Rocket Surgery

Transgressive fiction: some thoughts

2012-01-06T23:47:00.005-06:00

I think that Chuck Palahniuk was wrong way back then.
I think transgressive fiction is still alive and well.
I think this because what I write, every day, has that very goal: to be transgressive.
But what transgressive aims mean has to be up to the individual author.
So what do I mean when I say transgressive fiction?
What is the use-value of it as a genre?
First, I think this: far too often in narratives, our experience of other ways of seeing our culture is mediated through our protagonist. This is why we have the Scarpettas, the Longmires, the Clarise Starlings: as a viewer/reader, we want to see the abject character, but through a window. Safely ensconced behind bars. Through the eyes of someone who is standing a bit closer than we want to be. Hence Law and Order: SVU. We want the detective Bensons of the world to have to be in the same room as those who move through culture on the less-than-approved paths.
We don't want to have to be close enough to touch them.
What transgressive fiction does (when it's firing on all cylinders) is to bring the reader face to face with protagonists who are varying degrees of different (most often extremely so) from the 9-to-5 worlds we inhabit. No convenient protagonist between us and the abject--they are the protagonist. We are in direct contact with them.
So we don't ride along with the detective who tracks down a man who traffics children in to sexual slavery, instead we see the world through that man's eyes, and come to understand what circumstances might lead him to do what he does. Palahniuk writes about a young man so fed up with the doldrums of living the societally approved life that he invents another life for himself where he is a nihilist and a terrorist (who happens to look like Brad Pitt). Ellis writes about a man whose desire to become a powerful player in business leads him to have to push his violent drives down so far that they erupt in to multiple murders. Cooper removes the metaphor of worshiping body parts by creating characters who actually dismember (and most recently eat) their objects of sexual desire. So on and so on.
No convenient character standing between us and these.
No outside moral compass to keep us from identifying with these monsters.
This is the value of transgressive literature: it forces the reader up against the most terrible of terrible creatures, and then dares them to not empathize, to not understand (which we're trained to do with our protagonists). It's a blush response test in many ways, though even in the case of PKD's brilliant Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, we still have Deckard between us and the androids. What might happen if we had to watch all of it through Batty's eyes?
Second, I think it's this: the violence and sex are not off stage, safely contained for the viewer/reader. The romance novel puts the sex on-stage, but so often uses softening (if you'll pardon the pun) metaphors to make the sex more palatable. Transgressive works have no intention of making what they have to say palatable. Sex and violence are both horrible and often brutal, especially for those that exist on the outside edges of society. Viewers recently got a taste of this when they went to see Fincher's brilliant adaptation of Larson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The rapes are brutal, and fully on stage. There is no way for the viewer/reader to escape it, or pretend it is anything close to loving or consentual (unfortunately, Lisbeth Salander, one of the most brilliant characters to come along in a while because she is so transgressive, yet exists in a text that is so mainstream, is mediated through lots of other eyes). Whether we like it or not, we are slowly but surely growing callouses that keep us from feeling quite as deeply as we should when it comes to the brutality inflicted on other people in our culture. So sex and violence in transgressive texts often go far in to what some might call excess in order to shock an audience slipping slowly in to apathy. So often, we have to go five miles over the mark to get an audience to move a centimeter.
Ultimately, both things add up to the same thing. Transgressive literature forces the reader/viewer to empathize with characters that they would normally keep at arm's length by refusing to give the audience a helpful mediator through which to experience the encounter with this abjected individual, and by putting the reader/viewer at ground zero, so to speak, of horrifically violent acts. There are perhaps other ways to accomplish this forced empathy, but obviously this is the method I've chosen.

Best Books List 3

2011-12-15T09:45:00.006-06:00

So, finally my thoughts on best fiction explicitly intended for adults that I read in 2011 (even if it wasn't published in 2011):

Best "Adult" Books:

1. The Marbled Swarm by Dennis Cooper.

2. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys by Chris Fuhrman.

3. Never Let Me Go by Kuzuo Ishiguro.

What are the best novels you read this year?

Best Books List 2

2011-12-15T09:35:00.004-06:00

So here is my second list, best nonfiction or literary theory books I've read this year (even if they weren't published in 2011):

Best Nonfic or Lit Theory:

1. The Typewriter is Holy by Bill Morgan.

2. Blue Box Boy: A Memoir of Doctor Who in Four Episodes
by Matthew Waterhouse.

3. Innocence, Heterosexuality, and Queerness in Children's Literature by Tison Pugh.

Do you read a lot of nonfiction or literary theory books? If so, what were your favorites of 2011 (even if they weren't published in 2011)?

Best Books List 1

2011-12-15T09:23:00.004-06:00

Since it's the end of the year, it is time for everyone on the planet to roll out their "Best of the year" lists. My confession is that I love these things; I love making them and I love reading other peoples' lists.
I am not always able to read books the year they come out--I have a lot of what I call "catch up reading" to do. So, here is the first of my lists of the best 3 books I've read this year (even though they may have come out before 2011):

Best Young Adult Books:

1. Sprout by Dale Peck.

2. Going Bovine by Libba Bray.

3. Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher.

Do you read YA books? If so, what were your favorites this year (whether they were published in 2011 or not)?

Conspiracy as Control

2011-12-12T10:24:00.002-06:00

Recently I came across the book Paradigms of Paranoia by author Dr. Samuel Coale. The book attempts to explain why the conspiracy is such an important part of contemporary postmodern fiction. He looks at the work of several authors, including Thomas Pynchon and Don Delillo (though White Noise is conspicuously absent from examination).

The book's central premise gets a bit bogged down when Coale tries to make the comparison between religious fundamentalism and conspiracy theory, but in essence his thesis is something like this: much like the belief in God meaning that there is a central plan that organizes the universe (so that it is not chaotic), conspiracy theory posits that there is some entity, person or cabal secretly in control of actions, and therefore the universe is organized (so that it is not ruled by chaos). Conspiracy theory shows up in postmodern fiction precisely because it is postmodern fiction, in other words--as a reaction to the formlessness of the movement.

This is the kind of premise that stays with a person. It's an important concept to help us understand contemporary postmodern fiction (and, by extension, transgressive fiction which I see as one strain of the postmodern, though I recognize that could be argued).

Coale's conception of the postmodern sublime as the search and discovery of information is fascinating. Hence, in much of postmodern fiction, the discovery of the conspiracy ultimately leads to the chasing down of the conspiracy and then to the uncovering the conspiracy and the inevitable revelation of the secret at the conspiracy's core. The sublime moment, then, according to Coale, is that moment when the protagonist stands face to face with that secret fully revealed to the audience.

I would argue, though, that this is not exclusively the domain of the postmodern. After all, isn't that particular sublime moment present at the revelation of the central motive in the whodunnit genre? Isn't that why we have to have the final confession scene? What is the moment that Oedipus figures out what he has done, with the mystery fully unfolded before him, but the sublime moment of information that was hidden revealed?

The best thing that can come out of a book, though, comes out of reading Coale's: I'm still thinking about it a week later. His thesis is provocative to say the least. What do you guys think? Is he right? Do you see this occurring in transgressive fiction, too?

December Update

2011-12-02T13:25:00.002-06:00

It seems like every year the calendar accelerates, and I wind up not saying much during the downhill run toward January. So, here's a quick update of what's going on:

That's right: Nothing.
I'm not complaining, though. The reason not much is going on right now is because all the projects I was working on this year are in. Silencing Orpheus is already in the hands of Rebel Satori press, and they are working away on it. The article on dystopian literature for young adults is in the hands of the editors of the anthology. They've sent me a notice to be ready to get the edits back early next week, but they said that they didn't feel like too much needed doing. The book review that I did for Lion and Unicorn is in, came back, in again, and will be out very soon.
So, I've been doing a lot of writing on the final part of the conceptual trilogy, tentatively titled Drowning Narcissus. It's hard going right now, but the wheels are rolling (even though they're creaking at the moment).
I want to thank all of you who have bought my novel; I can't tell you how much I appreciate the support (and thank you for supporting indie publishing, too). Remember to follow me on Twitter (it seems like the bulk of my updates are over there these days), and while you're there, check out some of the other great indie authors that I follow. Maybe pick up one of their books, too, while you're at it. It'd make their day.
Feel free to contact me via comments below or over on Twitter, as well. Questions, comments, concerns, what have you...I'd love to hear from you.

A Funny Thing Happened While Sorting Books Today

2011-10-29T21:16:00.006-05:00

Besides fiction, I write poetry.
In face, I wrote poetry first.
I started out writing reams and reams of that awful, self-important crap that most high school students do. Eventually, through continuous work, workshopping and performance, I got myself out of that phase and recognized that poetry could be, besides Wordsworthian ecstatic spontaneous expression, a coded language. A way of telling truths to the world without it immediately getting upset.
The problem is that the type of work I do doesn't have much of an audience, anymore. The Hip-hop-ization of poetry, combined with the simultaneous return to confessional modes, leaves not much call for a Morrisonite, Jim-Carroll-ite poet. I'm okay with that. I suspect I was never brilliant at it, anyway.
Thing is, though, even now, when fiction is my primary tool for expressing, I find myself looking longingly at this ancient green tupperware tub where I keep all my old poetry journals. Yeah, I was one of those kids--from about age 17 until about age 25, I was never more than 6 feet from one of my journals. I used to think about those journals like albums--perhaps not slick, definitely not filled cover to cover with amazing work, but instead an accurate snapshot of where my head was from the time I opened the journal until the time I closed it out. I'd write the start date on the first page (usually the date I bought it) and then a dash. That blank space in the parentheses would be like a question mark until I decided that it was time to move on to the next period of time, the next experiment in writing. I'd write the close date on it and put it in the stack with the others.
I started out thinking about the types of journal I'd use in the same way music artists think about what studio to record at--does it have the right attitude? Does it seem to already be saying something? I started out with old composition books for 79 cents, but eventually moved up the sturdy hardbound black sketchbooks. Eventually the Moleskins.
Over time, though, the style of poetry I was most comfortable with was rapid-fire, stream of consciousness symbolism. No preconceived notion of what the poem was going to be about, just open the floodgate and try to catch the words and images as they poured past.
Right around the time I switched to my Masters program, though, I switched to composing on the keyboard. It was a purely practical move--it got tiring having to copy poems out of the notebook they were in to take them to the weekly poetry workshop. Once I started, though, I found that my typing was finally fast enough to keep up with my head. I could catch more of the words and images through typing than I could with a pen. It wasn't long until I was writing less and less in notebooks and more and more on computer. Eventually, I abandoned the notebooks altogether. I still have that battered old hulk of a tupperware box with the stacks and stacks of journals, but the poetry lived on my hard drive.
The writing that was to eventually become Stealing Ganymede started to emerge, though, and I wrote poetry less and less. By the time I moved to Illinois to start my Doctorate, I had abandoned poetry altogether. I even wrote a piece where I said that poetry was something only the young do. It felt very true at the time.
Then, nearly a year after moving to Wyoming, the disaster I've described happened. The hard drive crashed. None of the creative work was recovered. There are now whole swaths of poems that can never be recovered. Little by little, I'm getting some of it back--things I emailed to people, chapbooks I created, etc. But poetry, novels, short stories...they're just gone.
An interesting thing happened while I was sorting books today, though, down in the basement of our local library (I'm in the Friends of the Library here, and we hold a book sale, so there are donations that have to be gone through). Someone donated a completely blank hardbound journal that was in brand new condition:

As an experiment, I've taken it home. Four seconds after pressing play on U2's 1991 album "Achtung, Baby," poetry exploded out of me onto the pages of this new journal. Rusty, to be sure, but very much in the old style. As if those pieces had just been waiting all this time.
So, here goes. On with the experiment.

