Darker Blogistan

Why do you go to the movies?  Most would probably answer that they go to be entertained.  There's nothing wrong with that.  Entertainment need not consist only of 'splosions and eye candy, but also mental stimulation and emotional involvement.  We generally don't go to the movies to be educated, or to merely appreciate a "work of art" in the distanced abstract.

When I tried to read the novel version of The Road a few years back, I was not "entertained" on any level.  The book captured well a bleak and destroyed world, but I didn't see why I had to participate in this world as an observer.  Also, the fact that the man was compelled to live in this hell for his son's sake, and the fact that I have a young son as well, just made the book too horrific and unpleasant on every level.  It raised the sick thought that it would be a mercy for the boy to die, so that his father can join him and they would escape from the madness.  I don't enjoy reading novels where death is really the only solution.

I watched the film version of The Road because the suffering would only be limited to two hours (I am not a speed reader) and I could see what I might have missed from the last half of the book.  The film captures well an absolutely bleak and nihilistic landscape, and I could appreciate it on that level as a work of art.  But to what end?  Nihilism, misanthropy, death?  On some level, the viewer might take comfort in the world around him after the film ends, since it is so much better than the hell of the film.  But anyone capable of empathic engagement cannot help but share in the suffering of these characters.  As they starve and scramble to eat bugs, as they talk about how they would like to die, I could not help but feel that death was the only viable solution in this wasted world, and that the father kept going only out of a stubborn selfishness.

The film raised more questions than answers for me.  In the book, I'd been under the impression that the psychotic evil surrounding the man and his son was the result of some kind of zombification or mental virus, like the Ravers in the Firefly universe, but here in the film they seem sentient but affectless hillbillies missing digits.  Is this then the "natural" state of human savagery to which we would revert after the apocalypse?  People have criticized the glorification of the primitive "noble savage," but this portrayal of mankind-- feeding on women and children, leaving mutilated people in a permanently darkened basement to feed on at will-- goes far beyond the Hobbesian view of an evil human nature.  McCarthy's writing is almost Biblical in the sense of a humanity in a state of complete evil and sin-- the only redemption being the man's "God," i.e., his own son and the lessons the man teaches him.

After the hell of the film, the ending came off feeling a bit cheesy, as if this beast was forced to contort itself into a marginally positive ending just so the audience wouldn't go home and shoot themselves afterward.  The boy encounters the Guy Pearce character, a blank hillbilly very similar to the one the man and his son killed earlier in the movie.  Then we meet his family, and we are emphatically told by the "new mother" that they had been following the man and his son, and had been "very worried" for the boy.  How convenient.  Why didn't they contact them sooner?  It seems that although the world has become hell, the father might have slipped into paranoia to the degree that he wouldn't be able to recognize friends.  Or are they friends?  If we had been left with only the Pearce character, then the quixotic ending would leave us with the feeling that the boy just may be eaten, but the emotional appearance by his family seems an attempt to convince us that THIS IS A GOOD ENDING. 

I have the feeling that the answers wouldn't be provided in the book either.

Friends, while rappers go on how "we don't love them hoes," I must admit that I have always had a soft spot in my heart for the prostitute.  It's the world's oldest profession for a reason, people-- it works.  In India the is a goddess of prostitution and these sex workers have a role that is almost holy.  No, I don't live in a Pretty Woman fantasy that those whores are true innocents with hearts of gold, but it's impressive the lengths they'll go to to please us men.  In this sense, I feel kin to William Vollmann, the baroque postmodernist writer who writes so lovingly about fornicating with prostitutes in Whores for Gloria and The Rainbow Stories.  Prostitutes would even have sex with men who look like William Vollmann.  They'd even have sex with the elderly and the crippled, deformed dwarfs like Betelgeuse from The Howard Stern Show.  Are there any lengths to which a whore would not go?  I've always been interested in taking increasingly deformed individuals, like the guy from Goonies, and seeing if there is no physical deformity that can pierce the veneer of a whore's professionalism.  I doubt it.

Now, the standard criticism of a whore is that she only does it for money.  Absolutely true, of course.  But what other profession gets such virulent disrespect because the work is done "for the money?"  Politicians and we lawyers prostitute our principles to the highest bidder.  Many people live under the thumb of a third-rate retail-store despot in their dead-end jobs, suffering an adult life more disrespected than a child in school.  Is there anything wrong with doing it for money?  I've yet to see a reason why having sex for money is inherently wrong, and yet spending our waking lives doing some other random, meaningless task for money is A-OK.

