Item number: 280878470647.
That's a picture of the amp. That's my bed it's sitting on. Will it help the sale if I post more pictures, some of me lying seductively next to it?
Friday, May 11, 2012
I Am Selling A Guitar Amp, and I Propose That You Be the One To Purchase It.
I am selling a guitar amp on eBay. I think you should buy it, but that's just my opinion. If you're local I'll hand deliver it. I promise to leave. That's Kane's Promise # 3 -- You don't have to tell me when to leave; I know when I'm not wanted.
Item number: 280878470647.
That's a picture of the amp. That's my bed it's sitting on. Will it help the sale if I post more pictures, some of me lying seductively next to it?
Item number: 280878470647.
That's a picture of the amp. That's my bed it's sitting on. Will it help the sale if I post more pictures, some of me lying seductively next to it?
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Flashover by Gordon Highland.
Hey! Gordon Highland has a new book. It's called Flashover. Click! Read!
Friday, April 13, 2012
Post-Vomit.
I haven't thought about writing anything of length for some time. I wrote a novel then put it in a drawer-- I am glad it has stayed there, as I can't identify with it anymore, and I feel its existence is akin to what The Onion AV Club writer Steven Hyden wrote concerning the legacy of Metallica's St. Anger: "[It] can be likened to a bucket of vomit: It came out of a sick organism, it is composed of unsavory materials, and seemingly had to expunged for the good of the organism...The end result is a necessary byproduct of a healthy process, but that doesn’t mean you want to be near it. After all, this is a bucket of vomit we’re talking about here."
I wouldn't say that that the product of my first concentrated creative effort is particularly vomitous, or that it deserves to be lumped in with Metallica's most notorious sonic turd-- after all, my book is in a metaphorical drawer. Like three people have seen it, one of whom I believe discovered it on the back of a toilet in an apartment in London, of all places, courtesy of my old college roommate. Furthermore, as an artifact of a creative entity attempting to rediscover its relevance and artistic fire, St. Anger is actually fairly compelling. On paper. Keep that shit out of my ears.
My first novel was a necessary expulsion of thoughts and ideas that needed to occur before I could make an attempt at "crafting" a story. That would happen in my second book. Of course, the writing of my second book ended at about 80 pages or so with the commencement of my third book, which itself lasted for about 20 pages until the start of that year's NaNo, which saw the start of a fourth book.
What the hell was I doing? In seems in having vomited out my first novel I also expelled my hunger to tell a complete story-- I was more interested in the journey. I apparently took Ann Lamott's advice a little too literally:
"E.L. Doctorow said once said that ‘Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard."
I loved this. This gave me license to be aimless. Indeed, I enjoyed every sight along the way, but at some point I ran out of gas, and my cellphone was dead so I couldn't call for a ride, and so I had to hoof it to the nearest gas station which was like ten miles away but when I got there the girl at the counter was a bitch and wouldn't let me use the phone because it would be a long distance call and she'd get in trouble so I had to keep walking. Now, I'm where? Still walking.
The thing about walking is you pass things so much more slowly. If you see an interesting tree while driving, you have just a few seconds to make sense of it. If you pass a tree walking, you are free to observe. You can see people's lawns with a clarity those lawns are largely unsuited for-- people do really weird things to their lawns. One house I pass on my way to work has so much shit in the yard that I see something new every time I pass-- was that a pinball machine?-- and can never get a full sense of it. Coming at it on foot at long last, I know I am in for a mental adventure. It may not entertain anyone to hear the story of the few minutes I spent staring at this lady's crazy lawn; but it nonetheless became a story that felt valuable.
What is life like post-vomit?
I wouldn't say that that the product of my first concentrated creative effort is particularly vomitous, or that it deserves to be lumped in with Metallica's most notorious sonic turd-- after all, my book is in a metaphorical drawer. Like three people have seen it, one of whom I believe discovered it on the back of a toilet in an apartment in London, of all places, courtesy of my old college roommate. Furthermore, as an artifact of a creative entity attempting to rediscover its relevance and artistic fire, St. Anger is actually fairly compelling. On paper. Keep that shit out of my ears.
My first novel was a necessary expulsion of thoughts and ideas that needed to occur before I could make an attempt at "crafting" a story. That would happen in my second book. Of course, the writing of my second book ended at about 80 pages or so with the commencement of my third book, which itself lasted for about 20 pages until the start of that year's NaNo, which saw the start of a fourth book.