Hello, Spaceboy

2011-10-20T19:45:00.004-05:00

I’m sorry that there haven’t been any updates in quite some time. Like most people, I’ve become somewhat lost in microblogging on Twitter. If you want more frequent updates on what's going on with me, my Twitter is where it's at. I’ve also been working a lot with my local Friends of the Library (but that’s for a different entry).

I’ve been reading a lot about David Bowie, lately. What’s interesting to me about that is that I’ve liked Bowie for a while, now, but it wasn’t until I moved a year ago to the city that I live in now that I really became interested enough to read books. In the absence of an autobiography, I've read these three (so far):

My interest has a lot to do with death. Bowie is now 64 years old. In 2004, he had to stop touring because of a heart attack. Doc Hammer, one of the creators of Venture Bros., said during a panel in 2010 that we have to understand that we may very soon live in a world that has no David Bowie in it.

Some things that I have found interesting so far in these books:

- All the focus seems to be on the early 70s albums ("Hunky Dory,” “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,” “Aladdin Sane” and “Diamond Dogs”), and the late 70s albums (The Berlin Trilogy of “Low,” “’Heroes,’” and “Lodger”). As the book progresses, the stories about each album get shorter and shorter. By the time the books get to “1.Outside” the first Bowie album I heard, there’s hardly any focus at all.

- Bowie’s “coming out” in the early 70s and then “going back in” for the rest of his career is fascinating. I find myself wondering if the homosexuality referred to in that infamous article was him speaking in character, and not his own admission.

- I find myself drawn in to the question that the authors all investigate in different ways: is Bowie a genius who reinvents himself, always seeming to hit the zeitgeist-nail on the head, or is he a ruthless thief, stealing from those around him before they can become famous with their own style?

- As I’ve said in an earlier entry here, the reason I like Bowie (especially his early 90s work) is that he’s not afraid of atonal work, or even compositions that are ugly on purpose. Though he’s abandoned that aesthetic, I still find it fascinating.

I find myself wanting to raid the “further reading” sections of these books and bury myself in the subject of Bowie for a while, but I can’t. Palahniuk’s new novel just dropped, and Dennis Cooper’s comes out in a little over a week. Not to mention the fact that my “to-be-read” pile has climbed to 20 books in the meantime. At some point, though, I want to do that—devote myself entirely to one subject for a while.

I wonder what it’d be like to write a Bowie book of my own.

Or steal his life for a character

My Galaxy

2011-08-23T10:51:00.004-05:00

I just finished reading John Densomore's book, Riders on the Storm. As I was reading, I thought a lot about how much Morrison's poetry influenced my own as I was growing in to my voice. That lead me to think about who his influences were, and inevitably to asking who were my own.
There's a very popular music app for the iPad called "Planetary." This app visualizes each music artist as a star, then visualizes all their albums that you have downloaded as planets, and each song from those albums as a moon. It's much more visually arresting than my description makes it seem, I promise. It makes your music collection in to a cluster of stars, a home galaxy that you live within, sonically.
If you were to think about the authors you love most, the ones whose voices guide you in your own work and their poems or novels in that same way, you would have a galaxy, a set of literary constellations that influence you, help you navigate your artistic life.
So, here are is a map of my literary galaxy (as best as I can tell so far)*:

- Chuck Palahniuk
- David Bowie
- Bret Easton Ellis
- Jim Morrison (mostly his poetry, but his aesthetic interest in the role of the Shaman and the priest of Dionysus)
- Ernest Hemingway
- Dennis Cooper
- Jim Carroll
- Irvine Welsh
- Philip K. Dick
- William S. Burroughs
- Allen Ginsberg
- William Butler Yeats (especially "The Second Coming" and "Sailing to Byzantium")
- Walt Whitman
- Robert Frost

What I find most interesting reading this list just now is that I consider myself a feminist, and yet there are no women on the list. I don't know what that says, but it's interesting to me.

If your a writer whose reading this, who are the stars in your own galaxy?
_____
*= you'll note that the list also contains some music artists--this is because these artists have influenced my writing through their lyrics/aesthetic values

6 books that I anxiously await

2011-07-29T09:30:00.004-05:00

2011 has been a big year for books, but it's only just getting warmed up. Here are 6 books that I'm waiting for in the bottom half of the year:

Craig Thomppson's new graphic novel, Habibi will be out on September 20th from Pantheon books. (Amazon entry here)

Scott Westerfeld's new novel, Goliath is due out on September 20th.

Chuck Palahniuk's new novel, Damned will be out on October 18th.

Dennis Cooper's new novel, The Marbled Swarm is due out on November 1st

-2012 is already heating up, too:

There's nothing official about Irvine Welsh's next one, but unofficially it's titled "Skagboys" and there's a tentative (or so it appears) date of April of 2012.

John Green's new novel The Fault in Our Stars is due out on January 10th of 2012

End of June update

2011-06-27T10:14:00.003-05:00

Just getting back in from the Children's Literature Association conference. All work on the creative writing end has been on pause for over a month, now. First because of the wait for the end of the Hard Drive Saga, and then because I needed to get my paper in order for the conference. Work continues on my submission for the upcoming Dystopian critical anthology, "After NAFTA," though. If everything goes smoothly on that end, I'll have publication information towards end-of-year.
No galleys yet on the next novel, but the people at Rebel Satori have had a lot of high-profile books come out, recently, and so they've had to share editing time with publicity time. As soon as I see the galleys, I'll post an update to let you know how things are going.

Thesis recovered!

2011-06-13T14:51:00.001-05:00

Thanks to a dear friend of mine, I have my Masters thesis back! I'd emailed it to him a long time ago because we share an interest in science fiction and he found it lurking in the backlogs of his email addy. This makes me very happy.

A Small Ray of Hope

2011-06-08T12:45:00.002-05:00

By combing through old emails, I found the draft of the novel "Remains." Luckily enough, I'd sent the whole manuscript to an agent via email. He passed on it, but at least I never deleted that email. I'm happy to have it back.

Final Hard Drive Update

2011-06-07T09:18:00.003-05:00

I have received the external hard drive that the technicians used to store what they could recover from the old hard drive that crashed.

Though all the file names and folders are present, all the word files, .pdfs and power point files are corrupted.

The loss is total. The draft of the third novel in the conceptual trilogy that started with Ganymede and continues with Orpheus is gone. Another completed novel that I had named "Remains" is gone. A semi-autobiographical novel which was also complete that I had called "Reunion" (which, to be fair, had already been passed on by Allyson publishing) is gone. Another novel that I was about 3/4 of the way done with is gone. Every bit of poetry that I had typed since 2000 is gone, quite a number of them with no paper copies in existence. Every paper I ever wrote for every college class I ever had is gone. My dissertation remains because it was on my flash drive, but my Masters thesis is gone. Every short story that I ever wrote (which, admittedly, isn't many--I never really came to love that format) save two are gone. All of the assignment hand outs and pedagogy statements are gone. The .pdfs of articles (including my own first scholarly publication) that I had managed to stockpile for teaching and research are gone.

The past ten years of my life as a scholar and writer are gone.

Every time I talk to people about this, they mention Reinaldo Arenas. How he had to rewrite from scratch the same novel six or seven times. And I know that I can go back and reconstruct many of the novels. I can re-type much of the poetry (at least, all of it that existed as pen-and-paper first). And I will get back to it, eventually. There's even the chance that, as we tell our composition students, the work will improve through the process of drafting and redrafting.

I just need a bit of time to mourn the loss. As I said before, Silencing Orpheus is already in the hands of Rebel Satori and will be out sometime in the near future. Thank you to all of you who sent well-wishes during this time.

Hard Drive Update

2011-06-01T18:07:00.003-05:00

The good news is that the people at Gillware, Inc. were able to recover data from the hard drive.

The bad news is that the tech says that this was a "rough extraction." Bad enough that they charged me only half of what they normally would. The directories were intact, but he says that there are a number of files that, though they show up on the directory, are corrupted very badly.

The new external hard drive with the recovered data on it is on its way. They estimate delivery by the 7th. I'll update then with a damage report.

On Hold

2011-05-25T08:09:00.004-05:00

There’s still no word on the hard drive. At this point, I’ve been living with the fact that the drafts I’d been either fully working on or tinkering with for the better part of a decade might be gone that I’m almost fine with the loss. I guess it serves me right for kvetching so much about the draft of the 3rd novel I was working on. A kind of cosmic "let's see whether or not you really are conflicted about it." Turns out? I wasn't as conflicted as I thought, and I want it back. I can't start on a...what do I even call it...a replacement?...a different draft, though, until I know. I'm on hold.
There is something I fear, though. It’s that one or more of the techs might get nosy while recovering the data. I fear that because I write transgressive fiction. As I’ve said in earlier posts, there are plenty of people out there who don’t understand what that’s about. Instead of seeing someone trying to work through the ugly stuff of the human psyche, they might think they see something else. Something worse. That “p” word that, once you’re labeled with (whether you are or aren’t), you can never get away from. What he or she might think if they read my work or my notes, and what he or she might do with how they feel if they do that is a big weight on my mind right now.
This is one of the main things that drives my life, my work: I am trying to understand the nature of power and how it is enacted on the body. When you look at it from that perspective, my fiction being transgressive and my scholarship being on dystopian work intended for adolescents makes perfect sense. The reason I’m worried is that, when power starts looking at a subject, the interpretation is never carried out in detail. Instead, people are fitted in to the most expeditious, convenient narrative possible. My fear is that, as has happened to me my whole writing life, someone will look at what I do and instead of deeming it art, they’ll think of it as confession.
The first thing of any size I ever wrote was a short story about a kid who survived abuse. I’m pretty sure I was in fourth grade. My father had gone to one of those “come see our time-shares and we’ll give you a computer” things. He brought home this shitty computer with an amber monitor, and from the second I first sat down to the keys, I was hooked. Even back then, I was interested (in a childish way, but still) in how someone lives their life while being harmed daily. As a voracious reader, people never really monitored my intake too much. This lead to a defining moment in that the first time I read something not from the science fiction aisle, it was I Know My First Name is Steven. That book is the story of Steven Stayner, who was kidnapped at age 7 and was raised by his kidnapper as a “normal son” until age 14. Normal son, that is, except for the continuous sexual assaults. The idea of how someone could live through that every day was a big question in my life, and I tried to explore that through writing. Once I was done with the draft (though I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time), I took it to school. The other kids immediately thought I must be writing about something that was happening to me, and there was, shall we say, a kerfuffle.
When Stealing Ganymede first came out, there was a question of whether or not to include it on my academic resume. I didn’t see a problem with it: Samuel R. Delany is a hero of mine, and being both a scholar/theorist and a fiction writer at the same time has always been the goal. One of the people on my committee, though, thought it was a bad idea; she basically called the novel both wish fulfillment (she was a Lacanian, if you know what that means) and pornography. That she would think this was no surprise, but I think it underscored what I’ve felt since I first read Less Than Zero, since I first read Try: transgressive fiction (and, indeed, any transgressive art), gains its power by dealing with all that stuff we shove way down in our psyches and refuse to deal with. As I’m writing that, I’m thinking that transgressive fiction and horror fiction have that in common.
During my work on my Masters thesis, I found Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman . In it, one of the things she says is that our culture does so much to “not know” that it begins to develop these lies that become the truth over time. This is especially true of the body, and what happens to it. She says that in order to better understand ourselves, we have to look squarely at the things we most don’t want to. Since the 80s, it seems to me that American culture has gone further and further into the mindset that “not knowing” is somehow a virtue. That those who want “to know” are somehow sick. If you look at the monster instead of running from it, then there must be something wrong with you. She says that she believes there can be artists who look squarely at how power and sex and the body are all intertwined, and that these “moral pornographers,” by not shutting off the camera during the smutty parts, will help us all to move forward.
I see this in Dennis Cooper’s work. I see this in J. T. Leroy’s work, even if the woman writing those novels was never a little boy who was abused. I see this in Chuck Palahniuk’s work. I see this in Irvine Welsh’s work. I see this in Bret Easton Ellis’ work. I see this in Adam Rapp’s work. This is what I strive for in my own.
But, in a culture where looking squarely at the monster is a sign of sickness rather than bravery, I fear. This is what I’ve been living with since having to turn over the hard drive to people who don’t know me, don’t know what I do. I had to balance my need to have my work back with the fear of what might happen if some tech gets snoopy and doesn’t understand. If he or she decides to place me in to the most convenient definition possible. So I’ve been living in dread of a knock on the door for the last month or so. Of having to try to explain my work to power that only wants to see things in definitions that are easy to type on to forms in triplicate.
No worries, though: as I said before, the draft of the next novel was already safely in the publisher's hands before the failure happened, so it is not in any way impeded. More news on that as it comes up.

