Glad to Mutate

Chris Nakashima-Brown has a piece on Strange Horizons called, "Nomadology". I could describe it, but maybe it would be better if I just let you read an exerpt:

"At the Royal Brisbane Country Club, the lower level of the clubhouse has been converted into interrogation facilities. Portions of the men's grill and locker room allowed to realize their immanent potential when the Homeland Guard recaptured the western suburbs and set up a beautifully landscaped gulag here, a mile or two outside the area under the control of the insurrection.

I am strapped to a banquet chair with hard plastic ties. On the wall opposite, the elusive face of Tiger Woods watches over his shoulder as my interrogator attaches the electrodes to my testicles. Is that a Mona Lisa smile the golfer wears, or some darker aspect? The predatory seduction of the child star.

The empty swimming pool through the window is a detention area surrounded by concertina. A thousand putative rebels rounded up at night from the surrounding municipalities shamble in the shallow rain puddles of the deep end, watched by black-uniformed sentries perched atop the lifeguard towers with assault rifles that intermittently glisten in the light of late dusk.

As the current starts to run through me, I hear the battery of lawn sprinklers kick in. The cascading shook-shook of watery machined spurts ejecting over the greener-than-real turf, unexpectedly synchronized with the waves of high-voltage spasms as they seize my corpus in a rictus of new pain."

Actually, I totally can describe it. It kind of reads like a soft-core "Roosevelt After Inauguration", by William Burroughs. This doesn't appear to be quotable online, but you can read an exerpt of it via a Burroughs Reader on Google Books here.

I like Nakashima-Brown's piece. I'm not the biggest fan of the enviable Burroughs; perhaps better to say that for me he has his moments, and then he also does not. Nor am I a really big supporter of topical subject matter in fiction. It's the atemporality thing--I personally stray away from anything that could date a piece of fictional prose. Like a friend of mine mentioned about rap songs and videos, you can tell instantly when they were outdated by the cell phones that cameo in the song. Fiction shouldn't strive to be universal necessarily, but it certainly shouldn't be looking for the thong-covered ass crack niche that is "current".

But "Nomadology" on the other hand, already feels dated, but in a powerful way, not one of obsolesce. It imparts the brittleness of history in the same way as these current events did when we first learned of them. It's all stuff that happened elsewhere to Americans, in another time and place. Maybe even a different world. Sure, we heard a lot about Darfur for a while. But atrocities, in the United States, always happen in the past tense. Facts always come to light after the fact, and then we condemn, and resolve to have it never happen again. Until the next time that breaking news uncovers what someone else was living with for days, weeks, or years, up until only recently.

And I think this is the real connection to Burroughs, not the shock value. "Roosevelt After Inauguration"... what, people were pissed about Roosevelt? Which one? Why? The whole thing sounds like fictional history, like Burroughs delusions of current events only existed in some drug-addled alternative dimension. But the real drug-addled alternative nightmare is real life, and history is the delusion. We know now that Roosevelt was a good president, because it says so in the history books. We know that Abu Grahib was a bad place, because we are told it is not so anymore. The truth of history is defined by it's nonexistence, and its segmentation to a volume of time and space that are divorced from the present. Both Nakashima-Brown and Burroughs bring the past to life in a way that can never die, because it is too bizarre to be killed. It's been zombified, and given chainsaws for hands, and had a clown mask sewn to its skin, and been installed with a 10,000-year rated deux-ex-machina-brand atomic power-cell, making it impervious to the ravishings of age and nearly unkillable. This horror has been inaugurated, and is going for four more years. Or is it four less years? History never actually happened if it's too horrible. We simply deny it by dating it; or does it do this to us? The story doesn't say, but I have a feeling those terrorist parties happen ever weekend, and on Tuesdays for Service Industry Night. You just need a flyer to get in.

The new Internet world is a strange place, and perhaps what is strangest is that things like car bombings still happen all the time. I'm glad someone is willing to document the strangeness in a way that can deliver the magnitude of history, without falling prey to the glossiness of aqueous-coated magazines, or the tiny fascisms of time, space, and plot. This is the job of literature, if ever it had one. As Roosevelt said, and I quote, "I'll make the cocksuckers glad to mutate."

Pink slip, Purple CSS

I was laid off today. I've actually been on furlough for three of the past four weeks, so it's not exactly a surprise, but still it is now official, so on my unemployment claims I will now stop checking off that I expect to be back at work in the next four weeks, because now I don't.