I think the poor treatment of the whore arises largely from the modern Western illusion of individual love.  It is believed that you have to be subject to this arbitrary, uncontrollable emotion called "love" in order to fornicate.  No matter if the tryst is inspired in the depths of intoxication at the local dive bar or a trance club.. you are in control of your destiny and who you fuck!  Modern feminism has only served to make women more into cockless men, with repulsive results.  But remember how Raskolnikov married a purposefully unattractive and crippled woman at the end of Crime and Punishment as penance?    If so, imagine the karma of these prostitutes who fornicate with the desperate, the deranged, the unloved... all those men who need sex and aren't getting it.  And let's face it, is in an obvious need unless you are a masochist like the Catholic priests of old or 19th-century German philosophers.

The whore is one of the most noble of professions.

The porn starlet is a different matter.  People might think that they are the pinnacle of whoredom with their wealth and their fame, but I disagree.  Porn starlets do not fuck the same needy men like the whore does.  Their sex is limited to a stable of waxed gym monkeys.  As a Chinese fellow told me, American porn is just "exercise."  (Asian porn is different in that the woman is often squealing in apparent distress and displeasure.)  They do not give-- the gym monkey probably cannot feel a think through the haze of cock callouses, steroids, and Cialis.  They are only  working for the camera, not for us.  And often, they live in a world of pathetic fantasy.  I met the porn star Chloe at a porno event at an LA club and she was adamant that she was an actress, completely different from the whores and hookers of the sex worker world.  And by living in the completely artificial realms of porn, hired dicks and confused whores on empty industrial sets funded by the Mafia, they can perpetuate this sad illusion.

Embrace your whoredom, porn stars.

Awesome.  Hell yes. Don't care so much for his idealistic speechifying as the fact that he really, really pisses off the conservatives.  Would support him more if he did something extreme to piss them off even more, like tar and feather them or stick them in some kind of Gitmo camps like they're always goin' on about.  That'd be coo'.

Yes. No. Yes. A gent by the name of Ahmed Khan unfriended me roughly contemporaneously with my self-publication of "The Parable of the Spider" here on my blog. Coincidence? Others have unfriended me as well, but I didn't believe any explanation was necessary. I tend to unfriend people who post all the time. And I mean all the time.

I'm doing this just so's I don't forget.

MONEY by Martin Amis
LORD OF LIGHT by Roger Zelazny
HOW FICTION WORKS by James Wood

I'm going to beef this list up by including graphic novels:

OMEGA: THE UNKNOWN by Jonathan Lethem
BONE: OUT FROM BONEVILLE by Jeff Smith
SPACE PIRATE: SARDINE IN OUTER SPACE by Guibert

Is that cheating?

Thanks to Jay Lake's facebook page, I found out that Nightshade Book and the io9 site are offering Paolo Bacigalupi's THE WINDUP GIRL as a free ebook.  This one's gotten a lot of positive buzz, including being on TIME Magazine's Years' Best list, and I've also read and enjoyed quite a bit of Bacigalupi's short fiction, so I downloaded it instantly.  I figured out how to transfer it over to my iPhone to read with the Stanza app, but unfortunately it came across as garbled with text running off the page and many, many blank pages.  

I think the only way to read it on iPhone presently is to open it as a PDF and read it that way, the drawback of which is that it keeps "forgetting" where you are in the book and need to have internet access wherever you are for it to reload.

The perks of this is that I can actually read a book while it looks like I'm working to the casual observer.  The drawback: I may go blind by the end of the book.  Let's see how this goes.

A book about how fiction works?  "That's a bold statement," as Travolta says to Stoltz in Pulp Fiction.  Who is this James Wood that he has unearthed the answer to this almost metaphysical question that scholars have asked for centuries?  

The title led me to believe that this was a rather practical "nuts and bolts" type of book that went through the mechanics of creating effective fiction, but that's not the case at all.  Instead, it comes across as more of a history of the modern novel, tracking its progression from Biblical tales through Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, et al.  A better title might be Why Fiction Works, as its concerns are more philosophical than practical.

