Being Offended Is the Natural Consequence of Leaving One’s Home
“Being offended is the natural consequence of leaving one’s home. I do not like aftershave lotion, adults who roller-skate, children who speak French, or anyone who is unduly tan. I do not, however, go around enacting legislation and putting up signs. In private I avoid such people; in public they have the run of the place. I stay at home as much as possible, and so should they. When it is necessary, however, to go out of the house, they must be prepared, as I am, to deal with the unpleasant personal habits of others. That is what “public” means.”
– Fran Lebowitz
You know what I forgot sucked? Puberty.
Here’s a Wednesday check in. My hay fever is raging fierce and mean so don’t expect much in the way of segues.
You know what I forgot sucked? Puberty.
Holy shit does puberty suck. You go from playing with GI Joes, drawing rainbows, and unicorns to crying uncontrollably for five hours and breaking out in zits all in the span of one week. And that’s just the early stages. Give it a few years and you’re a sanctimonious twit outraged because the book kiosk in the mall doesn’t have a copy of Naked Lunch.
But anyway, I bring this up because right before my Tuesday afternoon class (the one I teach alone) the 6th grade alpha couple (he’s a dope, and she’s a smart bully) had a big fight and broke up. Then it came time for my class. He’s not in it, but she is, and, well, the tears, my friends, the tears and I’m the “adult” in the room who, you know, has a lesson plan and wants to teach some English—but fuck all if that gets done when the season finale of Dynasty is going on in the classroom.
You know what’s really popular in Korea? “The North Face” athletic gear.
It’s so popular there are tons of knock off North Face gear. My dress sweat pants have a The Novella Face logo on them and my sneakers are The Red Face. Which only means I think of the Gas Face whenever I put this stuff on:
If I had a segue to the next part it would be here.
Mary Renault’s The King Must Die is one of the best fantasy novels I’ve read this year. No fooling. First, there’s the language:
“Then I saw why Apollo had sent a bard. Cretans do not know everything, though they think so. They know how to raise stones, but not men’s hearts. The people were afraid. So I understood why I was there, and called upon the god; and he put the power on me, to feel the work and make it music. I sang his praises, and gave the time. After a while, the seven kings with their sons and barons came forward and pulled for Apollo’s honor, standing among the people. Then the stones rose up slowly, and slid into the beds the Cretans had made for them. And they stood fast.”
Second is the world building, which is Ancient Greece seen through the eyes of a person who believes himself the son of Poseidon. If you’re a fan of Gene Wolfe or Catherynne Valente it’s worth checking out. Even if you always thought Theseus was a bit of a douche for leaving Ariadne on Naxos after she helped him escape the Labyrinth. It’s still worth it.
Gerard Jones on Finding Your Story
Oh no, this is my third post in a row on writing (!) after I’ve said how much I hated writing posts (!!). But it’s true I do hate writing posts, only this is from an interview with Gerard Jones. I loved Jones’ Killing Monsters and Men of Tomorrow. Read them. They are great.
(Thanks to pal Jay Ridler for sending this my way and absolute stranger Meghan Ward who conducted the interview.)
The Secret To Writing
From the movie adaption of Charles Willeford’s The Woman Chaser. I can’t remember the exact quote from the book, but I think this is close. Possibly the best piece of writing advice you’ll ever find in a misogynistic 1950s smut novel.