Am I sad/depressed/angry/worried/panicking? Yes. After withholding, my unemployment insurance totals $280. This covers my rent and most of my debt (school, etc), but not much else. Luckily, my fabulous partner has a much more secure job, but she earns every dollar she makes and deserves more. So, while we will not starve, I will probably be accumulating a bit of debt until I find a job, the prospects of which are just about as bad as they are. The chances of staying in my current field, printing, is probably slim. I hear rumor that offset press workers are being forced to retrain to receive benefits. There is a bit more of a market for digital, which I am in, but everyone is cutting back on extraneous overhead, which printing is deemed to be. I could easily be starting over at the bottom, running a forklift or something (on which I am OSHA certified as a trainer--CALL ME!!!).

But hey, I'm not starving. Plus, I have another job!

Of course, it is unpaid. (Unpaid, Mr/Ms. Googling Unemployment Investigator!)

I've been writing seriously for over two years now, balancing my creative secret life with the life of the full-time employee. So keeping myself busy will be no problem. Over the past few weeks I've actually come real close to finishing a full-length book-type-thing. Only about 20K words out. I might even finish it this next week. So I am actually looking forward to having some extra time, and not necessarily having to fight tiredness with stimulants, and undergoing sleep deprivation to be able to write and work at the same time.

But I am going to have to organize things a bit better. My career, cashflow, and schedule are now officially Favela Chic. So what am I going to do with myself? How ought I to quick-rig my life, and hack the former life of that gainfully employed dude which I am now squatting?

First we'll hack the schedule. Time is some of the easiest hacking there is.

Firstly, I'm still looking for a job. The unemployment is a nice cushion, but it's not enough for the current lifestyle. I'm a bit of a distance from freeganing it all the way to the community collective non-bank; I'm not quite prepared to default on those school loans. Plus, as Mr/Ms. Googling Unemployment Investigator will tell you, I am willing and able to work every day I am claiming for benefits. Having a steady paycheck is pretty sweet, and if I can continue in the printing industry, which I do enjoy, I would like to do so.

So I'm going to need two or three hours a day for job search and application, plus interview times. Luckily, in this climate it doesn't take long to go through all of the new postings in a given day, and what with some skills and experience, I can apply to much more directed and likely leads.

Then, there is the writing. I typically write for three hours a day, and mostly in a spurt in the late evenings, if I'm rested enough. I need a bit of break time spread into this, and for research and drinking coffee and etc, so we'll call it four or five hours.

There is also the lovely partner, who works a night shift. With my newfound flexible hours, I hope to be able to spend some time with her in the afternoon and evening before her shift, to eat a meal, or something similarly domestic. I should be able to work the other things around that, right?

Now, there is the question of supplementary income. There is the book-thing, and the other writing online, (WHICH IS ALL REALLY GOOD AND YOU SHOULD HAVE READ ALREADY OVER AT BRUTE PRESS) which mostly I have offered for free, to date. Maybe I should be thinking about and developing payment schemes. Dedicated POD printing with linked Amazon offerings? Micropayments? Tip button on Welcome to the Interdome? Advertising? Simply actually getting off my ass to send out submissions? I like free, but hey, maybe more people would be interested if I charged a little bit, and promoted myself a bit more. Unfortunately, setting up all this crap takes time. How much time per day for the pursuit of selling out? One hour? Two?

Now the problem is, I like the writing, and of course hanging out with the partner, but the rest of it shoved in there is starting to sound an awful lot like work! Work I am unpaid for no less, and which does not have a huge chance of payout. I might be better off practicing poker strategies, or working on my method for the track. (KIDDING. I only like to play Keno sometimes, and there my method needs no help. It's golden.)

So I guess I'm going to need a schedule. Crap. This self-employed thing is really a drag.

So what about space? What around me should I hack to make this process easier? Well, I already know about living on the cheap, since I done been to college. Soon I'll have tomatoes coming out of my ears when the garden starts yielding in a couple weeks. And I don't know where the actual squalettes are in PDX, but because I have a wonderful, well-paid partner with job security (did I mention she is in a UNION? Hmm... wish I had one of those now...) we'll probably stay in the house with the tomatoes and the papier-mache horse on the porch, and Original Ray keeping an eye on things (don't worry about him... I'll show you a picture some time).