The greatest pleasure in this book, like other works of academic nonfiction, is insight into a bright mind at play, running through the perceived pleasures of the literary canon.  In one of Douglas Adams' works-- either Dirk Gently or The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, I believe-- there is a brief discussion of a gentleman listening to classical music, gaining not the least iota of intrinsic pleasure of the work but merely because it is that which is supposed to be done.  Wood seeks to leave no question that he is such a disinterested pedant, when he writes with an almost erotic pleasure about passages from Roth and other writers.  (He calls one passage from Sabbath's Theater, a work that I also greatly enjoyed, "an amazingly blasphemous little melange.")  However, one question that I frequently had while reading, especially when Wood passionately discusses a writer that I don't particularly care for (like D.H. Lawrence), is why his loves all seem to be entombed in the literary canon of the past.  Surely it can't be a mere coincidence that Wood's loves are the same loves of the majority of English professors across the nation?  Surely it's not coincidence that he contrasts genre fiction with "really interesting [literary] writing?"  On the Asimov's messageboard, Mark Pontin writes that Wood would really have nothing to say about a genuinely sui generis writer like Ballard who is not from this literary canon, and I agree.  In the end, Wood comes across as something of an aesthete, one who derides the proletarian pleasures of plot and genre and only considers the more "sophisticated" pleasures of voice and detail.

What are YOUR favorite books about the writing process?  I've read On Writing by Stephen King, which is mostly a recap of Strunk & Write interspersed with personal memoir, and a few others like Wilhelm's brief Storyteller and Doctorow's Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, which are more practical and yet at the same time quite bland.  Are there any good writing books about what Jack Black would call the inspirado of the writing process?

I think anything in the 30s or 40s would do for me.  Why not the age I am right now: 33?  That works.  For what I've lost physically since I was in my teens and 20s, I've more than made up for in other departments.  I used to think maturity was just conformity.  What a silly boy.

I don't think I'd want to live forever if my memories stopped, since that would most likely devolve into some kinda Memento-like nightmare.  In the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, there was an older institutionalized man with that affliction who suffered trauma each new day when he saw his reflection.  That would really, really suck.  If I were stuck with that, I'd choose my teens or 20s, since it would be easier to live a mindless hedonistic lifestyle without memory at that age, like the fauns and nymphs of old.  But it's not my first choice.

Just finished reading my Christmas present, Bangkok Tattoo by John Burdett, second in his Bangkok series.  What fun!  I don't have a great deal to say about the book except that its a great read.  But this fun comes with a brain, as the most fascinating part of the book is how we see through the opium-smoking brothel-owning corrupt-yet-pure policeman narrator's eyes.  Highly recommended!



Have also been exploring some fun comix with th'boy.  Bill Moonroe at the Asimov's forum mentioned Sardine in Outer Space, tall tongue-in-cheek tales (see image above) that th'boy has taken to mightily.  I also picked up the first volume of the Bone comix (Out from Boneville) and we've been having fun reading that fantasy-tinged series as well.  What's the rush to get into chapter books, I say?!  ;)

I stole it from William Sanders.  Actually, his coinage was "Darkest Blogistan," which didn't fit so I was forced to use the one I now have. 

I find it very appropriate!

One of the great things about living in LA is that you can see films long after their regular theater run, in near-empty venues like the Beverly Center, which is still playing The Hurt Locker, The Road and Bad Lieutenant.  One of the great things about having my own practice is that I can play hooky during the day and scoot on over there to catch a matinee at my leisure.  I decided to go with The Hurt Locker based on its outstanding reviews.  The Road struck me as too grim, and I wasn't too enamored of Keitel's original Bad Lieutenant, even before Nic Cage got his ham fists into the role.

The Hurt Locker was directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who I'm starting to realize is one of my favorite directors.  Yeah, this movie was a lot more thoughtful than Point Break (another favorite) but also similar in a lot of ways.  Both are concerned with the motivation behind the macho and fiending for the adrenaline fix.  Her cyberpunk effort Strange Days did kind of too, in a sicker, darker way.  (Best Strange Days quote: "Paranoia is just reality on a finer scale.")  Funny that a female director tends to make the most intense and riveting films about masculinity.

To me, the most interesting part of the movie was Sergeant James' relationship with the young Iraqi boy hustler "Beckham."  In many ways, the film was more of a character study of James than your traditional action-adventure flick.  I just want to know: Did those sick fucks really use "body bombs?!"

I dimly remember reading a review of this film (I think it was in the New Yorker, maybe) which disparaged James as a somewhat despicable character.  But I don't see one thing I don't like about this guy.  Like Chuck Palahnkuk wrote in his steroids essay "Frontiers": "It's such a chick thing to think that life should just go on forever."   It's almost enough to make you want to smack the poncey reviewer upside the head and say: "There was a war on, people."  It's almost like James is the only one who realizes this, with the rest of his team whining throughout, and yet the walls that James hits up against makes it clear that this isn't your usual war, and can't be won as such.  Good line in the film: "Good thing we have all these tanks around, in case the Russians come."  

