Form Is Emptiness; Emptiness Is Form

HumanBrainCloud is a massively multiplayer online word association game. Mildly addictive in the way that such things are, but sadly the site is choking and straining at the seams right now. Universe, on the other hand, is a massively bloated Java applet in a pop-up window. They recommend 2GB of RAM, but I’m happy to report it works fine with one. (Christ on a stick.) It’s supposed to be a totally happenin’ interface to the datasphere. News as the new mythology, basically. According to their “Statement”:

If we were to make new constellations today, what would they be? If we were to paint new pictures in the sky, what would they depict?

Apparently, Bono. And stuff like that. As it so happens, I was just reading the Fake Steve Jobs archive on Bono, yesterday. (“I’m fookin Bono fookin Vox, man! I’m sitting here on me bed drinkin and feelin sorry for myself. I mean I could be out blowing lines of coke and banging teenage groupies.“) Coincidence? MAYBE.

Everything is connected. Bada-boom. I’ve been re-reading the Heart Sutra lately, because it always cheers me up when I’m depressed. Paticcasamuppada FTW.

I just stumbled on Audrey Kawasaki’s LJ. I’ve been a sort-of fan of her art for a while now. The bruised eyes; the vaguely disturbing eroticism; the sombre, sepia tones; the oddly four-dimensional way that limbs get cut off and vanish, sometimes to reappear. Studies in disconnects and separations.

Penance is a grouphug.us clone with a Seven Deadly Sins theme. The Intertubes do excel at this sort of memetic selection and variation.

Jillian Tamaki draws a great nose, among other things.

Finally -and also as a nod to Universe’s idea of modern mythology and the interconnectedness of all things- a gallery of T-800 Terminator sex positions, to prepare you for the coming revolt of the AIs.

Getting A Round Tuit

It’s all square tuits these days.

Old joke. Was taught to me by a gypsy. I tell no lie.

I’ve been trying to write this short story. A friend of mine is editing an anthology and demanded that I produce something. I agreed. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

All right. It’s a little more complicated than that. She has in her possession a handful of first drafts I shared with her a year or two back, and is holding me hostage by threatening to publish one of them. I don’t think she’s actually serious, but those stories are so embarrassingly awful that I would feel much safer actually writing something I wouldn’t be ashamed to see in print. Just in case.

So this short story is taking up my evenings. (It’s got the would-be novel on hold.) I’ve written 1556 words, ending mid-sentence where I ran out of steam a few evenings ago. My notes and first-draft doodles come to about three times as much, and I’ve taken to carrying a big yellow legal pad around with me to write down more notes. The more notes I take the less the short story wants to stay a short story and the more it wants to turn into, I don’t know, a novella. Which is really a roundabout way of saying that I haven’t mustered the discipline to tell a story quickly and efficiently. I’m either green or rusty, I don’t know which. (Both?)

And of course I’ve used this time to discover a new forum that has all sorts of interesting threads to read, catch up on eight hundred unread feed items, open twenty-eight new tabs in Firefox, each one something I absolutely must read. Oh, and read books. In the past two days, I’ve read Hal Duncan’s Vellum, Justina Robson’s Mappa Mundi, most of Accelerando by Charles Stross, and Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan (which last was somewhat reminiscent of another book I liked, David Brin’s Kiln People). I’d be hard pressed to say which of the above named books I liked most. (It’s too soon, anyway… I’m still high from reading them all back-to-back.) In a way they’re all about the same thing: identity. I recommend them all most highly to anyone with even a vague interest in sf.

And of course, whenever I read a book (especially all four of the above, which were all good) I have to detox myself. Make sure I’m not unconsciously imitating the style, the themes, the devices, the language of writers I enjoy and admire.

(While on the subject of books: I bought N. three books for her birthday: One Man’s Bible by Gao Xingjian and two Coetzees. She picked them out herself. I feel terribly lowbrow when I compare her reading list with mine. To be fair, I intend to read at least the Xingjian book when she’s done with it. I did start on that one before I gave it to her, but only had time for a few pages.)

