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

"Anger is a precious gift not to be squandered on assholes."

So says my dad, with whom I talked with for a while on the phone today. It was the first real fulfilling phone conversation with the 'folks in a while, I think that's due to the fact that the stress is starting to recede or get more manageable. The downside is I haven't been able to write much outside of class, but the things I've been required to write have been pretty enjoyable lately.

I was up at 9 on Saturday, which most certainly breaks some kind of college law of physics. Friday night was the first night I didn't out in a while, and damn it was refreshing. I got a big chunk of work done on one of my final projects and managed to enjoy myself in the process, I really hope that by the time I go back home I'll be sick of socializing so that the lack of things to do in Georgia will seem peaceful, not like a burden.

Now that old man winter is getting his ass out of the door, it's easier to look outside and feel introspective in a way that isn't depressing. Yesterday I rode the bus to the mall with Kenton and Jeff, and I did a lot of city watching – I forgot what cities look like when they're sunny and thawed out. I imagine the south this summer will be a pleasant change for a few weeks and then I'll go back to hating the scorch, but whatever. I sat out on the quad yesterday while it was sunny and got a little toasted by the sun. In Syracuse, you say? It's more likely than you think.

The last couple of weeks have been filled with a lot of generic college debauchery, resulting in a lot of babysitting drunk friends, amongst other things.. (I accidentally used the phrase 'going out with a bang socially' on the phone with my mom the other day and when she responded, I could hear the eternal maternal worry jittering beneath her laughter.) I think that candid facebook photos will be the downfall of our generation, I can't wait to see what our grandkids will think of our disregard for discretion, and I also wonder what stupid things they'll do to top it. Fuckups in space? The apocalypse?

Whatever they do, I hope I'm alive to blog about it.

Enjoy the season.

Optimisery

Today, I talked with my adviser about getting the hell out of the Communications and Rhetorical Studies department, to which he responded, "So you couldn't find a home here?" I appreciated the joke, but at the same time it made me a little depressed, maybe because he said it in his perpetually saddened eastern-European "sounds-like-a-refugee" accent, and he had some solemn classical music playing in his office the whole time.

I want to try to write something based on that scene at some point, and frame it with the same emotions: 90% funny and 10% partially sad, with the 10% sadness causing you to question whether you need to lighten up and be less sensitive or if the sadness is genuinely warranted. Is that too personal? I sure hope so.

All pseudo-sadness aside, I'm fleeing CRS and never looking back, that's final. It wasn't a particularly bad experience, but I'm pretty sure it's not for me. July will tell whether I'm going to be in Television/Radio/Film or English for the rest of my undergraduate career, I think regardless of what happens I'll find some kind of enjoyment in doing something.

April is national "school kills your existence" month, but if I navigate successfully through the hellmonth I'll have the excitement of a new China Mieville book to look forward to in May, which better be good. I expect something totally awesome from the writer who made me take writing seriously in the first place.

I'm continuing to work on the airport piece, the direction of which is kind of nebulous and unclear right now. Still, it's good to have something to work on consistently, even if it isn't really about anything. I'll find something worthwhile to extract from the drabble, by god.

Also, started a new thing this weekend which I'm somewhat stoked about, tentatively titled Dad's Rage Box. It's my attempt at screwing with form in a way I haven't before, which is challening and loads o' fun. More updates on that once it materializes.

Sleepin' now.