2011-05-03T08:16:00.001-05:00

This documentary about the Love In Action "therapy" camp will have its world premiere this June at the 35th Annual San Francisco International LGBT Film festival, Frameline 35:

Superman's Citizenship

2011-04-30T11:12:00.006-05:00

There are all kinds of things I want to say about the Superman controversy sweeping the internet, but it would involve huge paragraphs about "continuity" and how not all stories that are printed in any given comic book (especially anniversary issues like Action Comics #900, where the story causing all this buzz appeared) are part of continuity, and how sometimes, especially in an anniversary issue, the people who write backup stories specifically write things that go against continuity because they think things need shaking up, and many other things besides, but I have to admit that I just don't have the energy. I don't even want to begin talking about how superheroes change over time, and none more than Superman who started out as a social radical when he first appeared during the Depression. That no one is bothering to have these conversations, though, surprises me. The thing that does interest me, though, is that EXTREMELY recently, the character went through a story arc where he not only ALREADY renounced his citizenship, but in fact left the planet to go live on a different one (the New Krypton storyline) and no one said a word. And those stories ARE official continuity handled by the official writers on the main titles, not a guest writer doing a short story contained in an anniversary issue (such as Action Comics #900). Nor does anyone seem to be mentioning that (if we're going to go this far in terms of discussing a fictional character), Kal El was not born in the United States, and his adoption papers are forgeries. There is a very interesting conversation about immigration that COULD occur if we were to continue thinking about a fictional character politically, as we seem to be doing. However, instead of having that conversation, we're instead taking one or two panels written by a guest writer in an anniversary issue that are likely not in any way official continuity to be canon, and then making them somehow a political statement on the part of an entire company and/or an entire political movement.

An Open Letter To The Texas House of Representatives

2011-04-05T10:33:00.004-05:00

(RE: This Bill )

To Whom It May Concern,

Safe spaces for LGBTQ people are established to counteract the predominant force of heteronormative culture which already exists. They, not your measures, are an attempt to restore a balance which was already lacking. This is what your white, heterosexual privilege allows you to ignore: everything in our culture already promotes heterosexuality.

Practically every film I have ever seen in my life involved a man and a woman kissing and/or making love. Every pop song sung by a man is said to be about a woman, and vice versa. Every novel that gets canonized is filled with some man deeply longing for some woman. I would love to know how you think heterosexuality has in any way been slighted.

This is what angers me to the point of distraction about the current "Family Values" push--it ignores its own role as oppressive. As rhetorical aggressor. LGBTQ people wanting to have safe spaces and take classes that in some way remind them that there is a balance to be had are not somehow upsetting the balance, merely attempting to restore a balance that has been absent for the entirety of human history.

You feel attacked by these classes and centers because they remind you that your life is built on the lie of heteronormativity and white privilege. There is no attack on family, only an attack on ignorance. Only an attempt to create safe spaces. What you've done is take away the balance you sneeringly say you're attempting to preserve.

What saddens me is that someday, after we have already reclaimed the rights guaranteed by the constitution of the United States (which your state continues to remove with a glee that can only be described as horrifying), you are all going to have to try to justify to your grandchildren why you saw fit to discriminate. You'll have to explain how you used them, either in name or in suggestion, to promote a culture of ignorance. How you pandered to the lowest common denominator as a means of securing power. I feel sorry for that day which is coming to you. I feel saddened for what the state of Texas is becoming.

In No Way Yours,

Me.

Kindle Edition

2011-03-31T11:30:00.002-05:00

We now have a Kindle edition of the novel available here.

Website Redesign

2011-03-31T11:09:00.004-05:00

My webmaster, who is amazing, has reconfigured the website, and it looks great. You should stop by and have a look: J-Warren dot net. The biggest change? I joined Twitter on January 26th to see if I'd like it. I've found that I do, so the website now contains my twitter feed (and ways to link to it for those of you already there).

Long Live The Fighters

2011-03-23T06:08:00.002-05:00

I am somewhat happy to hear this. The reason is that, currently, the literary estate is in the hands of Herbert's son, who is a terrible writer who has made a name by cashing in on his father's name.

Because, let's face it, that miniseries, and the sequel, were beyond awful. And not like early Doctor Who awful, which was charming in so many ways, but actually hardcore awful.

So, I say it's dead--let it stay dead.

Even a master craftsman like Lynch couldn't really do the book any justice (though he came closest so far). If he couldn't, what hope do the current crop of hacks have? There's only one director currently working, and one coming back out of what seemed like a slow fade, that I'd trust with Dune: Steven Soderbergh, or Ridley Scott. Neither of them seem all that interested in the material, though, so let's just let it go.

Let it die while it still has some dignity left.

All of this will sound really harsh, I know, but you have to understand what the novel Dune means to me. I know that brands me as the worst kind of nerd purist, but I really do think that time has shown us that this material defies visual representation in many ways--it's too sprawling, too epic (in the original sense of the word, not the way we currently use it).

Katniss Is Not Stewart!

2011-03-18T09:26:00.002-05:00

Cautiously optimistic about this casting news. I was dreading, and somewhat resigned to the fact that it was probably going to be Kristen Stewart. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure she's a lovely person, but her acting leaves me cold and disconnected from the characters she's playing. Since the whole reason Katniss is cool is that she's a badass action hero who doesn't have to shut off her emotions in order to be effective (i.e. become just a male character in drag), casting Stewart would have completely defeated the forward strides that I feel Katniss represents. I haven't seen "Winter's Bone" or "X-Men: First Class" yet, but I really do have a better feeling about this film now that this bit of casting is done.

LLF Finalists announced

2011-03-16T07:05:00.002-05:00

This year's Lambda Literary Foundation finalists have been announced. Pulling for The Right To Be Out in the nonfiction category--that book is really fantastic.

Ex-WBC members at Kevin Smith's "Red State" showing

2011-03-13T09:01:00.005-05:00

Woke up to these two stories:

Read this one.

then read this one.

I can't imagine how scary and cool that must've felt for Kevin all at the same time. What would I do if two people who had escaped human sexual trafficking were to read Ganymede right in front of me, and then ask me questions about it?

I wonder if we might get a commentary track from them on the DVD release. How mindblowing would that be?

Exploding Ticket and Crash

2011-03-08T06:20:00.005-06:00

Slowly working my way through Burroughs's Nova Trilogy (as you can see on my Goodreads widget over there --->).

One of the non-Burroughsian novels that I haven't gotten to so far in my life that I want to is J. G. Ballard's Crash.

So, I was very interested to find this, Ballard reviewing The Nova Trilogy, floating out there on the net.

How Lambda Literary Made Me Bankrupt

2011-03-07T13:30:00.003-06:00

I swear that Lambda Literary is trying to bankrupt me.
Three books that are fresh off the press that are absolute must-haves:

Queer America: A People's GLBT History of the United States by Vicki L. Eaklor

A collection called After Sex?: On Writing since Queer Theory

and the YA novel I am J by Chris Beam.

Epic Comicness

2011-03-06T20:41:00.005-06:00

The people who run the local Friends of the Library sale are getting on in age. Some of my colleagues who have become very close friends and I are working to take over the reins. This year, we're just working behind the scenes to learn how the sale (which is far more massive than the name implies) works.
This year, that included sorting through the equivalent of 6 longboxes worth of comics that were not in any particular order. So, a friend of mine and I rolled up our sleeves and got busy on that today. After about 5 hours, we'd gone from having many, many boxes of completely unorganized comics, to stacks and stacks of unboxed madness (the picture above, which he took), to somewhat organized stacks, to organized and labeled boxes of organized sequential runs of comics. It was GLORIOUS.
Four things I learned today that were very interesting to me:
1) We both found ourselves incredibly annoyed by the fact that a complete set of 20 or more comics would be broken because of one missing issue.
2) The work was so fascinating and satisfying, that 5 hours went by instantly.
3) After working so hard on the collection, I found myself loathe to leave it. It started to feel strangely like "mine."
4) We both found ourselves trying to think about the mind that did the original collecting, and wondering what the logic was in collecting huge runs of books that neither of us would have enjoyed, and yet very small runs of books that we were quite excited to find.
I can't think of a time I spent a better 5 hours. Maybe I'm meant to be a comics librarian, instead.

Abandoning

2011-03-06T09:07:00.003-06:00

This is super interesting to me right now because I'm in a tough spot with the third book in the conceptual trilogy (jesus that sounds more and more pretentious every time I say it, but it is what this whole thing is about) that starts with Ganymede and continues with Orpheus. See, I've abandoned my share of dead ends on my hard drive, and I won't listen, but there's a little voice at the back of my head saying I might need to abandon this one, too. Not the entire concept, but this draft. We'll see I guess.

Blade Runner Prequels?