And now, your moment of zen: photos from the Asimov's Forum West gathering last Monday. 

Anyone know how to use this iPhone lj-app to read the friends page and comment, or is it just limited to posting?

Presently reading Bangkok Tattoo, a very fun yet smart and well-done detective series set in... You guessed it, Bangkok. Also started Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, the beginning of which is written in a stilted and archaic tone like holy doctrine. I suppose it fits because the setting is another planet where our posthuman descendants have recreated the Hindu pantheon with their godlike powers.

I also started watching Three Extremes, three shorts from three different directors, including the ones who did Oldboy and Audition. Could only make it through the first one, "Dumplings", though. That's some sick stuff.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

This is a test posting text and photos to my LJ

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

This book has been crying out at me for some time to read it.  Not only is it on TIME Magazine's top 100 books list, but just look at the cover: hundred dollar bills, a naked torso, and film reels.  Who could ask for anything more?  I repeatedly picked it up and flipped through it at the local B&N while my son was looking at his joke books in the kid's section, leaving it nearby to corrupt some hapless inquisitive minor.  But now I've finally bought it and read it.

There were a few things I didn't particularly like about this book at the beginning.  The narrator/protag John Self is supposed to be this fat alcoholic schlub for whom money seems to gravitate towards like manna, bringing him the finest women, sports cars, etc. regardless of any effort on his part.  He spends his time carousing in pubs and porn parlors and has frequent blackouts.  Nothing so bad about that, but the prose representing his interior world is often too beautiful for such a character.  The contrast between this guy and the skill with which his world is presented grates at first, and does seem to be some kind of elaborate joke by the writer Amis at poor Self's expense.  At times I got that impression, especially when Amis himself appeared as a character in the book, looking down his nose at Self-- it seemed that Amis' view of Self as a boor informed the narrative more often that the actual character of Self.  But in the end, we get some clever metafictional ploys that make it clear this was Amis' scheme the whole time.  

The book is also increasingly funny and absurd as it goes on-- I haven't laughed this much at a book since A Confederacy of Dunces.    Yes, it is almost entirely at Self's expense.  The fact that Self works in the entertainment industry with an assortment of high-strung, neurotic, egotistic (but amusing) actors gives some comedic value too.  But yes, I also came to empathize with Self, the poor blighted bastard.  It's scary how genuine Self's internal voice is!  How many books can pull that off?

Another cool thing about the book is how money is this capricious, all-encompassing entity that shoves the characters around like pawns, a rather novel way of depicting our world.... and a pretty damn realistic one, at that.  In this book, money doesn't really make sense, but it's the only sense there is.  I'm sure a lot of us feel the same way.  Personally, I don't think money is as bad-ass as all that, since there are plenty of people who are able to be both rich but also unloved social misfits.

This book is money... but not in the Swingers sense.

Then you probably remember this one:

Ahhhh sheeet, I've been listening to a lot of KDAY 93.5 lately, which has finally made a comeback after all these years.  [Listen here.]  Good to groove to Dru Down's "Pimp of the Year" while whipping up legal pleadings.  It's kind of funny that the 90s stuff I listened to in high school and college are ALREADY "back in the day hits," but I'm not complaining.  It beats listening to Power 106 and Amped 97, which play the same crop of songs to death: basically Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind", "Sexy Bitch", Drake's "Forever", or the Black Eyed Peas...  Decent songs, but their glory wears off after the hundredth listen.

In other non-news, we've started off the New Year with a splurge of spending.  We've torn out all of the carpet in the living room and it's being replaced with hardwood floors.  The workers covered everything in plastic sheets.  I can tell you, it's a freaky experience to wake up in the middle of the night, go out in the pitch darkness to the kitchen to fill your water cup, and hear those plastic sheets rustling at you.  Also ordered a new laptop and a black iPhone 3GS, which I can't wait for that damn mailman to bring so I can start playing with them!

I would never have been able to reconstruct this list without this LJ.

His Master’s Voice by Stanislaw Lem [presently halfway]

Money by Martin Amis [presently halfway]

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

Philip K. Dick is Dead, Alas by Michael Bishop [half]

The Dark Tower by Stephen King [half]

The Word of God by Thomas Disch

The Alcoholic by Jonathan Ames [graphic novel]

Watchmen by Alan Moore [graphic novel]

Too Fat to Fish by Artie Lange

Trunk Music by Michael Connelly

Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly

The Basic Kafka [half] by.. never mind

The Year’s Best Science Fiction, 14^th Ed. [half] ed. by Dozois, Gardner

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris

DEMO [graphic novel]

The Filth [graphic novel] by Grant Morrison

The New Space Opera [more than half], ed. by Dozois, Gardner

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway [half]

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury [re-read]

Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter [less than half]

Eye in the Sky by Philip K. Dick

A Fire in the Sun by George Alec Effinger [re-read]

The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick by Philip K. Dick [most]

Ron Jeremy: The Hardest (Working) Man in Show Biz by Ron Jeremy

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Every Last Drop by Charlie Huston

Blood Meridian byCormac McCarthy

Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard [half]

This exercise has made me realize that I don't even have an attention span anymore...

$1,100. "The Saving Power" in ADBUSTERS #74, November-December 2007. Approximately 14c/word, but took about a year of pestering to receive payment.

$0. "Reduction Descending" in Electric Velocipede #12. Because I chose to take payment in the form of contributors' copies. If I'd taken pay, it would've been about $50-$60.

$0. "Laundromat Dreams" Oddlands Magazine, March 2008

$0. "Ekpyrosis", Bewildering Stories, Issue 270

$0. "No Pets", Scifantastic, Issue 5, reprinted online at BWS as "You Are Alien"

$0. "Trade Secrets", Neometropolis, Issue 0x09, reprinted online at BWS

$0. "The Fragile", Ethereal Gazette, Issue 4, reprinted online at BWS

$0. "Inside the Artists' Colony", Bewildering Stories, Issue 197

$0. "Towards a New Ontology", Bewildering Stories, Issue 192

$0. "The Liberal Intelligentsia", Alienskin, February-March 2006. They did send me a check for $13, but I never cashed it because it was my first real pay for a story.

$0. "War Thrash", Ultraverse, November 2005, reprinted online at BWS

$0. "Mistakes Were Made", Writers' Stories

So you can see, the average would be less than $100 per story, and only the Adbusters thing is barely keeping this boat afloat.

What's up with the LJ pop-up ads? Is this a permanent or seasonal thing?

And now for your moment of Christmas zen:

"I... am not... a spoon."

This is an interesting film. Not exactly pleasurable to watch. But interesting.

Christian Slater plays against type. As Bob, he's not the smartaleck we know but an office drone nebbish terrified of making eye contact or speaking to his fellow cubicle workers. You know, the kind of role usually played by William H. Macy, who also plays against type as the glib captain of industry and this Dilbert's boss.

We start off from the outside looking in at this character. We see him putting bullets into his pistol in his cubicle, sweating and fantasizing about murdering his coworkers. We see his boggle-eyed goldfish pester and needle him at home to "kill all those motherfuckers" at the office, bringing to mind the Son of Sam's dialogue with dogs. But then the film takes an unexpected turn, and another bespectacled office drone begins executing his coworkers before Bob can. Bob looks on, disinterested until the other nebbish is about to execute the cute, smiling girl of Bob's fantasies, at which time Bob guns down the gunner. Afterward, Bob is hailed as a hero for taking down that maniac.

That aspect of the movie reminded me of Taxi Driver. You know, the repressed guy who fetishizes violence as a cleansing therapeutic, building up to some violent excess. In that film, DeNiro was thwarted from killing the politician at the last moment (which would have been seen as horrible) to killing Harvey Keitel's child-pimp thug instead (which is seen as heroic). In much the same way, it is only random fate that defines the external reaction to Bob's act of violence.

Bob begins to develop a relationship with his smiling fantasy girl, who is now quadraplegic due to her injuries from the shootout. He lovingly tends to her and her needs. We can see how his life is defined by the love he gives and receives. At the beginning, he rants about how emasculated men have become in modern society as part of his buildup to violence, but his relationship with the girl becomes loving and tender. Things become increasingly surreal, people mock him for being with the girl only because of her disability making her dependent on him.

SPOILERS! At the end, we come full circle. Bob is back to his disturbed self, ranting in rage how his dream girl will leave him and return to the William H. Macy character's side when she recovers. The insecurity leading to rage and instability are all there. And finally, we are back at the beginning of the film, with Bob dressed the same, in the exact same spot, but now in the position of his coworker, holding a gun out at the girl of his fantasy dreams. This is probably open to interpretation, but what I think happened was that the movie was an extended fantasy and rumination about possibilities and Bob's fate, which leads Bob to turn the gun on himself rather than gun down the girl of his dreams. A sort of slipstream dream that shows us the contours of Bob's character and his relationship to the girl he would murder, a "what might have been" that is pulled off not as a cheesy cop-out but done remarkably well.