July 14, 2008
Computer broken. Posting from the damn library. New computer ordered, but delayed by holdup with the credit card. Why do I have the credit card, if every time I need to use it I have to call some 800 number and recite Gunga Din backwards to a machine?
Birkensnake update: I now have nightmares about screen printing. But supposedly the covers are done (I haven’t seen them all myself). I think we’re still waiting for thread to arrive in the mail, for the final act of binding. The truth is I have little control over this phase of the operation.
I also had a nightmare about Greek verbs. A couple of years ago, before I came to Brown, I was teaching myself Greek out of a book; now that I’m done with Brown I’m teaching myself Greek out of a book again. But now, unexpectedly, the verbs haunt me. Particularly λαμβανω, take, receive.
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July 2, 2008
When I say “finished,” I mean I was writing it and I’m not writing it anymore. I sent it to some publishers, but naturally one assumes that will come to nothing. But it seems finished, in the way that things sometimes seem finished; and I feel different now — at least I think I feel different now — than I did before I started it, so it’s also finished in that some change in the way I feel has been completed. Of course maybe I felt this way before and I just forgot. But I already have a new favorite David Bowie album (was Ziggy Stardust, now Hunky Dory), which seems significant.
The main change, which I admit I didn’t expect, seems to be that I have even less idea what I’m doing on a day-to-day basis than I did before. And I’ve never been strong in the knowing-what-I’m doing department. I tend to drift around inside. And it’s as though, in order to write this thing, I had to stop drifting a moment, and somehow fix some part of myself in a finite and durable form; and now that it’s done, all that fixity or concreteness that I had to scrounge to put together two hundred pages of text has gone out of me along with the book, leaving me vaguer and more indefinite than ever. It’s a bit how I imagine Sauron, Dark Lord of Mordor, might have felt after placing the greater part of his power in the One Ring. Is that weird? Does it happen to other people, besides me and Sauron? I always thought (stupidly, it now seems) that learning to write fiction would be a process of increasing certainty.
My working title is The Fixed Stars. That could change. If you’ve been walking around with a really killer book title in your head for a while, but despair of ever writing the book to match the title, please
contact me.
Like I said, maybe someone will publish it, maybe not. The question turns out to be less important to me than I thought it would. I’ll keep the blog abreast.
Maybe the thing to do is take up new hobbies. Stringed instruments? Herbalism? Shooting?
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June 30, 2008
It’s true, I am no longer a graduate student. I am, in the quaint terminology of my degree itself, a magister in artibus elegantibus.
I’ll be teaching science fiction writing to high school students for two weeks at the end of July, then I imagine moving on to janitorial work.
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or something like it. The really plague-like part lasted only a couple of days, during which I thought almost continuously of the solitary-death-by-fever scene in The Sheltering Sky, and hated Paul Bowles, with all my remaining strength, as though it were the existence of that scene that was somehow making me sick. Finally my fever went away, and now I just have this lingering cough, which I hardly mind except when it prevents me from sleeping.
Today I went to the doctor to see if the cough might be made to go away too. Probably a mistake, doctors’ offices being some of the most miserable places around — not as bad as the DMV, but close. I sat in one room for an hour, then another room for another hour, wondering whether I could just bolt, and then the doctor came in and prescribed me codeine. I took a walk in the cemetery across the street from his office and saw a hawk diving at a sparrow or whatnot over by all the Armenian graves. Right after the hawk, I saw a cardinal just for a second. I’m not sure what that means (but it obviously means something).
Here is my list of all the works of fiction that have actually frightened me:
- The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles
- Boy in Darkness, by Mervyn Peake
- “The White People,” by Arthur Machen
- “Not After Midnight,” by Daphne du Maurier
That’s it. “Not After Midnight” is probably the weakest of the bunch, and maybe actually works only in conjunction with other Daphne du Maurier stories — like on its own it wouldn’t have frightened me, but coming on the heels of “Don’t Look Now,” and “The Birds,” and “The Blue Lenses,” it did.
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June 17, 2008
I was doing too many things for a long time, and not writing here. Maybe I’ll write more here now — but slowly, slowly.
I was in New Hampshire for a week with Michelle and my mother. You can see some of Michelle’s pictures here. If it seems like there are more pictures of graveyards than you might expect, that’s because the graveyards of New Hampshire are innumerable. The state is practically carpeted in graveyards.
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May 6, 2008
I haven’t been posting, because I’ve been writing all the time, and I probably will continue not to post for a few weeks, because I will continue to write all the time. But meanwhile, if you find yourself wondering about words at all, and wanting to navigate them in ways the dictionary can’t quite help you with, you might look at WordNet, which apparently has been around forever, but which I’ve just discovered. I think it’s not intended primarily for use as a dictionary- or thesaurus-like database, but you can use it that way, and it’s weirdly great.
For example, if you look up “compost,” you discover that compost is a type of composition (composition: “a mixture of ingredients”), and that the other types of composition are paste, soup, and beebread.
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April 19, 2008
I bought a bar of Grampa’s brand pine tar soap or something like that. I don’t remember for sure what it’s called but there’s a picture of a grandfatherly man on the box. As it turns out, pine tar has a good smell that is similar to the good smell of burning wood. My bathroom smells like a cookout. I walk down the hall, suddenly have the impression that I’ve just come from a bonfire, and wonder why I don’t remember it.
Recently I was cooking bacon. Linnea and Josie left bacon here on Sunday and I decided to eat it all myself. The smell of the bacon blended nicely with the smell of pine tar soap. The entire apartment smelled of burning wood and cooking bacon, and you could control the relative strength of each by moving around the rooms. I also had porridge on the stove. The fire alarm went off. In my apartment there are actually, I think, three different fire alarms. One makes a slow blatting sound, like a robot farting. The second makes the more familiar high-pitched smoke detector scream. The third has a pleasant but urgent female voice, not unlike the one that tells you to press five or just stay on the line, saying, “Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire.
“Fire.
“Fire.
“Fire.
“Fire.
“Fire.”
The porridge was burning. I put it in the sink. The kitchen smelled like cooking bacon and burnt porridge. In the hall it smelled more like burnt porridge and less like cooking bacon. In the other hall it smelled like cooking bacon and burning wood, and not at all like burnt porridge. I put in some earplugs and continued cooking the bacon. It was a nice day outside, sunny, not hot but probably the warmest day so far this year. I sat on the porch. All the fire alarms were just as loud out there. It smelled like burnt porridge. I opened all the windows, put the fan on a chair in front of one of them, got out the extension cord, plugged in the fan, and turned it on to the highest setting, the one where it shakes the chair and also the floor. The fire alarms were no less loud but now the fan and the rattling chair were loud too. I enjoyed the bacon even though it had cooked unevenly. There wasn’t any porridge smoke, but there was still a burnt porridge smell. I went back out on the porch and finished the bacon.
I sat there for forty minutes or so. One of the fire alarms stopped, the high tweety one, but the klaxon one and the “Fire” one kept on. The burnt porridge smell also did not diminish, nor did the burning wood smell, but the cooking bacon smell was soon gone, or at least buried under the other smells. I thought I heard a truck drive up, so I went downstairs and around to the front of the building. There was a fire truck there, but no firemen. All the doors to the building were closed. It was quiet. There was no sign of firemen except for the fire truck. I waited around for a few minutes and then went back inside. The fire alarms stopped. It smelled like burnt porridge for the rest of the day. Now that smell is gone too. It still smells like burning wood in the bathroom, because of the soap.
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I will be reading from my thesis or something at 7pm on Tuesday, April 29, in the McCormack Family Theater at Brown. I’ll read for about twenty minutes. Also reading for about twenty minutes each will be Joanna Ruocco and Linnea Ogden, and if you are uncertain about hearing me read, I can assure you that it will be worth your while to hear them read. Anyone can come! It is fun for the whole family! I will probably read something about reproduction!
If for some reason you are interested in other thesis readings, or god knows what else, you might check the events calendar for the Literary Arts department.
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March 31, 2008
Joanna has sent me a kind of hash, apparently made out of my blog. It’s not good to read from beginning to end, but if you glance over it casually, as though to distract yourself from something else, there are some good parts.
Submit to Birkensnak a hot tub, or sex.
certified into a drawing foblog then I am enter a of random fiction attracted by the idecate at Amazon
(1)Remote Control Jod of good
“Binake checking accounents for our Birkens s a checking accountight, Birkensnake harkensnake.”
Something nice about making sense and then not making sense and then making sense again. I was noticing last week how it’s pleasurable just to understand something in the middle of things you don’t understand. Like if you’re walking down the street in a foreign country, say China, and all the signs are in Chinese, then it’s pleasant to see a sign in English and understand it. Even if it just says “SHOES” or whatever, and you don’t even need shoes. Or if you’ve just read ten stories where you can’t tell what the author is trying to say, and then you read a P. G. Wodehouse story, even one of the lesser P. G. Wodehouse stories, where the meaning of everything is very clear, that makes you feel good. Joanna’s hash, which I assume she generated with a machine, is probably more interesting than eighty percent of things written deliberately to entertain people.
I was playing a little bit with MegaHAL, which is a program that tries to have a conversation with you as though it were a person. The fun part is that you get to feed it the initial sentences from which it builds its brain. So for example you can give it Bishop’s lines from the script of Aliens,, and it will start talking like Bishop. It learns a little as you talk to it, and so the more you talk to it the more it will start to sound like you. What is the most interesting text to start MegaHAL off with? Just for fun I tried it with the blog-hash. I got this:
More american to me island but now livesat he is from rhode een me and him
is th from somewhere elseyland), whereas i am likely to forge under a i am
going to have for example, suppos eat the foam, agic or science? I de
florets? Is that m the broccoli.
Shall I eat the foam?
On mondays ays i eat the no the different parts is, i start cookingy i
prepare food now them whenever they m times and then eat of my meal at
rando osed to go together.
Is there foam in the meal?
Is it g ? Is that why people emptiness & despairgain to break up the total
panic absolut or something? Or is watch horror movies everyone would be
back to whe sex started, and my hand as soon ass than five times ircourse;
probably le ad to dream sex, i barises that might les a dream situation s
to try to run us s at us in the meal?
Today I went to Boston and walked in the Public Garden.
Is there foam in the public garden.
There was no foam there. There were ducks made of metal.
Is there foam in the streey? People throw slop o change the channel and we
are unable tdown in their jeeps, may begin to feel th it long enough you.
No fucking kidding.
No so on, whether they hat are simultaneousones, but the ones ts, the
sort-of-good ake them out at nighy bad.
I remember the metal ducks being in a different place in the public garden, and also smaller. But I might misremember.
Also among ampire squid, is amois infernalis, the v er: the southern
pudcies of tiny pudu dethem are the them in the public garden.
sweet
(By “america” i ue from wales or benind-bad.
If you want, you can download MegaHAL and my files and try it yourself. You’ll have to read the instructions, but it isn’t actually very hard. There are some other MegaHAL personality files on the same download page; it can talk like C3P0 or Ferris Bueller, it can talk in German; maybe it would be fun to mix the training files together, the blog hash plus Bishop, who knows?
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March 18, 2008
Sometimes I forget that there is such a thing as the vampire squid, but then I remember.
If you want to read accounts of other people’s dreams — and who doesn’t? — there’s the World Dream Bank. Most of the dreams appear to have been dreamt by one person, the site’s owner, and most of those that weren’t dreamt by him appear to have been dreamt by friends of his. Some dreams include interpretive notes by the dreamer. Some include artwork. It is a strange site; I think I’m glad it’s there.
If you want more dreams and less apparatus, there’s also another online dream bank.
Someday I might write a story incorporating all the organisms with my favorite scientific names. Naturally Vampyroteuthis infernalis, the vampire squid, is among them. Also among them are the two species of tiny pudu deer: the Southern Pudu, Pudu pudu, and the Northern Pudu, Pudu mephistopheles.
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