2011-03-03T08:43:00.005-06:00

This is going to make a lot of people pretty upset. I'm one of them. "Blade Runner" is the holiest of holys to me. The thing we have to remember, though, is that no matter how spectacular the film is, no matter how much it impacted our lives, it has always had a troubled history in terms of standing on its own as a work.

The novel was already a loose adaptation of an earlier work. The title alone has an incredibly complex history, being also the title of the Alan E. Nourse novel, which was then later adapted into a sort-of novel/screenplay by Burroughs.

What most people who love the movie hate to deal with is that it already had sequels, and they flopped horribly. The movie, in fact, already has prequels in publication.

So, though the news of today is saddening in some ways, I think that those of us who hold certain films to be too special to be touched by the prequel/sequel/remake machine that Hollywood has become have to remember that many of those texts already have a troubled history. The way we show them that this prequel/sequel/remake madness has to stop, though, is by not going to these films, not by bitching and moaning and then going anyway.

A Rant

2011-02-14T13:20:00.002-06:00

Pre-warning--this is a rant that I feel I want to put into the public space of my blog. If you're not particularly interested in hearing me rant about my personal feelings on a subject, perhaps this is not the post for you:

Every single social change movement that I can think of in the United States that was about equality eventually bursts through the bigotry and hatred, and becomes law. Women gained the right to vote. African Americans gained their civil liberties. And when they do get through, and a generation grows up with that new paradigm in place, the adults who thought they were "protecting culture" or defending conservative points of view have to explain to their grandkids why they were bigots.
Every single one of the legislators and pundits who are determined to put their homophobia on parade are some day going to have to explain to someone why they thought it was a good idea to deny rights to an entire group of people. It has happened before, and I have no idea how these supposedly smart people don't see that it can and will happen again.
This is what amazes me right now--these bigots, these homophobes, these ignorant idiots are GOING to have to explain themselves someday to a culture that has moved past their ridiculousness. Are they really so happy to make sure that day comes?
The short view of history they must be taking in order to be able to put themselves in positions like this is a view that I cannot in any way understand.

Wonder Woman Cosmetics?

2011-02-13T11:36:00.001-06:00

How could someone have misunderstood what the character is about this badly?

Transgender Equality Survey

2011-02-04T13:17:00.002-06:00

This is staggering. I'm at a loss for what to even say about it.

All-Ages Oeming

2011-01-27T10:58:00.002-06:00

This looks really ...interesting. I'm a huge fan of Powers . I have to be honest, though; I'm not trying to doubt Oeming's skill at all, but his style isn't what I'd normally call "all-ages friendly." However, perhaps it's time that the rounded, smooth, "all-ages friendly" style is challenged.* I'll be very interested in how people respond to this book.

---
*=I am aware that some, like Matthew Loux, have already done some of that challenging, but for some reason it seems to me like Oeming's style pushes the boundary further.

Burroughs!

2011-01-25T08:39:00.003-06:00

It will come as zero surprise to anyone that I absolutely fell in love with Oscillocope Laboratories' film "Howl". What I just found out, though, is that they have another film (a documentary this time) about another of my author obsessions, William S. Burroughs titled "William S. Burroughs: A Man Within":

Here is the homepage for the film at Oscilloscope that shows the play dates and also gives the date the film will be out on DVD.

If you're interested, though, there are some other films out that you might also enjoy (but may not have heard about). Among them is a jewel called "Beat":

And, of course, the film "Naked Lunch" itself:

Silencing Orpheus

2011-01-21T16:17:00.002-06:00

I want to thank you all again for your support of my first novel, Stealing Ganymede. I can't tell you what it has meant to me.

I just sold my 2nd novel, Silencing Orpheus, to Rebel Satori, and contracted a 3rd for the future. This would not have been possible without all of you, and I can't tell you what that means to me, as well.

We'll be working through the edits in the weeks to come, and sometime soon I should have a release date for you. I hope you'll continue to support me, and (more importantly) indie publishing.

Apologia

2011-01-05T09:08:00.003-06:00

Apologies for not having posted in a long while. I appreciate you sticking with me, dear reader. I hope your holiday season was wonderful, and that the new year is being very kind to you so far.
Keep watching this space for some big news in the weeks to come!

Electronic Persecution

2010-12-09T12:41:00.003-06:00

Like most people in the United States right about now, I'm very excitedly waiting on the film Tron: Legacy . Having downloaded some tracks from Daft Punk's soundtrack to the film, last night I was hyped up enough to dig through my DVD library and find my copy of the original film.

It has been a long time since I've watched it. The last time I can remember seeing the film was about 13 years ago on VHS (though I'm a little fuzzy there, my dates may be messed up). I've learned a lot since then about texts and interpretation and I guess what I am struck by most is this: "Tron" is a dystopian work. For some reason, I remember it being about the struggle between Flynn and Yori and Tron against Sark and the MCP. What I didn't catch until last night (and I feel really stupid for not catching) is that the MCP's takeover of the computer world takes the form of religious persecution. Sark is a monotheist who speaks directly to his "god," the MCP. The programs who are being rounded up are those that still have a belief (which Sark calls archaic) in "the Users." From the way they are spoken of, these "Users" are very much like the Greco-Roman gods to the programs who believe in them--all-powerful, but distant and unknowable. In other words, the central social struggle in "Tron" is that a powerful Monotheist regime is persecuting all of the polytheists that live within its borders. I'm absolutely sure I'm not the first person to think of this; there has to be others who studied the film out there who see it. I was really struck by it, though, and I wonder how much this will play out in to the new film.

Grayson, Todd and Drake.

2010-12-05T09:47:00.009-06:00

If you read Ganymede... right away, you can see that it's my way of getting to write a Batman and Robin story. I've always been absolutely fascinated by the concept of Robin (though usually underwhelmed by the execution of the character by most writers) and the contradictions it brings to the Batman mythos.
There's a fantastic new Agent of S.T.Y.L.E. article over at Newsarama, today. I love how Kistler attempts to connect the clothing concepts for each individual hero-in-training to their particular iteration of the Robin costume. Very cool stuff.

Feasting on the Corpse

2010-10-31T10:16:00.002-05:00

Graeme McMillan offers some thoughts here as to why Caprica was cancelled. With the show canceled, it's time to engage in that time-honored tradition on the internet: Monday Morning Quarterbacking (or, feasting on the corpse).

We all know by now that I watch far too much TV for a writer or a scholar. One of the shows that I came to like a great deal was Caprica. Even with that said, though, I'm sad to admit that I agree with most of his points. There is one that he didn't make, though, in the negative, and one that I think needs to be made in the positive:

1- (negative) the real problem for the show has always been its casting. Battlestar Galactica, Caprica's parent show, always had fantastic casting to fall back on when the storylines wandered. Caprica had almost no actors that were intrinsically interesting in and of themselves. Polly Walker was, to me, the only actor who was both very good, interesting and had a well-written character simultaneously. Ultimately, I think, this is what sunk the show. Who on earth thought that Eric Stoltz could carry the weight of an entire series? This on top of McMillan's point re: the inconsistency of the character. Save Polly Walker, all the really interesting actors were relegated to minor roles. My sincere hope is that these actors find new gigs quickly, because I thought some of them were doing fantastic work (especially Sasha Roiz).

2-(positive) McMillan isn't wrong when he guesses that there will be basically 3 attitudes those of us who enjoyed the show will adopt. However, I think he gives one of them short shrift. We as fans of science fiction have a right to be upset about the cancellation because the (supposed) science fiction channel is supposed to be the one place, the ONE PLACE, where a science fiction television show can get a fair shake. I'm not stupid; I understand they have to think about how they're going to fund their network, but steadily they have been getting that funding from non-science fiction based programming. In the early days, the heavy presence of sword-and-sorcery style fantasy was fine, because much of the rest of the content was science-fiction centered. However, these days, I defy you to find anything that is science fiction based on the so-called science fiction network. Their re-branding in terms of their name seems to have been more than just a broadening of spectrum, and instead seems to have signaled a complete shift in attitude. Falling below one million viewers would doom any series on any of the other cable channels, but the whole reason for having a science fiction channel is so science fiction programming, which is going to show lower ratings than most other programming on mainstream networks almost by definition, can still survive.
In short, if SyFy is going to start axing shows for ratings problems using very similar criteria to the other more-mainstream networks, then why are we as science fiction fans still supporting it as a network? It very much feels like the network has turned its back on those of us who kept it alive through the early lean times now that a new set of lean times has returned. That's what hurts the most, I think.

Huizenga

2010-10-24T13:05:00.002-05:00

I 100% agree with everything said here. Kevin Huizenga is my all-time favorite comics author/artist. Glenn Ganges is one of the most important characters in literature to come out of the 21st century.

Juxtaposition Lyricism

2010-10-23T08:54:00.004-05:00

Marc Spitz just put out the paperback to his David Bowie bio , and I desperately want a copy. It'll have to wait until next month. Because of that, I'm doing a lot of Bowie listening (even more than I normally do). What keeps striking me over and over again is the interesting juxtaposition of images in his lyrics. The sudden way words will collide with one another. It's one of the reasons I'm a big fan. So, for no reason other than that I want to, a collection of my favorite Bowie lyrics* in no particular order, today (and avoiding some of the more often-heard songs of his Glam period in favor of some that I prefer from his later-ish albums):

this bit from "Black Tie, White Noise" strikes me as one of the most powerful truisms in a song ever:

They'll show us how to break the rules
But never how to make the rules
Reduce us down to witless punks

and you can't talk about that same album without mentioning the anthem "Jump They Say" because of this point he makes:

They say hey that's really something
that you should get some time
I say he should watch his ass, my friend.
don't listen to the crowd
when they say 'Jump'
Got to believe somebody
Got to believe

a sentiment he echoes a bit once we get to "No Control":

Every single move's uncertain
Don't tell God your plans

and then a really interesting flash of an echo in "We Prick You"--that for us in the last few years of the 90s, it seemed like the push for social change got lost in a rampant sex culture:

Revolution comes in the strangest ways
I'd rather be inside you

of course, Bowie isn't going to be able to resist taking a poke at the ridiculousness of the heteronormativite mindset, never put better than this bit from "Boys Keep Swinging":

when you're a boy
other boys check you out

or here, in "Hallo Spaceboy" (which kills me every time I hear it):

And I want to be free
Don't you want to be free?
Do you like girls or boys
It's confusing these days

"Diamond Dogs" contains some of my favorite post-apocalyptic image-mash (it's hard to listen to this song without thinking of something like Delany's novel Dahlgren):

Crawling down the alley on your hands and knees
I'm sure you're not protected, for it's plain to see
The diamond dogs are poachers and they hide behind trees
Hunt you to the ground they will, mannequins with kill appeal

I am amazed at "We Are The Dead" for capturing so perfectly the feel of Orwell's 1984:

You're just an ally of the lecher pro creator for the virgin king
But I love you in your fuck me pumps and your nimble dress betrayals
Oh, dress yourself, my urchin one, for I hear them on the rails
Because of all we've seen, because of all we've said we are the dead

the chorus from "Ashes to Ashes" has always been one of my favorites:

Ashes to ashes, funk to funky
We know Major Tom's a junkie
Strung out in heaven's high
Hitting an all-time low

as has this bit of pre-chorus and chorus out from "I'm Afraid of Americans":