But maybe I should reshape my time-based projects to somehow adapt to this new, unemployed space? Is a schedule enough of a time-space, or do I need something more? I could start an unemployment blog, and channel my writing and monetization efforts into the same place, and maybe get well known and at least get a job out of it if not a coffee-table blog-book deal. But that's not really my thing. Actually, it kind of makes me want to choke myself.

Maybe, instead, this is a time to take risks. I have a lot of ideas way more risky than trying to be a damn writer. Maybe it is time to throw a couple levers, move a couple fulcrums, and really put my weight on some things. Hell, the tough part, the preamble to "quitting my job to do _____" had already been established. Now all I have to do is do it. But, which it? Hmm...

This remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, if you have any ideas, any wild schemes, or any incoherent notions requiring someone with a lot of time to flesh it through, give me a holler. Got an idea for something to spend time on with no apparent tangible result? How about a diagram of a concept not fully accessible with our current metaphysical technology? Any stray words you need strung into a sentence? I am officially "open for business". And since sustainable business models are totally out this year, I would say yes, my industry is booming.



PS. Also, if you know anyone that would be interested in publishing a work of literary fiction about time, space, plants, and memory, sung in a jaunty and ebullient well-meaning prose not unlike Gogol driving an out-of-control troika hitched to Beckett, Nietzsche, and that other post-modern jerk of an author you really, really like, then drop me a line. I know I guy who is writing it, and he'd be happy to send you a portion to read.

I'm Sorry, but the Professer was/is/will be Indisposed

I'm finding it most infuriating to even think about composing anything like a blog post of late. There are several reasons why this is so, not least of which the fact that I am attempting to finish a "most important" project, which is going rather well despite a few typical, technical issues not outside the nature of the craft, and so I am relishing the momentum, and not trying to hard to force any other projects until this monolith of an effort is better anchored.

But that aside, there are other, similarly technical obstacles involving blogging which are cropping up around me, which are not quite resolved. I'd love to share some of these dilemmas here, because they involve my usual cast of characters, including but not limited to:

-time and space

-the art and act of writing and authorship

-technology and the shift forms of semiotics

-Teh Internet (proper noun)

-My own personal anger with and within society

But the fact of the matter is this: my conclusions are leading me to believe that these points are all leading themselves in a different direction than my tendency here on Welcome to the Interdome; that is to say, I am not quite able to sum up my thoughts in the usual format of concise, (albeit somewhat wordy) witty aphorisms, taking us away from the so Internet-friendly-ish blog post, delivering us happily from Point A to Point B.

With as much narrative finality as I'm really willing to commit to at this time, let me ease the explanation with a little SF; I feel like the inventor of a time machine who, upon the successful test of his equipment, finds the only mistake is in the guidance system, and is now arriving through a series of wrong times, unable to get back to his starting point to report his success, therefore presenting the notion to all observers that his test has catastrophically failed.

But I'm not making a time machine here (or at least it would not seem like it to you), just writing a blog. So in your dimension, it may seem like I'm merely succumbing to the same Twitter fever as everyone else, being slowly absorbed by the lure of a quick service, requiring little to no forethought to maintain. I'm seeing many blogs gravitating towards a more "Tumblr"-esque form, no doubt as a result of this same disease. Though, perhaps this was what blog were originally intended to do, so perhaps I'm not one to judge.

At any rate (not just a figure of speech), Twitter seems atemporal enough for me to interact with currently, and perhaps this is the true root of the disease. So if you wish to find me, you could always try there. This is not an announcement of a hiatus of any kind--certainly not an abandonment of this blog for any length of time at all (or any perception of time, either) but, it may begin to change shape, as space alters in conjunction with time. See? You probably preferred the SF narrative. Well, so do most of us.

Anyway, be wary: things are always changing. I'll let you know when our time-traveler finally files a report. Until then, beware of those who come to you without an actual pen in hand....

The Future is Totally Crazy

I also wrote a new article for The Brutalitarian, during an accidental caffeine and pseudoepinephrine frenzy.

Don't worry, I did go back and edit it later.

But, the article is still a thick circus of time-travel, Internet/informational riffing, Kantian metaphysics, and Science Fact/Fantasy.

It all started when @greatdismal, (who I guess is some guy who writes SF books), posted a flurry of updates about atemporality. It got me all in a tizzy, because I have this little twitch about time and history (yes I am the sort of person that has a twitch about time and history). It has a lot to do with politics and post-structural theory, but to cut off the story of my theoretical life, let's just say I have a certain feeling that the world would be a much better place if we all thought about time more in terms of Bergson's concept of "duration", rather than according to a humanistic timeline of history. More feeling, less fascism.