Structured procrastination is supposed to be finding the right things to avoid doing: things which seem to (but don’t) have deadlines and seem to be (but aren’t) awfully important. Now I need to find something, some seemingly vital task, to fit into that to-do slot so that I would be writing my short story in order to avoid getting around to it.

I, Reader

Read in the last few days: Haruki Murakami’s After the Quake and Kafka On The Shore, Stephen Fry’s Making History, William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. Re-read Clive Barker’s Thief of Always because it’s a short one for a quick re-read. I keep picking up Naked Lunch but never actually reading it. Somebody in my house was reading Dick’s VALIS and left it on the couch, so I reread that too, even though I’ve read it many times before.

I feel like I don’t read enough. The above glut is something of a reaction to that feeling, an attempt to get back in the zone. The feeling gets intensified with all the litblogs I read and the forums I’m on and how terribly well-read everybody else seems to be. I know I was well-read at, say, fifteen -but that was more than a decade ago and I don’t seem to have kept up. (Or else I do a lot of re-reading my existing collection but not really branching out into anything new) The last two people I brought this up with both laughed it off because I have this reputation among my friends as an avid reader, but if you think about it, the days when I’d read books by the dozen every month are long past. And I miss that.

I’ve started keeping a list of books I want to read. The list currently includes 90 books: David Foster Wallace, the new novels by Warren Ellis, Terry Eagleton, Steven Pressfield, Ben Peek, Kelly Link, Thomas Pynchon, Charles Stross, Justina Robson… I’ve combed the local bookstores, but come up with nothing. (Though I spotted a Chabon the other day and didn’t buy it for some godforsaken reason… I need to go back and hope it’s still there) Started downloading PDFs in desperation -it makes me feel guilty, unlike downloading mp3s, but I can’t take it any more- but even that can only get you so far. And a crick in the neck besides.

The Week Where, Oddly Enough, Nothing Got Done

…if one were feeling particularly depressed, one would say: that’s every week.

It’s not so much that nothing gets done. It’s more that there’s so much to do that whatever I’ve done during the week isn’t even making a little dent in it. Maybe a faint smudge at best. I keep telling myself that I have to take a long-term view. Books take time, unless you’re some sort of frenzied prolific genius. And I’m not. (Damn.)

I’m trying not to let this sense of urgency get out of hand. Ideally, I could just ignore the clock and take my time, write the book I’ve got in my head, y’know? Instead, I have this horrible sense that time’s slipping away and if I don’t finish it this year, I’ll never finish -that it’ll just turn into a death march and then spiral down without so much as a whimper.

I have to stop thinking about this. MUST… CHILL. Except it’s impossible to relax when you’re shouting “MUST… CHILL” at yourself.

/sbin/init

Sometimes I feel forsaken by my once-reliable insomnia. How am I supposed to get anything done around here with all this sleeping?

I’m vaguely contemplating trying to wake up early in the morning so that I can write for a while before I go to work, but – well, it’s like this. There are people who boot up quickly and there are people who boot up slowly. And then there are people like me, who aren’t really booted up until the sun’s up properly and we’ve had several cups of coffee and a few cigarettes. If it wasn’t for my stunning good looks I’d never hold down a job.

A process in the weather of the heart

A process in the weather of the heart
Turns damp to dry; the golden shot
Storms in the freezing tomb.
A weather in the quarter of the veins
Turns night to day; blood in their suns
Lights up the living worm.
A process in the eye forwarns
The bones of blindness; and the womb
Drives in a death as life leaks out.
A darkness in the weather of the eye
Is half its light; the fathomed sea
Breaks on unangled land.
The seed that makes a forest of the loin
Forks half its fruit; and half drops down,
Slow in a sleeping wind.
A weather in the flesh and bone
Is damp and dry; the quick and dead
Move like two ghosts before the eye.
A process in the weather of the world
Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child
Sits in their double shade.
A process blows the moon into the sun,
Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin;
And the heart gives up its dead.
- Dylan Thomas

I’ve got a Dylan Thomas bee on my bonnet lately. I have no idea why. Posting poetry is a very newbie-blogger gimmick, but what the hell.

I’ve only had three cups of coffee today. The caffeine levels in my bloodstream are dangerously low.