God is an American
God is an American

[CHORUS]
Yeah, I'm afraid of Americans
I'm afraid of the words
I'm afraid I can't help it
I'm afraid I can't
I'm afraid of Americans

lots of songs are about breakups, but the only lyric I've ever heard that precisely expresses what they always feel like to me is this one from "Bring Me The Disco King":

You promised me the ending would be clear
You'd let me know when the time was now
Don't let me know when you're opening the door
Stab me in the dark, let me disappear

I also love the idea of Bowie making his "Thin White Duke" persona a kind of anti-cupid in the song "Station to Station":

The return of the Thin White Duke
throwing darts
in lovers' eyes

Or casting his early 90's electronica incarnation as a kind of God of (terrible things)in "Telling Lies":

Me I'm fast like bad infection
Gasping for my resurrection
Swear to me in times of war and stress

which is, a sort of echo from the earlier "The Man Who Sold The World":

You're face to face
With the Man who Sold the World

which continues through "You've Been Around" in a way:

Where the flesh meets the spirit world
Where the traffic is thin
I slip from a vacant view
I should have thought of that
And the sound of tomorrow
Like a black-hearted vile thing

I love the images in this bit from "Dead Man Walking":

Two young men dancing under the lamplight
Shaking their sex and their bones
And the boys that we were
An alien nation in therapy
Sliding naked and new
Like a bad tempered child
On a rain slicked street

I also love this really simple but powerfully startling reworking of an old colloquialism from "The Motel":

There is no hell
Like an old hell

___
*= Of course, it goes without saying that these lyrics are all copyright protected by their individual songwriters (almost always Bowie himself) and that they are shown here without permission. If you are Bowie or one of the other copyright holders and object to my display of your material, please get in touch with me and I will gladly take the lyrics down.

Reflections on the Future

2010-10-19T09:45:00.007-05:00

apropos of nothing:

Believe it or not, though all three came out in 1979, "Moonraker" preceded both Star Trek: The Motion Picture" and Disney's "The Black Hole." The film version of "The Andromeda Strain" came out in 1971. The film "Colossus: The Forbin Project" came out in 1970.

These facts continuously blow my mind. This is because, watching them now, I can sense their futurism far more easily than I can Abrams'.* That term makes very little sense on its own, so let me explain: I am a sucker for good design. Good design might make me pick up a book off the shelf and consider it for purchase when the premise doesn't (not a very critical way of looking at literature, but I am a good little capitalist). Good prop and set design in a film (called Production Design) will make me like a film that I otherwise might not. All of the above films have similar production design and, for some reason, that particular design aesthetic to me immediately reads as "the future." This is, of course, because so many were trying to emulate the same production design that Kubrick created for the 1968 film, "2001: A Space Odyssey."# This has become interesting to me because, even though it is far more realistic, a recent re-watching of the J.J. Abram's "Star Trek" reboot does not seem "future" to me. The touch screens and general Apple-like gleaming surface aesthetic doesn't seem to be as "future" to me as the vaulted ceilings, avacado green or burnt orange wall panels and tiny screens with gibberish readouts of 1970's science fiction film.

1979's "Moonraker" is definitely proof of this. I don't like Roger Moore. I know that most James Bond fans will have a special place in Hell reserved for me because I said that, but it's true. I dislike Roger Moore, but I really like this film, and it has a lot to do with the production design. In fact, all the films I listed above share this characteristic: not particularly good films that have fantastic production design. Watching "Moonraker," and seeing just how similar it looked as a non-science fiction film to other films that I knew came from similar times, but had legit science fiction pedigrees, I naturally assumed that it had come later and filched their production design. Some night when you have some time, watch Disney's "The Black Hole" and "Moonraker" back to back and you'll instantly see what I mean. Now, though, seeing the release dates, it is perhaps them who were doing the filching. That's a hard thing to admit, but the film does precede the others by almost six months, meaning that production started earlier by at least six months, as well.

In some ways, I wish that I could feel that the polished, gleaming metal surfaces and the touch screens and immaculately clean glass of the current crop of future-visions was where we are headed, but time and time again, it is the rounded hallways and washed out gray jumpsuits that speak of "the future" to me.
____
*= Also surprising to me because their sense of "futurism" seems much more relevant to me, so I tend to think of these films as occurring later than they do--1979 seems fantastically early for films like these to me.
#= Again, it seems nuts to me that a film like "2001" could have occurred in 1968.

Unfortunate Editorial

2010-10-06T12:23:00.003-05:00

Take a second and read The Daily Targum's editorial response to the media attention surrounding Tyler Clementi's suicide.

My response to the editorial is confusion. Is it the case that, somehow or another, the outcry over bullying of LGBT teens and college students is antithetical to mourning? As if, somehow, we can't be doing both simultaneously? Whoever wrote the editorial not only missed the point in their attempt to uphold the university reputation, but also creates a fallacy that could have been avoided. What an unfortunate piece of writing to post in response to all of this.

Biokrieg!

2010-10-05T10:00:00.006-05:00

I'm in the middle of reading Paolo Bacigalupi's novel, The Windup Girl.

It's really complex and wonderful (apparently I'm not the only one who thinks so--it's already won just about every award a science fiction novel could possibly win). I'm particularly drawn in by the cover (you may not know this about me, but I'm a sucker for good book design--it's one of the reasons that I knew Rebel Satori was great place for my novel: the book design on Ganymede is fantastic). The cover to Bacigalupi's novel is great. However, while crawling the net, I found the cover (and subsequent re-naming of the novel) for the German edition. Check this out:

Nothing at all intended against Night Shade Books, but that German cover? It owns. it wins, hands down. I sort of wish I could read German better; I'd love to catch people staring at that cover design out of the corner of their eye.
Shallow? Maybe, but I'm only human.

Losing Alyson

2010-10-04T11:58:00.002-05:00

This makes me more sad than I can tell you. I mean, I guess the time has come, but still. I won't tear at my hair and weep in the streets...after all, there'll still be e-books. Still, though, this comes as a bit of a shock to me.
This, of course, fits into the larger conversation about the shift in reading habits we as a culture are experiencing (not to mention the conversation about legitimacy of electronic publishing vs. print on paper). I was raised as part of the culture where book reading is as much a tactile as mental experience, though. I still have trouble screen reading. I don't in any way oppose e-books, but I have to say I'm not a big consumer of them, either.

You Should Make a Video

2010-10-01T12:31:00.002-05:00

If you're an LGBT person who reads me, maybe take a second to stop by this link. Maybe think about making a video. Maybe pass the link along to others:
The "It Gets Better" Project

The Fate of the Phoenix!

2010-09-29T13:06:00.004-05:00

Lately, for some reason, all I'm doing is the blogging equivalent of re-tweeting, and today's entry is no exception:

Richard Cook is doing this GREAT project where he is going back and reading the comics that came out in the month he was born. Today's entry brings him to Uncanny X-Men #137, the infamous "The Fate of the Phoenix!" issue. One of the things he said is:

"Of course, the subtext of the storyline is still depressing. A woman gains absolute power, so naturally she goes insane and has to be destroyed. Rumor has it that Byrne and Claremont initially intended to de-power Phoenix as a punishment for her actions, but Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter insisted that she die (because she’d committed genocide in an earlier issue). Regardless of their intentions, de-powering doesn’t change the subtextual problems."

What I say is: thank god someone else is paying attention. This is the exact problem I had with that DREADFUL third x-men film that attempted to tell the revised Dark Phoenix story, as well. Why is it that whenever a female character finally gains enough power to not have to ask for permission to do or say anything from males, she is immediately branded a threat, and someone inevitably says she must be destroyed? More to the point, notice that somehow or another the act of attaining that power drives any female character insane, but for some reason the worst a male who attains ultimate power has to worry about is going unconscious. This very same problem comes up with The Scarlet Witch--I've lost count of the number of characters who are hunting her with the intent to destroy her for altering reality. If I remember correctly, the only thing that Franklin Richards had to worry about was being grounded when he did something similar. It's a trend that bothers me.

Niffenegger's Latest

2010-09-19T11:29:00.002-05:00

I absolutely loved the novel, The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. I haven't seen the movie, so I can't speak to it, though I imagine that many of the scenes I love the novel for did not make the cut for the film (because of their very nature as slow, non-plot advancing scenes). I do need to see it at some point.
Here is an interesting interview she did about current and upcoming projects for Bleeding Cool news. The title of the piece is a little misleading, but that's not such a bad thing--I'm not so sure that a comics adaptation of The Time Traveler's Wife would work out very well.

Redacted Poetry

2010-09-11T06:52:00.004-05:00

Found poetry is always a dicey venture; sometimes you get genius, sometimes you get nothing more than dead language dissected and pinned to a page. Not really a whole lot of middle ground when it comes right down to it.
This is something I found while crawling the net the last few days and it looks like he gets it. The concept of mimicking redacted documents as a form of poetic expression is intriguing to say the least. Trying to track down a copy.

Harvard?

2010-09-09T09:16:00.001-05:00

Something interesting I found while web crawling this morning:
I might never make it there, but at least my novel is at Harvard .

Red Velvet

2010-08-28T10:14:00.002-05:00

No news on the novel, yet, but fingers still crossed.
Move completed. Well, completed in the sense that I'm in which I live, now, and all my things are here in the apartment with me. Boxes, boxes everywhere...
I know that in this day and age, in order to seem cool, I'm supposed to say that I'm head over heels in love with Lady Ga Ga or whoever the latest hip xylophone rock band is. My tastes are very different, though.
People ask about the first album I ever bought. It's difficult to say, because I bought two that day: Heart's album "Heart" and U2's "Rattle and Hum." This was back when CDs still had the long boxes for packaging. Of the two, U2 is the only band still fully active, and in the long run the band that means more to me. However, Heart still plays a deep and powerful role in my life. My first rock concert? Heart on their "Brigade" tour. The song playing during my first one night stand? "Dream of the Archer" . I could go on, but you get the picture.
So, I'm thrilled to find out that the sisters have just released their new album, Red Velvet Car . Go here for some interesting video.

Barred

2010-08-13T07:31:00.002-05:00

"Oh, shit yeah. Hugely. Storytellers are liars by definition, which is why Plato refuses to allows them into his perfect Republic. Storytellers will be barred at the gate."

Understanding things like this are the reason that Mike Carey's writing on the Vertigo series "Unwritten" is so genius. Here is a CBR interview with Mike Carey and Peter Gross about their latest softcover of collected issues, volume 2.

Passing It Along

2010-08-09T09:30:00.004-05:00

This book sounds really fantastic. I'm really interested in reading it, and I thought many of you might be, too, so I'm posting it here.

