dHarMa

Slam it on son with you beerslopped appeal
Coppin' the senses for cravin' a feel
Icewicket Baby, bodacious tangle
I too once crooned for the hairy dangle

Ten-Assed Summer

when I was a young'n not yet growed
I had lemonade in my veins err'vy summer
I hadda vortex gullet like a cockpine barber handle
old sludge tits here
took 'em into the dusty mason jar, behind a nostalgia log
burly treesap crustin' gramma
stumbling out from behind the pollenated trellis
arms like windsocks, the flab tethered love worms
“It smells like honeysuckle here,” she crooned
wheezerasped with laughter
a half eaten toblerone sticking out of a shirt pocket
oh shit, diatoms
----
Tenacity, n: The state of possessing ten asses.

Beerthought

Forced compound words involving 'beer' have been amusing to me lately.

Beerscum
Beersmut
Beerdangle
Beergasm
etc.

It seems like fusing the word 'beer' to the beginning of a dirty or potentially raunchy word enhances the raunch factor considerably. I think it has good potential for a drunken stream o' consciousness scene.

Maybe? Maybe?

Ah well, drunken stream o' consciousness has probably been done about 99999 times already.

I've been keeping up with that big ol' Lamination Colony contest, and I must say, the winning piece is pretty rockin'. I'll be looking forward to seeing the rest of the entries, as well as more of Mr. Alter's fresh-ass prose. Congrats to all. I probably should have entered that.

I'm watching one of those game shows right now where they pit one team against the other, and the teams represent two distinct social groups. (You know, like, accountants versus gymnasts, or something.) They need to get more absurd with the topics. Something like. “Chronic Masturbators vs. The French.”

Fuck, dude, I've been assaulted by the Transformers II trailer many times today. I don't want to get desensitized to hyperbolic robot rupturing yet.

I forgot how to write a worthwhile blog post.

Fuck the Cop

I remember one time in third grade I was talking to this kid on the playground about video games. During the conversation, he started telling me about a game he wanted to make some day, entitled "Bloody Shit." The premise of Bloody Shit was that the main character was a cop whose parents neglected him as a child, so much to the point that they didn't name him and allowed him to choose his own name when he was old enough. He named himself Fuck. I don't remember what else the game was about. The kid later grew up to become a redneck, which is weird, because he was pretty unsouthern growing up, and he was reared by staunchly unsouthern parents. Can cultural osmosis be that extreme?

The memory of Bloody Shit and its respective protagonist have gotten me thinking on a tangent: is there a yet unexplored way to use profanity experimentally in writing? Sure, the first person narrator can say "It was fuckin' crazy man," but what about a third person voice? No, I'm being serious. Could one effectively use phrases like "A storm had washed through I-75, and the sky was fucking dark." in the third person? I feel like there is a way in which it could be pulled off, the content would have to fit the voice though, somehow, so it wouldn't just be an interesting but unnecessary detail.

I started writing something this weekend that experiments in this department a little bit, although not with third person. It's a first person narration of a summer cookout, but all the characters' first names are swear words, the narrator is a guy who is pathologically uninvolved and hyperobservant of all social interraction, which ain't all that original. (Doesn't every writer feel they wear the orifice-like badge of social displacement/isolation?) But it's fun. I haven't laughed so hard working on a story since middle school, so who cares, maybe this piece is just for my leisure. Maybe not. Regardless, I hope the damn exploration of profanity in fiction turns out to be fucking worthwhile in some way.

What if I was remembered by that? Famously. "He's the guy who uses swear words in the third person." aw shiiiiiiiiit.

TVOTR/GB at the Tabernacle was sufficiently badass. Grizzly Bear is one of the busiest bands I've ever seen on stage, holy shit, the vocal harmonies and the instrumental multitasking was incredible.

