I was watching Inception, and every time this dude came on screen I felt this small tug at my memory. I knew I had seen him from somewhere before. I KNEW it, but could not for the life of me place his face. Well now, a week later, as I was doing something completely unrelated to anything, it hit me. It's Tommy from 3rd Rock from the Sun.
Looking through his discography, 3rd Rock was the only other thing I've seen him in. So now every time I recall a scene from Inception I see Tommy, the alien with long hair, running around in people's minds. Wonderful.
And no, this is not particularly blog worthy, but I'm trying to build up a habit again.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Books Books Books
Why do I love books? Because these sort of things exist:
The Voynich Manuscript
And
Codex Seraphinianus
The Voynich Manuscript
And
Codex Seraphinianus
I was reading this blog a while ago and it got me thinking about many things, which is something I find DFW does whenever I run into him. The source article is worth reading here. At this point I'm blogging about a blog about a blog about the original text, when it's the original text I'm looking for, but I suppose that's how information travels nowadays, and since I don't have the money, time, or space for a new book at the moment an excerpt will suffice.
The important quote is here:
My first urge was to say that this was true, but then I wondered if the books I have read really support it.
What have I read that's both Serious Lit and recent? By recent I suppose Joyce is a good cutoff.
We have The Fountainhead, DFW's own Infinite Jest (Though only a small part of it, as true to the joke I didn't bother to finish), Invisible Cities, a good smörgåsbord of HS required reading, like Animal Farm and Catcher in the Rye... And even among these titles the only ones that might not be considered old is IJ, which was published in the 90s, and Invisible Cities, which was published in 1972. In other words, I have no idea what passes for a Serious Novel nowadays. If it was written before I was born I probably have not bothered with it.
For a while I've noticed that I simply do not like 'modern' novels and have been struggling to understand this bias. For the most part I have assumed that the problem was in the sheer number of novels being published and the fact that the cream has not yet risen, which means the modern reader is slogging through the crap that has been only somewhat sifted out by the publishing industry. The democratization of publishing has exacerbated the problem. When I went up to Lunacon there were a number of authors peddling their small press publications. I purchased a book and found it riddled with basic grammar and copy errors before I even realized that as a story it wasn't any good.
If you go to Barnes and Noble, where the stock is more closely curated, you will still find that 99% of the titles are completely mediocre. Slogging through a minefield of duds is not my idea of a good time, and so I've stuck to what I know will at least give me something, even if it's nothing more than a stronger historical perspective or a familiarity with a title that has had an effect on literature as a whole. Even then you have duds. The Octopus was not worth my time, but the chances that I wonder why I bothered drop considerably when I go back 50 years. So, as a reader I'm not really equipped to talk about the situation of modern Lit.
I think the reason I feel so inclined to nod my head at DFW's position is that I can see the influence of the thought he is expressing in my own writing. Perhaps it's because I'm a denizen of the internet, where expressing passion is akin to being trolled, but it seems almost impossible to hit earnest without slipping into shrill. Perhaps it's because I'm an intellectual child of the 1900s that I struggle with the mores of my own time, but I would like to write something earnest and forward and true to an older aesthetic without having it feel pretentious and out of touch.
The important quote is here:
Serious Novels after Joyce tend to be valued and studied mainly for their formal ingenuity. Such is the modernist legacy that we now presume as a matter of course that “serious” literature will be aesthetically distanced from real lived life.
Pointing to Ippolit’s “Necessary Explanation” in The Idiot, Wallace asks:
Can you imagine any of our own major novelists allowing a character to say stuff like this (not, mind you, just as hypocritical bombast so that some ironic hero can stick a pin in it, but as part of a ten-page monologue by somebody trying to decide whether to commit suicide)? The reason you can’t is the reason he wouldn’t: such a novelist would be, by our lights, pretentious and overwrought and silly. The straight presentation of such a speech in a Serious Novel today would provoke not outrage or invective, but worse—one raised eyebrow and a very cool smile…. People would either laugh or be embarrassed for us. Given this…who is to blame for the unseriousness of our serious fiction? The culture, the laughers? But they wouldn’t (could not) laugh if a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction. But how to make it that?
My first urge was to say that this was true, but then I wondered if the books I have read really support it.
What have I read that's both Serious Lit and recent? By recent I suppose Joyce is a good cutoff.
We have The Fountainhead, DFW's own Infinite Jest (Though only a small part of it, as true to the joke I didn't bother to finish), Invisible Cities, a good smörgåsbord of HS required reading, like Animal Farm and Catcher in the Rye... And even among these titles the only ones that might not be considered old is IJ, which was published in the 90s, and Invisible Cities, which was published in 1972. In other words, I have no idea what passes for a Serious Novel nowadays. If it was written before I was born I probably have not bothered with it.
For a while I've noticed that I simply do not like 'modern' novels and have been struggling to understand this bias. For the most part I have assumed that the problem was in the sheer number of novels being published and the fact that the cream has not yet risen, which means the modern reader is slogging through the crap that has been only somewhat sifted out by the publishing industry. The democratization of publishing has exacerbated the problem. When I went up to Lunacon there were a number of authors peddling their small press publications. I purchased a book and found it riddled with basic grammar and copy errors before I even realized that as a story it wasn't any good.