Silencing LGBT Youth in Print

2010-07-29T10:57:00.005-05:00

Read this. I want to say "read this, and then go buy a copy so that people see when they try to remove books from shelves, there is a bump in sales." However, the book is now out of print. Which brings me to my next couple of points: 1) The book was published in 2000--so it's been on shelves for 10 years and there hasn't been too much outrage--I guess it wasn't as easy to openly attack gay people (especially youth) to score cheap political points then, so... 2) It doesn't surprise me at all that people would react strongly to a book from the Alyson imprint--the whole reason Alyson is important is that they tend to push boundaries, push limits.
Here's what should be considered (and the article gives some thought to this): Beck's group is using the public's discomfort with adolescent sexuality and identity to score easy points (especially straight parents' paranoia about the sexual orientation of their children in particular) and silencing LGBTQ youth in the process. There are all kinds of things to be said about people who try to defend the constitution by violating it, but in then end, to give more than a few sentences gives them the attention they crave.

Updating: The Move

2010-07-26T06:55:00.005-05:00

Not many updates lately; that's because I'm getting ready for a move. Reading a lot, though, as you can see from the sidebar. Writing some. Finally got the second novel in shape and submitted it for consideration; keep your fingers crossed!

In the meantime, enjoy Jemaine Clement, whom I have fallen head over heels in love with as a performer. Here he is doing an amazing David Bowie (from the Flight of the Conchords episode "Bowie") and then doing a Q and A as the character Dr. Ronald Chevalier* (from the amazing film "Gentlemen Broncos" **). I can't wait to see him soon in "Dinner for Schmucks" .

---
*= here is the official website of the character
**= a film I know has been all but universally panned, but I'm telling you is absolutely incredible. At some point I'll post a defense of the film, and talk about what the "critics" missed.

No Xylophones!

2010-07-10T08:31:00.002-05:00

Bryan Lee O'Malley just did a post on his blog revealing the songs on the Scott Pilgrim movie soundtrack. The list makes me V E R Y happy; I was worried that producers would want to go for the more xylophone-rock tinged stuff that seems to be the popular Hollywood shorthand for "hip music for kids" these days (check out the soundtrack to "Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist" to see what I mean). Instead, it's a wonderful selection of little gems from the 90s and early 2000s. This makes me happy not just because I am a little worried about how Scott Pilgrim is going to transfer to the big screen, but also because of how much I absolutely detest xylophone rock.

Diana's Makeover

2010-07-02T11:27:00.002-05:00

With the internet abuzz right now about the Wonder Woman costume redesign (pictured below) attached to JMS's pseudo-reboot story that starts with WW ish 600, CBR posted this great article about Princess Diana's costumes through the ages. Super fascinating stuff in terms of history of women, ideology and visual rhetoric. Here's a great interview that Newsarama did with the new artist, Don Kramer. I'll miss Gail Simone because she is amazing, and her tenure on the book has been really good, but I'm also really excited about this new direction.

Trailer for the novel!

2010-06-23T20:42:00.005-05:00

So, after wanting to put one together for a long time, I have finally managed to get a book trailer together for Stealing Ganymede. Click on the video, then click again to go to the video (it's truncated here, and you can't see it all):

$127 at www.pond5.com royalty-free video and music website, about a week's worth of scouring and designing, and doing more than a few drafts of the thing and finally it's here. I'm pretty happy with it. What do you think?

Ocean Vuong

2010-06-20T10:36:00.005-05:00

I think it's amazingly tough to really capture what the encounter between bodies is like, especially in poetry. Ocean Vuong has done it masterfully here (check out the poem complete with reading on the PANK magazine site). Check out his poem "Revelation," as well as the other poems he has available on his site.

Being the Change

2010-06-16T09:38:00.003-05:00

The Trevor Project is hosting the "Be The Change" video contest that you should really stop by and have a look at. I'm too old to participate, but I think it's an incredible thing, as does one of my all-time biggest nerd-hot crushes (and brother of one of my favorite authors, John Green), Hank Green. No information is up on the Trevorproject Blog, yet, but I'm sure it soon will be.

Nice Cardigan!

2010-06-09T08:52:00.003-05:00

This makes me very happy. If you haven't had a chance to see Misfits (their official site), yet, then put it on your list. I was blown away by the show's writing, and acting. Not trying to oversell it, but it was everything that the bloated, squeaky-clean and poorly written "Heroes" should have been (and wasn't).

Lammy Winners

2010-05-28T11:35:00.003-05:00

The winners of the 22nd annual Lambda Literary Awards were announced today. Lots of great stuff on that list, especially Dale Peck's novel Sprout, which is the LGBT YA winner this year.

Thoughts on "The End"

2010-05-24T10:21:00.005-05:00

**Spoiler Alert**
(if you have not yet seen the finale of Lost, stop reading right now)

The blogosphere is alive this morning with thoughts on the Lost finale.* I have some thoughts too. In fact, I think I likely cleared out an entire Lost party with my complaints last night. From reading around the net today, most of my complaints are already out there, and when I voiced many of them, others who are more expert at the show pointed out how there were some answers.

For instance, that near-final shot, where the dog, who has been missing for years, comes in and lays down next to Jack? Okay, I get that it creates visual closure with a scene at the very beginning of the entire series (as a friend of mine pointed out)...but at the point where we're already dealing with the slow-motion death of a major character, the swelling music...it just felt so over-the-top and manipulative that I lost any ability to empathize with what was happening to the characters. The only thing that could have been more heavy handed would have been to show a crying child in slow motion. However, others are talking about that at length.

Most of my objections are like that--explained away, but still disappointing.

However, in the end, here is the objection that stays with me the longest: in a show that has been so self-consciously about gathering disparate people together despite their past, their religion, etc., the show ended with a visual that can only be interpreted as Christian. Some will say "no, they created the place for themselves" others will point out "in the end, it's about letting go of attachments"...these things affirm Buddhist or other views. However, all the characters gathered in a church? In the end, opening the door to that church out into a bright white light? I'm sorry, guys; though there may be other ways to interpret that, the knee-jerk interpretation of that image is deeply Christian. And I'm betting 3/4 of the viewing population would agree; if you asked them, they would say "Jack and the rest got into Heaven." All well and good if you happen to be from a religion that affirms that afterlife orientational paradigm. But what about others?

From the second the show ended, I've been screaming that the re-gathering should have been in a terminal. I mean, I get that the last thing Jack had to do before he could let go was give his father a funeral. However, they had to know that the second they involve a church, there's no way back from that interpretation scheme. If your final concept, though, is that they need to gather before moving on, and your underlying metaphor has always been flight, then why not a terminal? It makes visual sense and, more importantly to me, it allows people other than Christians to get some closure from the show into which they've invested just as much time and love.

In the end, that's what left me the most cold. I would have forgiven the stone cork thing (that basically turned the island into a mystic toilet), I could have forgiven the idea of a plane taking off on a runway that short at such a low speed, and I might have even been able to forgive the INCREDIBLY heavy handed visuals near the end...but making the ending so filled with Christian visual metaphors that a viewer has to work hard to come up with a different interpretation? I'm not sure I can bridge that. Especially when someone like me, who doesn't make a living as a television writer, could come up with an alternative that I believe works much better.

More than anything else, that demonstrates the power of an ending, because I was perfectly happy with the first hour and a half or so. Only time is going to tell whether or not I remain a fan of the show knowing the whole tapestry. However, for right now? I'm left feeling pretty unhappy with that as an ending.

___
*= I guess, after all, I have become the kind of person who uses that term *sigh*

New Ellis

2010-05-19T09:36:00.004-05:00

Bret Easton Ellis, one of my all-time favorite authors, has a new novel coming out next month, Imperial Bedrooms. It's a continuation of the characters from his first (and still most amazing of all his novels to me) novel, Less Than Zero (at wikipedia).

He's also doing a series of interviews over at Movieline, starting with this one about Less Than Zero and its adaptation. Fair warning, in both this one and the the next one, he says some pretty inflammatory things that are burning up the internet at the moment. I don't agree with his opinion on female directors at all, but I also have to wonder how much of what he actually said was included in the comment...it seems rather offhand. At any rate, I make no apologies for him, though--I believe that to be a good author, a person must have strong opinions on things, and as is often the case, strong opinions on things tend to piss people off.

I cannot tell you how excited I am about him publishing anything, but I am especially excited about this particular novel.

Oration

2010-05-01T19:32:00.003-05:00

I am a sucker for great oration. Not only is this an incredible speech about elevating our national rhetoric from the kindergarden level it has fallen to, but it is also delivered with an incredible sense of orational style. Have a listen to President Obama's speech at University of Michigan's 2010 commencement:

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Stonewall Uprising

2010-04-26T08:00:00.000-05:00

I did a post a few days back about how excited I was to see the documentary "Stonewall Uprising" but it disappeared somehow. So, I'm reposting information on the the film. Information on playdates is here, at the First Run Features website.

If you're interested, here's a really great documentary on the subject of Stonewall, as well. I used this for a course I'm teaching, and hearing the voices of actual protesters from that day really interested my students:

Organized abuse

2010-04-24T10:41:00.007-05:00

Recently, Frontline did a documentary on the practice of Bacha Bazi in Afghanistan. As laudable as it is that such a documentary now exists, I'm still chilled to the bone when the investigator says that he was warned attempts to save the boys involved would only put them in more danger. The organized nature, the level of connections these people have to those with higher levels of power, of the abuse is what is so chilling and heartbreaking to me.
I remember when I was in the initial research phase of Stealing Ganymede, I watched "Body Without Soul" by Wiktor Grodecki. I remember being shocked most by the organized nature of the business, and the culture that surrounded it. This is one of the aspects of the novel that I think many people find most difficult to believe, but these organizations exist (look at how disbelief and the connections of the organization destroyed the attempt to break up one of these rings in the Johnny Gosch case). I've talked to survivors of organizations like the one I wrote about. I think far too often people believe and understand that these businesses exist for girls, but that organizations such as the one I wrote about couldn't possibly exist, especially in the United States. It becomes important because, while there are some excellent organizations out there working to end the practice of organized rings of abusers of girls, until we believe that it happens to boys as well, I worry that there won't be the same level of effort to save them, too.

H Jon Benjamin

2010-04-10T07:10:00.002-05:00

I love voiceover actors. One of my favorite things when watching animation is to try to figure out who the actor is before I see the credits. One of the actors that I really enjoy these days is H Jon Benjamin . His voice is instantly recognizable, and makes me laugh immediately. Something about the speed at which he delivers his lines, just a bit slower than "normal"--his cadence--it cracks me up before he even gets to the punchline.