What the hell was I doing? In seems in having vomited out my first novel I also expelled my hunger to tell a complete story-- I was more interested in the journey. I apparently took Ann Lamott's advice a little too literally:
"E.L. Doctorow said once said that ‘Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard."
I loved this. This gave me license to be aimless. Indeed, I enjoyed every sight along the way, but at some point I ran out of gas, and my cellphone was dead so I couldn't call for a ride, and so I had to hoof it to the nearest gas station which was like ten miles away but when I got there the girl at the counter was a bitch and wouldn't let me use the phone because it would be a long distance call and she'd get in trouble so I had to keep walking. Now, I'm where? Still walking.
The thing about walking is you pass things so much more slowly. If you see an interesting tree while driving, you have just a few seconds to make sense of it. If you pass a tree walking, you are free to observe. You can see people's lawns with a clarity those lawns are largely unsuited for-- people do really weird things to their lawns. One house I pass on my way to work has so much shit in the yard that I see something new every time I pass-- was that a pinball machine?-- and can never get a full sense of it. Coming at it on foot at long last, I know I am in for a mental adventure. It may not entertain anyone to hear the story of the few minutes I spent staring at this lady's crazy lawn; but it nonetheless became a story that felt valuable.
What is life like post-vomit?
Thursday, March 1, 2012
The Art of Theft.
An Amazon blurb, stolen in total:
"I doubt very much that I’m the only person who’s finding it more and more difficult to want to read or write novels," David Shields acknowledges in Reality Hunger, then seeks to understand how the conventional literary novel has become as lifeless a form as the mass market bodice-ripper. Shields provides an ars poetica for writers and other artists who, exhausted by the artificiality of our culture, "obsessed by real events because we experience hardly any," are taking larger and larger pieces of the real world and using them in their work. Reality Hunger is made of 600-odd numbered fragments, many of them quotations from other sources, some from Shields’s own books, but none properly sourced--the project being not a treasure hunt or a con but a good-faith presentation of what literature might look like if it caught up to contemporary strategies and devices used in the other arts, and allowed for samples (that is, quotation from art and from the world) to revivify existing forms. Shields challenges the perceived superiority of the imagination and exposes conventional literary pieties as imitation writing, the textual equivalent of artificial flavoring, sleepwalking, and small talk. I can’t name a more necessary or a more thrilling book. --Sarah Manguso
I cited Sarah Manguso, which feels like a mistake after having read such a provocative summary. I'm putting this book on my "to steal" list.
So, what do we think of this? How do we feel about Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music?" It's not exactly open-source theft, but, like MMM, Shields' book seems to be an affront to an established norm which is the type of incendiary idea that really gets the wheels turning. Why can you reappropriate visual media into art? Why can music use samples to form a new whole, a new cultural reference point? Is it perhaps that the rap listener is less interested in the origin of a dusty old guitar lick than a literarily-minded reader is in a particularly familiar idea/turn of phrase/plot/form/etc? Why can poetry be found, but not a novel? I have to craft mine from scratch, using the same antiquated form that's been around for hundreds of years as my roadmap, and I am implicitly required hide my artistic inspiration (re: theft) as deeply in the text as possible. Why not celebrate our inspirations by savaging them, cutting them to pieces, reconstructing them as we see fit in order to express a truly unique vision out of the familiar?
I'm not of the opinion that novels have become tiresome. I can tell you this:
1) I gravitate more toward established classics than newer work. Why is that? It's not that I think new authors are not worth my time. But perhaps there is a weariness there that I have not acknowledged, and have not really explored. I don't exactly know its cause. This is an age-old argument, old vs. new. Who's the best quarterback of all time? Arguments suited for a barstool. Er, coffeehouse stool? Let's go to the bar. You're buying.
2) Short fiction is far more likely to blow my mind simply because it does not seem bound in the strict traditions of the novel. Our literary lives were built on these traditions that, even when seriously bucked by writers like Faulkner and so on, still remain pretty rigidly intact. When a tornado takes out your house, for example, you don't all get together as a community and magically come up with new kinds of houses. There's one house we know-- when the tornado passes, we rebuild the house as we knew it, and get on with life. I'm not saying the novel is a boring form-- you can put all kinds of cool stuff in a house-- I'm just saying, wouldn't be cool if we weren't limited to that structure?
But then again, to follow Shields' example, I suppose the "new" house would be simply to rip off the designs of all the best houses already out there. And that would be the new house. He shouldn't have written a book at all. He should've skywritten it or something. Broke into Mike Tyson's house and tattooed it on his face. Faked his death and had the book performed via video will by mimes. That's the new form I'm looking for-- mass fake suicides + mimed video wills. The future is today.
"I doubt very much that I’m the only person who’s finding it more and more difficult to want to read or write novels," David Shields acknowledges in Reality Hunger, then seeks to understand how the conventional literary novel has become as lifeless a form as the mass market bodice-ripper. Shields provides an ars poetica for writers and other artists who, exhausted by the artificiality of our culture, "obsessed by real events because we experience hardly any," are taking larger and larger pieces of the real world and using them in their work. Reality Hunger is made of 600-odd numbered fragments, many of them quotations from other sources, some from Shields’s own books, but none properly sourced--the project being not a treasure hunt or a con but a good-faith presentation of what literature might look like if it caught up to contemporary strategies and devices used in the other arts, and allowed for samples (that is, quotation from art and from the world) to revivify existing forms. Shields challenges the perceived superiority of the imagination and exposes conventional literary pieties as imitation writing, the textual equivalent of artificial flavoring, sleepwalking, and small talk. I can’t name a more necessary or a more thrilling book. --Sarah Manguso
I cited Sarah Manguso, which feels like a mistake after having read such a provocative summary. I'm putting this book on my "to steal" list.
So, what do we think of this? How do we feel about Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music?" It's not exactly open-source theft, but, like MMM, Shields' book seems to be an affront to an established norm which is the type of incendiary idea that really gets the wheels turning. Why can you reappropriate visual media into art? Why can music use samples to form a new whole, a new cultural reference point? Is it perhaps that the rap listener is less interested in the origin of a dusty old guitar lick than a literarily-minded reader is in a particularly familiar idea/turn of phrase/plot/form/etc? Why can poetry be found, but not a novel? I have to craft mine from scratch, using the same antiquated form that's been around for hundreds of years as my roadmap, and I am implicitly required hide my artistic inspiration (re: theft) as deeply in the text as possible. Why not celebrate our inspirations by savaging them, cutting them to pieces, reconstructing them as we see fit in order to express a truly unique vision out of the familiar?
I'm not of the opinion that novels have become tiresome. I can tell you this:
1) I gravitate more toward established classics than newer work. Why is that? It's not that I think new authors are not worth my time. But perhaps there is a weariness there that I have not acknowledged, and have not really explored. I don't exactly know its cause. This is an age-old argument, old vs. new. Who's the best quarterback of all time? Arguments suited for a barstool. Er, coffeehouse stool? Let's go to the bar. You're buying.
2) Short fiction is far more likely to blow my mind simply because it does not seem bound in the strict traditions of the novel. Our literary lives were built on these traditions that, even when seriously bucked by writers like Faulkner and so on, still remain pretty rigidly intact. When a tornado takes out your house, for example, you don't all get together as a community and magically come up with new kinds of houses. There's one house we know-- when the tornado passes, we rebuild the house as we knew it, and get on with life. I'm not saying the novel is a boring form-- you can put all kinds of cool stuff in a house-- I'm just saying, wouldn't be cool if we weren't limited to that structure?
But then again, to follow Shields' example, I suppose the "new" house would be simply to rip off the designs of all the best houses already out there. And that would be the new house. He shouldn't have written a book at all. He should've skywritten it or something. Broke into Mike Tyson's house and tattooed it on his face. Faked his death and had the book performed via video will by mimes. That's the new form I'm looking for-- mass fake suicides + mimed video wills. The future is today.
Thursday, December 15, 2011
As a Machine and Parts by Caleb J. Ross.
Author and internet cool dude Caleb J. Ross has a new book.
As a Machine and Parts, available from Aqueous Books, can be purchased now. Click the link and do so.
From Caleb: [The] book incorporates subtle illustrations, formatting plays, and typography twists to create a story that is both bizarre and human. Though, how else could a book about a man turning into a machine--and not really caring about it--be written?
Sounds like fun to me. Visit Caleb's site to learn more: As a Machine and Parts.
As a Machine and Parts, available from Aqueous Books, can be purchased now. Click the link and do so.