10 Quotes For Today Apropos of Nothing
1. “Do not be afraid of irreverence towards the memory of those who controlled your childhood.” – Bertrand Russell
2. “A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.” – Samuel Johnson
3. “Everyone has inside themself a parasitic being who is acting not at all to their advantage.” – William S. Burroughs
4. “The collapse will not be televised. Ignored and alone, each of us will experience it singly. As blemish and accusation, you will be photoshopped from the American Dream group portrait. The lower you slip, the more invisible you will become. The disconnect between what’s real and what’s broadcast will become even more obscene by the day.” – Linh Dinh
5. “It was like becoming nothing and realizing one was nothing anyway, ever.” – Patricia Highsmith
6. “My work is one long triumph over my limitations.” – Charles Willeford
7. “Unknown to us, we live in the midst of causes whose effects will surprise posterity.” – Jan Potocki
8. “But here we have come full circle, for anything we say about the city’s essence says more about our own lives and our own states of mind. The city has no center other than ourselves.” – Orhan Pamuk
9. “Much is familiar there, little has changed except, of course, for those who return.” – Karen Lord
10. “So much knowledge could only end in starvation.” – Victor Hugo
What He Said
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about said better than I could. It’s from Gord Sellar’s blog and deals with “Industrialization of Culture”. And while Gord’s speaking in terms of k-pop and girl groups, he mentions it being a wider trend:
One of the worst things about consumerism is that it gets a decade or two head start over our capacity to critique it. Actually that might be the worst thing.
Boast of Quietness
Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious and would like to
understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of that same poverty.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword,
the willow grove’s visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude.
They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to
arrive.
– Jorge Luis Borges
(translation Stephen Kessler)
Thanks to Saladin Ahmed for sending this my way.
Alleys
“Consider the nature of a city. It is a vast repository of time, the discarded times of all the men and women who have lived, worked, dreamed and died in the streets which grow like a willfully organic thing, unfurl like petals of a mired rose and yet lack evanescence so entirely that they preserve the past in haphazard layers, so this alley is old while the avenue that runs beside it is newly built but nevertheless has been built over the deep-down, dead-in-the-ground relics of the older, perhaps the original, huddle of alleys which germinated the entire quarter.”
– Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
Censors of Knowledge
Today’s quote comes from No Tech Magazine:
“All too often journals, galleries, and museums are becoming not disseminators of knowledge – as their lofty mission statements suggest – but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thing they do better than the Internet does.”
…
“More than in any other area, the application of restrictive copyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky question of how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already not paying them. And unlike ‘mere’ works of entertainment, liberal access to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind.”
The rest is here.
I suspect this would be a testy issue. Researchers want to protect their work. Whether a paid gatekeeper charging 20 USD for single use access for one month on one computer cuts down on plagiarism I don’t know. It certainly doesn’t allow the information to reach a wider audience. But that’s another testy issue.
I’ll also add that I don’t have an advanced degree and am not currently in graduate school, nor do I play a graduate student on TV.
And Another Reason
And here’s another reason to keep a blog: I get to make a little archive of neat stuff found or read online. Case in point, today’s post over at Things Magazine:
“What emerges from all this is more evidence of the steep valley that lies between history and nostalgia, wherein a penchant for the latter tends to shape one’s attitude and interpretation of the former.
The Internet exacerbates this condition, building up our perception of the past through the endless reproduction and celebration of past ephemera. The past is filtered through a lens of celebration, a perpetually art directed world, be it the gritty black and white world of life sold from a suitcase in these images of Brick Lane in the 80s, or Soviet ruins, or abandoned lunatic asylums, rusting machinery, filleted libraries, caches of Eastern European match box covers, esoteric ephemera from long-forgotten Olympic games, boring postcards, found photographs, passive aggressive notes left on refrigerator doors, weird LP records, shopping lists, ticket stubs, or even our own almost entirely context free Pelican Project.
Collectively, we’ve managed to make a fetish of the failed, forgotten and the marginal, mashing them together with the Utopian and the celebrated until the edges are blurred. Whether its the decline of manufacturing and urban centres (Chicago Urban Exploration) or nuclear catastrophe (Approaching Chernobyl) or the collapse of the housing market (Scenes from Surrendered Homes) is all rendered flat and equal by the vivid resonance of the image. This is where the overwhelming emotional content of a carefully filtered past meets our nostalgia for now (‘… a mourning for the transience of a moment when you are still in that moment‘), and the result is a state of being that appears to seek out the romantic past in every captured moment.”
Fetish of the failed? Nostalgia for now? Alliterative indigestion aside, I’m going to be chewing on these paragraphs for months.
Yesterweird 