He first came to my attention as Coach McGuirk from the animated series Home Movies :

then, as Dr. Orpheus' Master (in the form of Cerberus the dog in this clip) from the genius show, Venture Brothers:

currently, he is in the new series Archer on FX as the main character, Sterling Archer*:

----
*= the new series from one of my favorite creators, Adam Reed (the man who created Frisky Dingo)

Defense

2010-03-30T06:52:00.004-05:00

Yesterday, faithful reader, I successfully defended my dissertation and received my Ph.D. It's been a truly interesting process, the last year. The most valuable thing to come out of it, though, has to do with writing. I had to set aside fiction writing in favor of academic writing for a year.
What I've learned about writing in this past year, though, by doing so, has been invaluable. Things you may already know about my writing from reading it were not obvious to me at all, but are becoming more clear to me, now. For example, the tiny detail work of editing is something in which I simply have zero talent. This is not to say that I don't edit and polish my work--far from it. However, I've learned I simply don't have the eye for such work. Bizarre as it may sound, I actually have a physical reaction to sustained periods of such detail-oriented work. My heart rate goes up, I get "squirmy" because of this uncomfortable tightness in my shoulders, and I find myself holding my breath without realizing I'm doing it.
So, besides being happy that I've crossed this particular finish line, and being excited about the new possibilities that are out there, I'm also very excited to get back to fiction--not in spite of the academic work, but instead being able to balance them both on my own terms. The follow up to Stealing Ganymede is also in the final stages of editing before I propose it to Rebel Satori and see if they want to buy it. There's a novel I'm working on right now that I'm just dying to tell you about, but I can't--I think it's going to knock your socks off, though.
Interesting note: The moment I got into my car after the defense was over, I turned the car on, and the radio came on because I'd been so nervous I'd forgotten to turn it off. Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" was on, right at the part where Buckingham is repeating "Don't you look back" over and over again. That's one of those things that, if you wrote it into a novel, people would think it was the worst kind of cheese, but actually happen to people.

Finalists

2010-03-16T08:36:00.001-05:00

The finalists for the Lammys were announced. Sadly, I didn't make the short list. It really is okay, though--just to be on that list in the first place was quite something. Though Stealing Ganymede didn't win, there are some amazing books on this list, and you should check them out.

The Future of YA LGBT?

2010-03-04T06:20:00.002-06:00

Lambda Literary has an all-new website, and it's really great. One of the newish entries is especially interesting to me: A really great post asking authors of YA LGBT work what they think of the current state of YA LGBT books, and what that particular segment of readership might want in the future.

Questionable Content, part deux

2010-03-03T08:16:00.005-06:00

Chris Handley's lawyer, Eric A. Chase, makes a statement about the case.*

I think it's really interesting that this was the case: "...Chris was not a collector exclusively of lolicon. He was a collector of all things manga. Of the thousands of books and magazines found by the Feds at Chris’ home, only about twenty had questionable content and ultimately only seven were charged as clearly depicting the violent sexual abuse of obviously very young children..."

Here is a particular interesting turn of phrase: "...which depicts figures that are androgynous, hairless, and clearly childlike, but not clearly children..." Many of us are going to ask "what's the difference, then?" Consider for a second, though, how we just finished Valentine's Day. How many grocery stores were littered with depictions of naked children that no one batted an eye at because we say "those are cherubs" and we don't sexualize them. We contextualize that image non-sexually. It is often the case in Manga that demons, goblins, aliens, etc., appear as childlike but are not children. I'm really glad that he made that point, even if giving in to the larger concern of, as he says, deciding that it would be nearly impossible to "...defend the images which, when projected on an 8′x8′ screen on a courtroom wall..." When taken out of context, in other words.

I think it is important that at least the lawyer involved understood that there is a context, but that there would be a problem once those images were taken out of context. I freely admit I'm not a lawyer, but I have to wonder what might have happened if they had fought for context. I wonder what might have happened if a jury had gotten an education on Japan, on Manga, and on contextualization.

___

*= via The Comics Journal online

Dangerous Art

2010-02-13T09:29:00.005-06:00

The Christopher Handley case (the Iowa man charged and convicted of possession of child pornography for his collection of lolicon manga) finally came to a conclusion with the sentencing hearing having concluded. The result, covered by many online and print outlets including Wired News, is six months jail time.

I'm not going to go into hysterics about the case, the conviction, or the sentencing. That's been going on for a long time by other bloggers and Manga lovers for a long time now. What I am upset about is this: though many are saying no legal precedent has been set, I think there has been. Every time a work or set of works gets labeled obscene, we all lose. It's that simple. Where are we when owning a published work can be equated with committing an illegal act upon a child? I know it's a slippery slope fallacy, but I'm wondering what's next...owning Adam Rapp novels is the same thing as being a child molester? I have a collection of Dennis Cooper novels--do I get brought up on charges of kidnapping, rape and mutilation? Do you see what I'm getting at? I personally may not like the idea of looking at [insert whatever particular thing one finds offensive based on ideological underpinnings], but the problem here is that a court of law decides that owning a published text that depicts [that thing mentioned above] is on the same level as committing the act.

I care about this for a number of reasons, not least of all because I write transgressive fiction. I have in more than one conversation I'm sorry to say had to deal with someone accusing me of writing terrible things as wish fulfillment...that Stealing Ganymede is somehow erotica. I deal with it, like most people who work in dangerous art, but I think we absolutely have to get serious about our conversations when a guy gets a conviction and jail time because of the Manga he wants to read. Do we then proceed merrily to locking up the gallery owner who purchases Charles Ray's latest piece? See what I mean?

Art, at its best, pushes buttons. I am very afraid to live in a country that begins prosecuting people because of their taste in and/or collection of art.

size matters

2010-01-31T12:56:00.002-06:00

And so, this morning, with a lot of luck, and a lot of help, this:

becomes this:

It's Alive!

2010-01-27T06:13:00.004-06:00

Work on the dissertation continues. All chapters have been approved by adviser, and at least seen by committee members. Next week is a major deadline to get the entire second draft to them, so this is my first opportunity to see the thing as a unified set of text.

I'm not in any way trying to show off, but there are some interesting things that I've found out about my diss. in doing this. I'm writing them here for myself, but I thought you guys might be interested as well.

First, some statistics:

Word count of full draft as of right now: 45,296 words
Word count of Stealing Ganymede the day I sold it to Rebel Satori: 62,200 words

Total page count (before Grad. School formatting): 178 (w/out bib.)
Total page count of Stealing Ganymede the day I sold it to Rebel Satori: 270

Now that I have it all together for the first time, I wanted to create a word cloud from it because I think the concept is fascinating. So, in a nutshell, here's my dissertation (dressed as a cloud):

Angel-Headed Hipsters

2010-01-24T10:14:00.006-06:00

I really want to see "Howl" (the wiki entry), the new film about Ginsberg's poem (the wiki entry). The film is making its debut at Sundance, and was selected for first night, which is very cool.* Here are some clips that have wormed their way onto the internet:

James Franco's performance seemed a bit over the top to me at first, but then I know that Ginsberg was more than a bit...odd...when giving a reading (to be fair, what poet isn't?). I hope it comes somewhere close enough for me to see when it's done with the festival circuit.

--
*= See the great write up from The Gaurdian

The Barn

2010-01-21T11:05:00.002-06:00

I think it's important to stop working on a major project from time to time, even if it's just for a few hours. It's hard to do, sometimes, especially with a dissertation, and even more so when you know you're barely going to make the deadlines.

One of the things I do is to make sure I get down to the local comic book shop at a minimum of every two weeks to pick up comics and/or the occasional graphic novel.

The next one I want to get is Storm in the Barn by Matt Phelan from Candlewick Press . Though it's been out for a few months, now, I haven't had a chance to pick it up yet. It's making a lot of noise around the internet. Here's an awesome trailer for the novel:

Have any of you read it already? What'd you think?

As a PS: I am really loving this idea of a trailer for a novel. Though ...Ganymede has been out for a while, I'm wondering about doing one for it. Do you think it'd be a good idea?

Up for a Lammy!

2010-01-04T09:56:00.002-06:00

Stealing Ganymede has been nominated for a 2010 Lambda Literary award in the category of Best Gay Debut Fiction. Have a look at the list here .

Metric!

2009-12-21T09:59:00.005-06:00

It's been a little while since I did a music post. Here's something new you might want to think about picking up:

The Canadian band Metric is just incredible. Edgar Wright who is directing the upcoming Scott Pilgrim Movie was recently on BBC Radio talking about the soundtrack for the film, and Metric will be on. That makes me very very happy.

Here they are performing the song "Gold Gun Girls" from their latest album Fantasies live on the Morning Becomes Eclectic show (KCRW):

Dan O'Bannon

2009-12-19T09:51:00.003-06:00

This news comes as a bit of a shock to me this morning. Dan O'Bannon has died. I've said it millions of times, but "Alien" is my all-time favorite film. Now, true, David Giler and Walter Hill were the script doctors on that film. True, also, that Ridley Scott was the director--but the kernel of the idea had to come from somewhere, and neither the best directing in the universe nor the best script doctoring ever could do anything without that initial kernel.
We have to remember, too, that his story "The Long Tomorrow" was one of the first real cyberpunk stories, prefiguring both "Bladerunner" and Neuromancer.
Sad day for science fiction writing.

non-fiction Hitler movies sell

2009-12-09T15:14:00.002-06:00

It's kinda too bad I'm buried under dissertation like I am right now: this is a screenplay that would sell instantly. Whoever writes that one up is going to make a mint.

They'll probably do something stupid like cast Nick Cage, though, so the film'll tank.

1 in 8 million

2009-12-07T07:46:00.002-06:00

Okay, so the New York Times series "1 in 8 million" is probably about the coolest thing I've ever heard of.

Fancy Spock

2009-12-03T08:03:00.003-06:00

Driving 800 miles home one way, and that same 800 in return, I had a lot of time to kill. So, instead of just listening to music the whole way, I put on the new Star Trek film by Abrams to listen to.* While I was down home, I also showed the film to my mother (which was a really great bonding moment for us).
Hearing it all the way through twice so close together, and watching it with someone fairly new to the film, I noticed something that bothered me a great deal. This is not surprising to anyone I know, because I am a well known Star Trek purist. I grew up with the various films and shows, and it has meant a great deal to me over time.
However, I think the thing that bothered me would surprise most people I know. As is evidenced in this blog, and in many other places my writing occurs, I am not a grammar purist. I believe that grammar is a rhetorical function, not an absolute (and certainly not the moral pillar of civilization that many think it is, but that's a different blog rant altogether). The problem I encounter with the new Star Trek comes on a grammar level. Specifically, the way Orci and Kurtzman have written Spock's dialogue.
Before I go into my rant, I want to point out that if you watch the new film, you will find that none of the other Vulcans use anything but absolutely correct English, to the best of my knowledge. Go on, go watch the film so it'll be fresh in your mind. I'll wait.

Back? Okay.
So, here's an example from about a third of the way through the film. Nero shows himself and asks Captain Pike to come over to the Narada. The following exchange occurs:

- Captain Pike gives a few lines outlining his plan to subdue the drill and try to save Vulcan.
- Kirk says he doesn't agree and makes a counter plan.
- Spock says "I, too, agree; you should rethink your strategy."