From Caleb: [The] book incorporates subtle illustrations, formatting plays, and typography twists to create a story that is both bizarre and human. Though, how else could a book about a man turning into a machine--and not really caring about it--be written?
Sounds like fun to me. Visit Caleb's site to learn more: As a Machine and Parts.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Christmas.
Christmas-- it's here. Basically. What's on my list? I'll share it with you:
Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid box set: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions) – Homer (translated by Robert Fagles)
Dracula (Barnes & Noble Leather Classic) – Bram Stoker
H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction (Barnes & Noble Leather Classic) – H.P. Lovecraft
Picture of Dorian Gray (Barnes & Noble Leather Classic) – Oscar Wilde
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Barnes & Noble Leather Classic) – Mark Twain
Fog Gorgeous Stag – Sean Lovelace
Four For A Quarter: Fictions – Michael Martone
Scorch Atlas – Blake Butler
Dear Everybody – Michael Kimball
Stranger Will – Caleb J. Ross
Valis – Philip K. Dick
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick
The Stranger – Albert Camus
Dune, 40th Anniversary Edition – Frank Herbert
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Naked Lunch: The Restored Text – William S. Burroughs
Kicking Horse Cliffhanger Espresso (Whole Bean)
Fancy-Shmancy Mustard of All Varieties
Ziggy Stardust – David Bowie
Space Oddity – David Bowie
Scary Monsters – David Bowie
It’s Complicated Being a Wizard – Portugal. The Man
Pink Moon – Nick Drake
Now, let's make some observations. This list betrays a terrible secret-- I do not yet own "Stranger Will" by Caleb Ross. My only explanation is that I am a prick and care for no one but myself, though I will nonetheless go on to defend myself by saying that A) it's on my list, and B) this endless Nabokov book has ground all literary purchases to a halt for me. I have not bought a book in months. MONTHS. Okay? Even when Borders was going out of business, all I came away with was Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger because it was like, a dollar. It's nothing personal. I fully expect Caleb's book to be excellent, which is why it's on my list. Notice it's in good company. Notice who's NOT on the list-- Nabokov. Therefore it is scientific fact: Caleb is better than Nabokov.
Also, what's with all the David Bowie? I don't know. It occurred to me that I don't own any David Bowie albums, and that seems wrong, so I picked a few at random.
"It's Complicated Being A Wizard" was a title that made me laugh. And I've heard Portugal. The Man is good, but I don't own any of their stuff, mostly because I despise the period in the name of the band. It ruins any sentence in which you mention them (like the previous one), so I've resisted up until now. But the name of this blog has an exclamation point in it, you say? Well for one thing, no one ever mentions this blog, so that's not a problem. Furthermore, stylistic use of an exclamation point is less subliminal and does not look quite so misplaced in the middle of a thought. If they were looking for some alternative characters in their name, why not Portugal & The Man? That really adds a 1987-CBS-primetime-Wednesday-lineup feel to their name that's pretty killer.
Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid box set: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions) – Homer (translated by Robert Fagles)
Dracula (Barnes & Noble Leather Classic) – Bram Stoker
H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete Fiction (Barnes & Noble Leather Classic) – H.P. Lovecraft
Picture of Dorian Gray (Barnes & Noble Leather Classic) – Oscar Wilde
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Barnes & Noble Leather Classic) – Mark Twain
Fog Gorgeous Stag – Sean Lovelace
Four For A Quarter: Fictions – Michael Martone
Scorch Atlas – Blake Butler
Dear Everybody – Michael Kimball
Stranger Will – Caleb J. Ross
Valis – Philip K. Dick
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick
The Stranger – Albert Camus
Dune, 40th Anniversary Edition – Frank Herbert
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Naked Lunch: The Restored Text – William S. Burroughs
Kicking Horse Cliffhanger Espresso (Whole Bean)
Fancy-Shmancy Mustard of All Varieties
Ziggy Stardust – David Bowie
Space Oddity – David Bowie
Scary Monsters – David Bowie
It’s Complicated Being a Wizard – Portugal. The Man
Pink Moon – Nick Drake
Now, let's make some observations. This list betrays a terrible secret-- I do not yet own "Stranger Will" by Caleb Ross. My only explanation is that I am a prick and care for no one but myself, though I will nonetheless go on to defend myself by saying that A) it's on my list, and B) this endless Nabokov book has ground all literary purchases to a halt for me. I have not bought a book in months. MONTHS. Okay? Even when Borders was going out of business, all I came away with was Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger because it was like, a dollar. It's nothing personal. I fully expect Caleb's book to be excellent, which is why it's on my list. Notice it's in good company. Notice who's NOT on the list-- Nabokov. Therefore it is scientific fact: Caleb is better than Nabokov.
Also, what's with all the David Bowie? I don't know. It occurred to me that I don't own any David Bowie albums, and that seems wrong, so I picked a few at random.
"It's Complicated Being A Wizard" was a title that made me laugh. And I've heard Portugal. The Man is good, but I don't own any of their stuff, mostly because I despise the period in the name of the band. It ruins any sentence in which you mention them (like the previous one), so I've resisted up until now. But the name of this blog has an exclamation point in it, you say? Well for one thing, no one ever mentions this blog, so that's not a problem. Furthermore, stylistic use of an exclamation point is less subliminal and does not look quite so misplaced in the middle of a thought. If they were looking for some alternative characters in their name, why not Portugal & The Man? That really adds a 1987-CBS-primetime-Wednesday-lineup feel to their name that's pretty killer.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Caleb J. Ross Wants to Write with the Intellectual Charm of a Mid-90s Family Sitcom.
This is a guest post by Caleb J Ross (also known as Caleb Ross, to people who hate Js) as part of his Stranger Will Tour for Strange blog tour. He will be guest-posting beginning with the release of his novel Stranger Will in March 2011 to the release of his second novel, I Didn’t Mean to Be Kevin and novella, As a Machine and Parts, in November 2011. If you have connections to a lit blog of any type, professional journal or personal site, please contact him. To be a groupie and follow this tour, subscribe to the Caleb J Ross blog RSS feed. Follow him on Twitter: @calebjross.com. Friend him on Facebook: Facebook.com/rosscaleb
Does anyone else remember Steve Urkel’s personality changing machine? For those who don’t, here’s the ridiculously brilliant premise:
TV nerd poster child, Steve Urkel, is madly in love with neighbor girl named Laura. Despite, or perhaps because of, the strange absence of his own family (strange only to the audience; I don’t believe the show ever addressed the missing family directly) the neighbor family treated Steve as a pariah, often going out of their way to express hatred for the poor kid. Quite often, episode story-lines hinged on the family’s eventual, yet always temporary, acceptance of the outcasted child. But, when Steve steps into his personality changing machine, shifting from hunched geek to smooth chic (with an equally sexified name: Stefan Urquelle) the world suddenly makes time for him. Laura loves him. The family loves him. The simple lesson: looks are everything.
Does anyone else wonder why the government didn’t seize that machine immediately? No, you don’t. The machine integrated into the Family Matters world as a perfect figurative and literal storytelling device.
That’s the fiction I strive to write. Conceptually heavy, yet contextually believable. The entire show’s premise during those episodes depended on how this single awkward element transformed the entire Family Matters world. There is a magical realism feel to this situation, in that the weird element is weird only to the audience; the characters don’t consider anything strange at all (or they are willfully ignorant to the strangeness).
Does anyone else remember Steve Urkel’s personality changing machine? For those who don’t, here’s the ridiculously brilliant premise:TV nerd poster child, Steve Urkel, is madly in love with neighbor girl named Laura. Despite, or perhaps because of, the strange absence of his own family (strange only to the audience; I don’t believe the show ever addressed the missing family directly) the neighbor family treated Steve as a pariah, often going out of their way to express hatred for the poor kid. Quite often, episode story-lines hinged on the family’s eventual, yet always temporary, acceptance of the outcasted child. But, when Steve steps into his personality changing machine, shifting from hunched geek to smooth chic (with an equally sexified name: Stefan Urquelle) the world suddenly makes time for him. Laura loves him. The family loves him. The simple lesson: looks are everything.
Does anyone else wonder why the government didn’t seize that machine immediately? No, you don’t. The machine integrated into the Family Matters world as a perfect figurative and literal storytelling device.
That’s the fiction I strive to write. Conceptually heavy, yet contextually believable. The entire show’s premise during those episodes depended on how this single awkward element transformed the entire Family Matters world. There is a magical realism feel to this situation, in that the weird element is weird only to the audience; the characters don’t consider anything strange at all (or they are willfully ignorant to the strangeness).
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