghost of a thought, I wonder where it goes. I think that it is steps ahead of me, guiding me ever upward. Guiding me to places I refuse to see.
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