Anyway, you may say I'm a loony, anarchist metaphysician, but I'm not the only one.

So, reading Mssr. Gibson's tweets got me all a-thinking, and I had to go read the second section of Bergson's Time and Free-Will again. Which naturally, got me thinking of Kant by way of Deleuze. (Both of Deleuze's essays about Bergson and Kant respectively, are very highly reccomended. By someone, probably. By someone with an interest in blowing your mind.)

Now, I was planning one of my "positivity" posts about Kant's metaphysical exposition of time, because it's pretty cool, and one of those things I keep returning to in philosophy, case in point. But because I was also thinking about cyber-space, and because I am always, always thinking about the Internet (help me. please, somebody help me) I put away that blog post for a minute, and started thinking about cyber-time.

At this point, I was already on my second cup of coffee, and then had a bout of sneezes, which sent me to the medicine cabinet.

The rest, as they say, is totally cognized cyber-time.

But this article is actually pretty good. Yes, it is bizarre how 5000 words can land in a flurry of three hours, and yes, it will probably not appeal to anyone not interested in the metaphysics of time and cognition, and yes, I had to go back and do a significant amount of editing upon the realization I had used the word "consciousness" over fifty times in six pages. But, I already did all that editing! Now it's pretty tight. If I added a little Bergson and made the language a bit more academic, I would totally turn this in as a course paper.

But seeing as the only course I'm currently enrolled in is, "A Literature Tinker's Guide to the Ever-Increasing Spiral of Crackpotism", (my average is currently a C+) I have instead uploaded it to the Internet.

Basically, the gist is, although the timeline of history is a perfectly good metaphor for our temporal understanding of the world, the Internet and a capacity for abstract thinking we will simply abbreviate as "SF" is allowing us to get more towards the root of our intuitions of time-relations--and as such, we are now, bit by bit, being able to violate that temporal timeline in what we might, according to the metaphor, call "time-travel".

LOL

So, there you have it. Crackpot Metaphysics Ltd, free for you on the Internet.

Post-Modern Blues

My life is becoming busy. There's work, which is a set number of hours a week, a set number of hours that expands as the job demands more as I try to do it better. Forty is a jumping off point. In addition to the job (which is a hobby) there is the hobbies, (which are my real professions). It's the stuff that I fill my time with when I'm not earning the money that is the axis of sustainable capitalistic existence.

There's my partner, first and foremost. She has her own world, and her own spinning axes, and thankfully we can overlap our globes together for the pleasures of companionship and partnership.

Then there's a lot of other things. I don't know what you call these things; hobbies is a stupid patronization, interests is too business-like. Yet they are investments, because they require time and resources be expended, and they certainly give returns.

I'm not talking about humanistic, soul-returns either. This is part of production--strictly material. I'm making something here, can't you see that? Well, perhaps not, because the production is not strictly spatial, but it is material all the same. No afterlife, no karma, no sense of defiant self-worth here. But I'm making it, and when its done, it will be done, and on to the next.

There's the cardboard tree in the next room, build from one-inch tubes and hot glue, growing not from the root or the buds but from an effort of my own to convert time into space and make "it". Making what? A tree from the processed pulp of real tree? No...

There's the writing, that's every where. On the computer, on the desk, taped to the wall, and under the chair. Vague theories about sending it somewhere and getting something back, but meanwhile, maybe the instruction manual to the machine, or maybe just more wasted paper pulp.

The food: not just sustenance, but foods requiring "preparation", tools, rare ingredients, magical poltices ground and manufactured for expressly kitchenic voodoo. Why? Why not? Goes well with wine.

Music, expanding over and over, crate after crate, millions of empty electronic crates grouped into megas and gigas. One song isn't enough, there must be more, they will beat the hammers on the rivets of THIS machine, winding springs. Gravity transformed into not just a down-and-in, but outward, and up, and prepositional shifts that make me dizzy, spinning on thousands of tiny gyroscopes.

That's what I'm doing now; Saturday morning, woke up early, cleaned the kitchen, made coffee and sat down, frantically busy.

Louis Armstrong: The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings.

Four discs and a companion booklet, free from the library. I try to get most of my resources as free as possible, saves wear and tear on the "job" axis, more time on the downstroke for the upswing and... well, et cetera.

Early Armstrong, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1928, 1929. Dixieland, swing, big band. Compared to Coltrane it sounds slow, old-timey, porch and lemonade. This is eighty years ago. Now we have punk and electro that would make Louie's head explode. Maybe.

Then it was "race music". You know what it is. Not marketed to everyone, just an opportunity to make some more money on the sides. Today we call it a sub-culture, then the "sub" was less substantial.

A funny thing happened; white people started to like it. It could be popular, what this black man in a white tuxedo was doing. It was big, and was bigger once they made more and sold it. Hot Five became Hot Seven, other numbers just became Hot Five, and the money was made. It was now pop, what the race was doing. Jazz was next.

But what was going on? Was it just that Louie was that good? Good enough to pass as a white trumpet player? Jackie Robinson on the cornet?

Of course not. There was A, B, and C; there was X, Y, and Z; there were numerous plotable points of artistic ingenuity that show, without a shadow of a doubt, that the clines were rising, that the times were changing, and that time x space executed a dramatic cultural capital transference that surplused even the white man's profits, so that there was something that "we" could "all" benefit from, even those non-racist whites that lived after Louis was already dead and on a postage stamp.

It had that, that SWING, man. Listen to it... just listen to it. A blow of air through a metal pipe vibrating at the speed of frequency, warmth, breath, hip and hop. Elan vital, of course, of course. Says Robert G. O'Meally, "a forward-tilting, dynamic process of coordinating with diverse but nonetheless connected fellow-workers/players and listeners/dancers alike." A vibrato that could make a single note swing. Yes yes, very good.

But listen to it, and... what, what is that? The trumpet is doing, doing that thing, what Django's guitar does; it's what Coltrane's sax does; it's what the distortion of an electric guitar does, it's...

Fist-pumping, foot-tapping, head-bopping, crowd-jumping, body-touching...

Henry Chinaski said, "Only assholes talk about writing." I don't think Henry Chinaski could play any instruments.

O'Meally sums it. "Like the twentieth century's other supremely influential figures--Einstein, Picasso, Joyce, Stein, Ellington, Le Corbusier, Freud, for example, Armstrong's original conceptions changed the field of music forever. Like these others, Armstrong made changes in his chosen form of expression that corresponded magnificently with the sophisticated moment at the beginning of the century when, across the disciplines, the focus and agenda radically shifted to reflect a world that was suddenly faster, smaller, and more technologically advanced: a world of new information and answers to old questions that spawned new sets of hard questions, new uncertainties and anxieties. With his majestic sound, Armstrong intoned lines of improvisation that parodied and deconstructed received originals as they created new structures in their place. In his playing, one discovers an apt soundtrack to the new world of particles and waves, moving pictures, lightening quick communication, Freudian psychology, the New Negro, stream-of-conscious writing, the Manhattan skyline, cubism and color cut-outs, world wars, modern weapons of mass destruction as well as revelry and ribaldry in spite of everything."

Yup, Louis Armstrong is everything all clogged together in the post-modern kitchen sink, including the sink itself, spinning downward in Coriolis loops of stream-of-conscious writing.... Wait a minute, stream-of conscious writing?!?!

Well, maybe not. Or maybe so. Maybe post-modernism just seems to fit it correctly, because that is what is going on outside that porch with the old Victrola and delicious lemonade where my consciousness is sitting, listening to Louis Armstrong blow a trumpet like god-doesn't-fucking-know-what. But he really is all that, and more, because it just sounds so good. Listen to it, just listen to it. "Georgia Grind," "Cornet Chop Suey," "Drop that Sack". Drop that sack! Oh yeah, like crazy.



Anyway, the point is, I'm really busy this Saturday morning, because I'm listening to Louis Armstrong and drinking coffee. This isn't just for fun, or because I'm interested in it. I'm working. I'm building something, producing something, and when it's done maybe I'll let you use it a little bit. We'll see. How do you think that Louis did it? He just practiced a lot? That's all there is?

I think more people should work harder. It's important to keep yourself busy. Not because down-time isn't good, but because if you aren't working on building it, on producing it, you can be sure as shit that nobody else will do it. They'll just sell you someone else's. You might be lucky, and get ahold of Louie's, or someone else who worked real hard and was good at it. Or you might just get some hobby project, some half-baked crap on TV that someone only made because they had to, not because they were really working on it.

I gotta go, gotta get back to work.