If you go to Barnes and Noble, where the stock is more closely curated, you will still find that 99% of the titles are completely mediocre. Slogging through a minefield of duds is not my idea of a good time, and so I've stuck to what I know will at least give me something, even if it's nothing more than a stronger historical perspective or a familiarity with a title that has had an effect on literature as a whole. Even then you have duds. The Octopus was not worth my time, but the chances that I wonder why I bothered drop considerably when I go back 50 years. So, as a reader I'm not really equipped to talk about the situation of modern Lit.
I think the reason I feel so inclined to nod my head at DFW's position is that I can see the influence of the thought he is expressing in my own writing. Perhaps it's because I'm a denizen of the internet, where expressing passion is akin to being trolled, but it seems almost impossible to hit earnest without slipping into shrill. Perhaps it's because I'm an intellectual child of the 1900s that I struggle with the mores of my own time, but I would like to write something earnest and forward and true to an older aesthetic without having it feel pretentious and out of touch.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
When things get complicated. I go quiet. Right now things are getting moderately complicated so I haven't been posting much. Here's a short update.
I tried near the beginning of this month to induce a radical change of habit by writing five hours a day. The first day I managed 2 hours, the second 1, I skipped the third, struggled past 1 hour on the fourth, and have been writing in 10min fits and starts for the past 2 weeks since. Ok, this last week I didn't write a single thing that I can recall. Today is Monday, so maybe this week will be a little better.
A while ago Blizzard decided the best way to make people civil towards one another on the internet was to make them sign their full names to any statement they made of the official forums. The idiocy of asking people to out themselves to a community that is notorious for immaturity, flaming, and ridiculous vendettas that sometimes span years and servers should be self apparent. I and enough other subscribers canceled our subscriptions and gave enough negative feedback that the decision was reversed within three days, but even so the thread announcing that reversal is going strong at 300+ pages. To put it into some context, the initial thread where the change was announced was locked as it approached 2500 pages. Considering it was open for only 3 days, that's 833 pages a day, 35 pages an hour, and about half a page a minute. This does not take into account that this is only discussion on the main thread. New threads were popping up every second and being deleted just as fast. Like many other posters mentioned, I've never seen any large community react so negatively and so unanimously about an issue on the internet.
Even though Blizz backed down my account remains canceled. I've been hemming and hawing about whether or not I want to renew it. On the one hand, my mage has hit a dead end. There is no raiding in my guild to speak of, and I don't care to RP in the server I'm on. If I walked away from him now I wouldn't feel all too bad. I've given up on seeing the Lich King by the expansion, and no one even seems to be looking at the Ruby Sanctum.
On the other hand I've been getting a hankering for moving away from PvP and spending some time RPing again. For me this means going back to Sentinels, and while RP is a lot of fun, and a lot more creative than anything else I've been doing lately, it also is intensely time consuming. I'll just have to see how I feel when it comes time to pay again.
And, I'm moving out to Denver in a few weeks. That's the complicated part.
I tried near the beginning of this month to induce a radical change of habit by writing five hours a day. The first day I managed 2 hours, the second 1, I skipped the third, struggled past 1 hour on the fourth, and have been writing in 10min fits and starts for the past 2 weeks since. Ok, this last week I didn't write a single thing that I can recall. Today is Monday, so maybe this week will be a little better.
A while ago Blizzard decided the best way to make people civil towards one another on the internet was to make them sign their full names to any statement they made of the official forums. The idiocy of asking people to out themselves to a community that is notorious for immaturity, flaming, and ridiculous vendettas that sometimes span years and servers should be self apparent. I and enough other subscribers canceled our subscriptions and gave enough negative feedback that the decision was reversed within three days, but even so the thread announcing that reversal is going strong at 300+ pages. To put it into some context, the initial thread where the change was announced was locked as it approached 2500 pages. Considering it was open for only 3 days, that's 833 pages a day, 35 pages an hour, and about half a page a minute. This does not take into account that this is only discussion on the main thread. New threads were popping up every second and being deleted just as fast. Like many other posters mentioned, I've never seen any large community react so negatively and so unanimously about an issue on the internet.
Even though Blizz backed down my account remains canceled. I've been hemming and hawing about whether or not I want to renew it. On the one hand, my mage has hit a dead end. There is no raiding in my guild to speak of, and I don't care to RP in the server I'm on. If I walked away from him now I wouldn't feel all too bad. I've given up on seeing the Lich King by the expansion, and no one even seems to be looking at the Ruby Sanctum.
On the other hand I've been getting a hankering for moving away from PvP and spending some time RPing again. For me this means going back to Sentinels, and while RP is a lot of fun, and a lot more creative than anything else I've been doing lately, it also is intensely time consuming. I'll just have to see how I feel when it comes time to pay again.
And, I'm moving out to Denver in a few weeks. That's the complicated part.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Wikipedia sometimes introduces me to fascinating things.
Juan Pujol
Another good link for posterity:
Rules for writing fiction, by writers, to writers.
Hitting 'next blog' up in the blogger dashboard is probably the most useful aspect of this little pre-fabricated blogging service out there. Sometimes you can stumble upon interesting things, like unschooling. I personally think this is a great idea, but requires a certain sort of family environment to be really effective.
Juan Pujol
Another good link for posterity:
Rules for writing fiction, by writers, to writers.
Hitting 'next blog' up in the blogger dashboard is probably the most useful aspect of this little pre-fabricated blogging service out there. Sometimes you can stumble upon interesting things, like unschooling. I personally think this is a great idea, but requires a certain sort of family environment to be really effective.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
June had 0 posts. Why? Because it was a terrible boil of a month and its end was an immense relief. July is building up slowly, but with a transfer request and college application pending things are looking up. Another difference: I struggled through The Education of Henry Adams all through June and finished it on the first of July, along with the quick read Taroko Gorge. Taroko Gorge was an early review book for librarything, and as a rule I am suspicious of anything free, but it turned out to be a decent book, and being able to read within five hours was a nice change of pace after the 2 month task of The Education.
I'm reading The Fantasy Worlds of Peter Beagle now, and anthology of his works that includes the novella The Last Unicorn. I used to watch the movie adaptation religiously as a kid, so I'm looking forward to revisit the story through the original telling.
I'm reading The Fantasy Worlds of Peter Beagle now, and anthology of his works that includes the novella The Last Unicorn. I used to watch the movie adaptation religiously as a kid, so I'm looking forward to revisit the story through the original telling.
Monday, May 17, 2010
My room is now cleaner than it has been in over 4 years. The massive amount of crap that has been slowly pushing me out of my own abode has been defeated, for a time, until by my fatal neglect allows its inevitable return.
Work has started scheduling hours again and I am anticipating a paycheck fatter than $50 again. This is a good thing. I already miss the spare time, but only to a degree, and God willing things will keep moving forward and all this halting and waiting is in the past.
Work itself is the usual. The books and the co-workers make it constantly enjoyable, and I still learn new things from the various customers that come in looking for this and that. Because of our proximity to Princeton we get every sort of reader, from every corner of the earth. It's a good job for the Observer. The only thing that gets on my nerves are the people who collect half a shelf of magazines, sit down with their cheap latte for 4 hours straight flipping through everything, and then wander away without even closing the last thing they read, or even worse, dump their magazines in front of other magazines in the stacks as far from where they belong as possible, as if somehow this will wipe their bookstore karma for next time. Nope. If I ever procure the power to kill with my mind, you fuckers are the first to go.
I'm undecided about whether or not I'll destroy the kids who come in and study out of our test books for the entire day without even considering purchase. One the one hand they waste our time and our space and never put the books back. On the other hand those things are kind of expensive, and become useless after the test has been taken. On the super secret third hand, libraries exist for a reason. I think I'll destroy them too.
My book reading has crawled to a halt with Adams. I need more of an education on America in the 1800s than I have to get much out of it, so for the most part all of his references fly over my head. Without the context The Education of Henry Adams is not much more than a guy saying stuff like, "I went to France and kind of wasted my time there. Then I went to England and didn't do much there either." What actually happened, if anything, is hard to pick out.
I commit hyperbole here, but even the introduction is an apology for Adams being so "allusive" and "obscure", so I'm not off by much.
Work has started scheduling hours again and I am anticipating a paycheck fatter than $50 again. This is a good thing. I already miss the spare time, but only to a degree, and God willing things will keep moving forward and all this halting and waiting is in the past.
Work itself is the usual. The books and the co-workers make it constantly enjoyable, and I still learn new things from the various customers that come in looking for this and that. Because of our proximity to Princeton we get every sort of reader, from every corner of the earth. It's a good job for the Observer. The only thing that gets on my nerves are the people who collect half a shelf of magazines, sit down with their cheap latte for 4 hours straight flipping through everything, and then wander away without even closing the last thing they read, or even worse, dump their magazines in front of other magazines in the stacks as far from where they belong as possible, as if somehow this will wipe their bookstore karma for next time. Nope. If I ever procure the power to kill with my mind, you fuckers are the first to go.
I'm undecided about whether or not I'll destroy the kids who come in and study out of our test books for the entire day without even considering purchase. One the one hand they waste our time and our space and never put the books back. On the other hand those things are kind of expensive, and become useless after the test has been taken. On the super secret third hand, libraries exist for a reason. I think I'll destroy them too.
My book reading has crawled to a halt with Adams. I need more of an education on America in the 1800s than I have to get much out of it, so for the most part all of his references fly over my head. Without the context The Education of Henry Adams is not much more than a guy saying stuff like, "I went to France and kind of wasted my time there. Then I went to England and didn't do much there either." What actually happened, if anything, is hard to pick out.
I commit hyperbole here, but even the introduction is an apology for Adams being so "allusive" and "obscure", so I'm not off by much.
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