There was also a Taylor Swift concert down the road at The Fox, and the polarity between the different types of fans was awesome. I was craving a gang-war between the polo-and-cowboy-boots UGA soristitutes and the skinny-jeans-and-flannel indietards, but I settled for the mutually awkward stares that communicated, from both demographics, “I'm the one with taste.”

Kyp Malone's hair/beard is the stuff of legend:

Vandertron

I'm going to partially rescind the Vander-Bash I had in the last post, because after finishing the book, I realize he does have some strengths in his storytelling ability. However, I still have a problem with his language, as in pretty much every sentence, he's goes just far enough over the line between eloquent and flowery to where it cements his mediocrity as a writer: if he just pruned his metaphors a little bit, his stuff would be much more tolerable. And while the faux-academic pieces like A Brief History of Ambergris are fun and entertaining (not to mention, suited to his voice,) they get kinda old after a while, I think you have to be a hardcore fan of the VanderMeer universe to really appreciate them.

BUT. But but but. He's damn good at establishing mood, I'll give him that. And he seems to favor protagonists that are one or both of the following: a) arrogant as hell, or, b) insecure and uncertain. (in terms of personality, the two pretty much go together). So, since he's good at writing that character, he's also very good at establishing dread, anxiety and paranoia on a really self-directed, personal level. This is most apparent in 'The Cage,' a story in which an enterprising merchant gets devoured by fungus (pretty sweet imagery too).

Since CoSM is the only book I've read by VanderMeer, I don't really know whether his favoring of the above mentioned elements reflects any limited singularity for him as a writer, but I think this combination of moods/characters says something greater about the city he's created in the work (a bustling, westernized metropolis whose original native inhabitants were historically killed off by its current residents), in that the selfish, arrogant character reflects the conquistador persona, while the guilt, insecurity, and fucked up situations that his characters end up in reflect some kind of karmatic justice, or at least on a personal level, the collective guilt of a nation that's killed off a people it didn't fully understand, while at the same time, pompously embracing its own history.

Maybe I'm just fulla shit. In other news, summer is looking pretty fine this year:





This was at the Nine Inch Nails/Jane's Addiction concert a few weeks ago, which was spectacular. There was actually a pretty varied age group, as opposed to when I saw them in August, which was brimming with the young'uns, and the most extreme minority of light-haired people I have ever seen in the south.

I hope you're all memorializing well.

hueg @zz

Seeing TVOTR and Grizzly Bear next month, which I'm immensely stoked about. I've really been enjoying TVOTR's earlier stuff, where you can hear their sound still in the experimental, embryonic phases of what would later morph into face-melting awesomeness on Return to Cookie Mountain. I think what I like the most is how they use the sustained guitar/strings/sample stuff to kind of emulate the tonalities of heavy machinery – the instant in which the ambient drone of a dishwasher or a car on the highway reveals its noiseless, completely musical potential.

But right now I'm listening to Tom Waits. It's a Tom Waits kind of evening.

Today, I kept trying to write and getting stuck, I had to angrily type the phrase WHERE DA FLAVA at least 10 times before anything started flowing.

I'm angry that I trusted the reccomendation of reading Jeff VanderMeer, goddamn, what a verbose bastard. I don't mind complex-ass writing as long as you know how to do it (e.g., Mieville), but with Vandermeer it's just so damn self-concsious and full of itself, maybe suited to another time period, but just as hard to enjoy either way. I think the problem VanderMeer has is that he likes the sound of his own voice too much, you can look at pretty much any passage in City of Saints and Madmen and think, “Wow, this must have been a lot of fun for HIM to WRITE.” And really, his setting doesn't make up for it. Ambergris doesn't feel fleshed out or original, it just feels like London with a lot of Squid and Mushrooms. Maybe I'm being harsh, but I'll need a good purge book for when I'm done with CoSM.

B&N sucks now. I never see anyone I know there any more. I walk around and think about all the book titles I wish I could see on display. Not real ones. I hope someone writes a memoir one day called “Prom Was Balls.”

I ain't too enthused to be writin' right now.

'night