Okay, so here's the problem (though you probably already see it). The the verb "to agree" means that there are 1 or more things being said, and the speaker is indicating his or her alignment with those things. However, the "too" there modifies that to mean that there has already been someone who agreed with those things, and the speaker is indicating that they are also agreeing. However, in that scene, no one has spoken but Kirk and Spock, and Kirk disagreed with Pike. What he means, though, is that he is agreeing with Kirk's disagreement. So that entire line is very poorly written, grammatically.
Another example comes from a time before that when Spock is talking with his mother and there is a bit of a pause. Then, Spock says "may I ask a personal query?" Here's why that's a problem--a query is a thing, a noun. It means a question, but it's a thing. Consider the usage "I have a query." It's a thing that one has. "I have a personal query" or "may I ask a personal question"...both those would work, but the way the line is written is awkward, and...frankly...shows a misunderstanding as far as I can see.
There are a few more places like that and I have to admit, they bug me. They bug me because this is what happens when people who are writers don't understand how the language works and yet are trying to make a character sound stilted or intelligent. Just adding extra words to someone's dialogue doesn't make that dialogue more intelligent. A writer has to understand why those extra words are there AND make them work correctly for whatever language. It's our job.
Trust me, the irony of me making a grammar rant is not lost on me. You can see from the clumsy way I did it that I'm not used to making them. However, to have one character making some quirky grammar choices when no other characters do means one of two things: either the character is quirky, and the choices are being made on purpose, or the writer just didn't bother to think the line through. Since no other characters attempt to use English in an odd way in the film, and specifically no other Vulcans, we have to assume that this isn't on purpose. How did it get by the writers? I'm tempted to lash out because I think Orci and Kurtzman were entrusted with something I dearly love. I won't go quite that far. I will say, however, that the choices seem really odd to me, and that they bother me a great deal. They pull me out of the film, and even if a writer is trying to make a quirky character or narrator by using the language in strange ways, I can't imagine that the goal is to pull the reader out of the story and make them feel strongly enough about those choices to write a blog on the subject.

--
* = to be clear, I put it on and then put the pod in a console shelf so I wouldn't be tempted to look at the screen. I don't want state troopers to read this and send me a ticket for distracted driving somewhere down the road. I was listening to the movie, not watching.

QAFing

2009-12-02T19:11:00.006-06:00

[Let me preface this update by saying that I know no one else but me is probably interested in this at all]

I've been a fan of the North American QAF since my friend Thomas introduced me to it. I freely admit that I didn't even know of the show's existence before he showed me the first episode. Like most people I know, though, from about 2 minutes in, I was hooked. Though seasons 3 through 5 fell off for me, I still think of the show as a real high point.*

Recently, I've finally had a chance to watch the Russel T. Davies' UK series that came first. I was somewhat unprepared for how closely the North American series mirrored the original in its first season. The storylines were practically the same.

However, the main thing I'm finding myself confused about is this: Stuart, played by Aidan Gillen (pictured here):

Here's what confuses me: he's not hot. That sounds incredibly shallow, but consider for a moment that the Stuart character is the character that all the boys want. He's the character that is supposed to be so virile, so sexually potent, that he runs the town. I admit I'm not very well versed on how masculinity works in the UK, but consider for a moment the character Stuart's American counterpart, Brian played by Gale Harold (pictured here):

Pardon me for going below the belt here, but HOT. Hotness. When the American series presents this guy as ultra-masculine and cool and sexy, I buy it. Stuart spends most of his time whining (should I say whinging, given the venue?), and when he dances it's not hot. Not at all. Nor can he kiss very well. Yet when Brian dances or kisses I find it hot. Here, let me show you what I mean (both clips somewhat NSFW):

Stuart dancing

Brian dancing (after a moment of dialogue)

See what I mean?

So, overall, I have to say that while I respect that UK QAF came first, I don't get how I'm supposed to fall for Stuart in the same way that I fall for Brian. It might take more views, the same way it did for Brian, but somehow I doubt it. There's no smolder in the performance, really. I understand the characters are not supposed to be the same person, but they hold the same position in their respective cities/communities and I guess I just understand in one case, and not at all in the other.

--
* = I will also admit freely that for a while, though a big fan, the Brian Kinney character bugged me. Now that I'm older, though, and have watched the show a few more times, I get it. I get that non-assimilationist orientation. I get it.

Performing Volatile

2009-11-10T09:51:00.003-06:00

Katee Sackhoff just reposted an interview she did (with Famous Monsters TV). As you know, I'm very interested in her journey playing Starbuck on the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, and though she only says a little about it, what she does say is fascinating. So, as usual, I hope no one gets too mad that I'm re-reposting non-original material, here. Have a look:

Apocalypse

2009-11-04T21:04:00.005-06:00

I hope nobody involved gets mad at me, but I wanted to post some stuff here about the A M A Z I N G end credit title for Battlestar Galactica: The Plan. It's an incredible piece.

Bear says, over on his blog, about the song:

"It begins with a haunting solo vocal by Raya Yarbrough, singing the Gayatri Mantra from the Main Title..."

She sings the Gayatri Mantra, related to the goddess Gayatri:

(in Sanskrit)

oṃ bhūr bhuvaḥ svaḥ
tat savitur vareṇyaṃ
bhargo devasya dhīmahi
dhiyo yo naḥ pracodayāt

There are, it seems, many translations . My favorite?

"We meditate on the effulgent glory of the divine Light; may he inspire our understanding"

Roundup

2009-10-22T09:08:00.002-05:00

A roundup of news stories that caught my eye this morning:

* this story about "community standards" and Manga--the debate continues.

* This interview with the creators of Venture Brothers, since season 4 just started.

* Since it's 7 release day, a quick run down and rating of new Windows 7 (the official website) features.

Out Loud

2009-10-11T10:07:00.002-05:00

If I had a penny for every time I've typed a comment to a student or peer to read a sentence or two out loud so they can hear the awkwardness of it, I'd have filled up one of those water cooler jugs by now. I believe very strongly that an ear is ten times the editor that an eye is. So, it made me very happy when Scott Westerfeld (my all time favorite YA author) talked about how he and his wife edit each other's work in progress during this interview with Romantic Times magazine.*

He says,

--
*= I sincerely hope they won't mind the repost--it's too fantastic an interview not to.

Teens Come Out

2009-10-08T09:16:00.004-05:00

I think that it is incredibly important that we recognize that being a gay teenager is horrific. Though things are slowly, haltingly, getting better (at least in terms of awareness of the problems if not in any other sense), life for a gay teen is horrible whether in the closet or not. They face problems not just in the heterosexist culture that surrounds them, but also from the outmoded concept that the child is tabula rasa...that a child isn't born gay but somehow becomes one through intervention of some sort (the most common thoughts of the unthinking stereotypers seem to be "bad mothering = gay child" and "contact with gay person = gay child" which is enough bad logic to make anyone scream).*

This intersection creates a special hardship for younger gays who want to come out. This rhetoric that circulates that somehow being gay is "just a phase" astounds me--I have no idea how that logic would work, either--and yet they face it every day.

I was quite happy, then, when this story was published. Though I'm not incredibly happy with the idea of asking the people you interview to out other people as part of the interview, but otherwise this article is really good. I plan on using it as part of my discussions when I get to LGBT literature later this semester.

Joy Behar did an interesting segment on this, too. I think she spends too much time talking and not enough time listening, but it's not bad. Have a look:

The bottom line? As critics of children and adolescent literature, or parents, or educators (or educators of educators), we absolutely have to try to find ways to make sure that issues of tolerance are talked about openly and explicitly in our classrooms, our homes, and our scholarly work. It is never easy, but it is absolutely necessary.

--
*=That genius scene in Bryan Singer's genius film, X-Men 2 where Bobby's mother asks him "have you ever tried not being a mutant?" sort of sums it all up.

Shelf Porn?

2009-10-06T09:50:00.001-05:00

First draft of Chapter 1 in on time. We'll see how that goes.
Some Chapter 2 shelf porn? Why, yes...I do have some.
This is what Chapter 2 looks like:

Drafting isn't just a term in NASCAR

2009-10-02T12:18:00.007-05:00

And so, with a little bit of luck and a helluva lot of coffee...

This

becomes this

chipping away

2009-09-29T17:18:00.001-05:00

Chipping away at chapter 1.

It looks like this:

Look Out World...

2009-09-22T12:35:00.002-05:00

So, that time that felt so far away (time to go on the job market) I couldn't even conceive of it is now here, and now all I want is a little more time. Standard. Still, at least I can say "Well, everything else may be up in the air, but I have the supplies situation handled."

2 ink cartridges? Check.
4 pack of post-its? Check.
2 25-count packs of white envelopes? Check
600 white address labels? Check
Enough Department Letterhead to choke a horse? Check

too many windows

2009-09-13T20:15:00.002-05:00

I cannot tell you how sad this makes me.

I've said before that, besides Jim Morrison, Jim Carroll (his website) was one of the biggest influences on my early writing.

"Blood Bridge" is one of my all time favorite poems. I find myself saying it out loud all the time:

Blood Bridge

White ship disappears
into wave machine… this morning
your eyes got shot with secret chains
that the pill armies eventually set free.
you queens so often, in fact,
open my graceful anxieties
like soft horses through toy deserts…
I love this mansion
though its too many windows
to open halfway each morning,
to close halfway each night.

Those last two lines always, ALWAYS hit me like soft sledgehammer massacre. In that dream anthology I have in my head, the one with only the poems I love in it? This one is one of the most important.

R.I.P. Jim.

Unwound

2009-09-12T06:45:00.002-05:00

Sorry that the updates have slowed to a crawl. I'm working on a dissertation, so it's likely to be this way for a while. I hope you'll stick with me!

I'm reading a lot of books right now, but one that that I particularly like is this one:

Unwind by Neal Shusterman (his website).

In the dystopian lit for young people category, it's really standing out to me as I go through because it isn't just a simple 1984 knock-off story. I'm really hoping that it stays high quality all the way through.

Crashed

2009-09-04T09:21:00.003-05:00

The book I'm most excited about right now?

Robin Wasserman's Crashed. It's the sequel to the really good Skinned.

Gregory Edwards made a few trailers for the novel, and this latest one is so eerie and wonderful I wanted to share it. Here, have a look (and I hope he won't mind me reposting):

dropping a mouse

2009-08-28T13:28:00.002-05:00

I've heard a lot about Billy Collins over the years, but I never had a chance to read much of his work until just this past week--bits and pieces here and there, but never a lot. He doesn't always amaze, but when he does, it's with this quiet grace of linework and vocabulary that almost knocks me down. I'm sure that if you know Collins at all, you know the poem I'm about to post, but it's one I've been thinking about a lot since I read it. I think I'm going to start using it as a way to talk about interpretation in a more general sense in some of the lit courses I teach. [I hope he (nor anyone involved in the copyright) will mind me posting]

"Introduction to Poetry"*

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

----

*= from The Apple That Astonished Paris (which is a really awesome reference to Greek mythology in my not so humble opinion)

Rockstarlet

2009-08-20T18:22:00.002-05:00

Stewart Lewis is a brand new find for me. I just finished his novel, Rockstarlet . I had picked it up because it looked like a good beachread kind of novel, but it turned out to be a solid, very well crafted novel. It's about a young musician having to make choices about going back into the closet as his career crosses over and takes off. After, I wanted to go to his website to express how much I liked the novel and found out that he's also a musician. And a pretty fucking good one, at that. Here are the two songs I heard that I liked most*:

"Shine" (from his appearance on the Josh and Sara show)

"This Is Not a Love Song" (from the album In Formation)
----

*=as I always say, I hope he won't mind me posting them here as a way of letting people know his work is out there and very worth a listen

sigh

2009-08-20T10:27:00.001-05:00

Why no update lately? This: