Dog Eat Crow World

My Backyard

2012-02-09T21:51:00.001-05:00

Not quite what I was hoping when I set out last year to clear the whole thing out and build it out, but a start, I suppose. The key is that there is no longer a crap-ton of ivy where snakes can hide and bite my son. And he even has a playset now. Go me!

I moved the garden into a sunnier area of the yard, and planted some broccoli, lettuce, and carrots a month ago because I realized those crops do much better in milder weather. Atlanta in the winter is pretty mild. As long as it doesn't freeze for several days in a row the plants should be cool. The broccoli especially is super excited to be in my backyard. I also planted some green and jalapeno peppers in the greenhouse, along with a few strawberry plants. we'll see if those bad boys do better than my plants last year.

I'll chat more as the season progresses.

Souls (Tick The Minutes Away)

2012-02-07T21:16:00.014-05:00

So, this song happened. Once upon a time I was in a long-distance relationship. Let's just agree that sometimes young lust, long distance, and creative aptitude with a guitar are not the best ingredients for brilliant pop lyricism. But, I guess what this song lacks in wordsmithery it more than makes up in sheer joy...or at least the closest thing I ever came to committing that particular emotion to tape.

Let's be clear; joy was not something that came to me easily. Not when I was 23 and I wanted to be a rock star so bad it kept me awake at night, tossing and turning and thinking about what my life was going to be like, in the future, when I arrived. In the future. Not when I was sleeping on a cement floor with no blanket and no money in Gulfport, MS, after a night spent singing alone in the corner to drunken midshipmen and their equally drunken girlfriends/wives. Not when I was shaking hands and selling CDs I'd spent $2 printing for a $1, and buying clothes I thought made me look cool, and smelling microphones covered in stale cigarette spit and beer and booze and lipstick. Not when I was finally realizing this wasn't gonna work out for me because I didn't have that certain savoir faire required of the very famous and the very destructive, and I sat down for the first time to work on this fiction story that I'd had bumping around my head for a year, and writing stories came back to me from a distant past I thought I'd forgotten but which had sat in my heart and my head and my fingertips and pried open the old and rusted cellar door of my soul and peeked out and blinked in the light. There was no joy in giving up music, just sadness and defeat and worry over a future self that did not include this part of me that had seemed so integral for so long that it had actually become me. I was the musician me and the musician me was all I had. I was afraid to ask, "What am I, if not this?" That question terrified me.

Yet, strangely, the writing continued. After that really bad first attempt, and the second and third equally bad attempts. After the novel that practically wrote itself then moldered on a shelf, and molders still. After the novella, and the screenplay for a movie that will never be made, not by me at least. After the short stories started getting better and popping up in places and other people who were not me or my mother started reading. And the writing continued even after I started telling people I was a writer and I started wondering what people thought of when I said that, those people who'd known me back when I was a singer, back when I was gonna be on MTV.

And the writing started to become the new me, and it fit me better. It was natural, something I'd done since I was a kid, something automatic like speaking or clapping or pointing at things that surprise you or delight you. This was something that I didn't have to try at, or pretend at, or wear a mask to admit to. This was me. This is me.

I still don't find joy easily. But this is pretty darn close. I don't listen to songs like these anymore and wonder what if. I listen and I say, "Listen to me. How brave I was to try so hard at being something I wasn't." It isn't easy to show the world a smile when you're wearing a damn mask. I suppose it isn't that easy without the mask either, but I'll try. Here you go.

Speaking of Love

2012-02-01T09:34:00.004-05:00

Amidst all this book-writing craziness, I have been doing a godawful job of promoting my work and the hard work of others. Australia-based Bright Light Media has tapped my story "The First Word" for their adorable* collection of uplifting stories about family and love. The book is called Speaking of Love and you can purchase it here. BLM is putting a huge advertising push behind this and it is available on all major e-book platforms, I believe. If you're looking for a great Valentine's gift to get your mom or grandma, this is it. Trust me, it's beautiful. Thanks to BLM for including me. I'm very proud to be a part of this. The YouTube ad is after the jump.

Bright Light Media is on all the major social media platforms, so if you wanna join up with em or like some stuff here are the details:

Facebook
Twitter

*And I mean this seriously. It is adorable. I can't tell you how honored I am to be a part of such an honorable project. In this day and age, to actively try to spread joy is a truly beautiful thing.

Year of the Novel: Complete

2012-01-31T09:33:00.000-05:00

I briefly mentioned this a few months back, but the Atlanta Writers Club hosts conferences twice a year in which they bring in a panel of literary agents and allow their members (for a nominal fee of $200 or so) to mix and mingle with the agents, as well as pitch their books and submit the first 25 pages of their manuscripts for critique.

Last November, the AWC held one of these conferences and I decided to participate in both the critique and pitch sessions. Although my book wasn't finished at the time, it was very close and I knew exactly what was going to happen so I knew that I would be able to cogently discuss the book if it came to that. I did my research on the seven agents on the panel and decided on the two that seemed most likely to dig my book and I signed up for the sessions and paid my money. The way I saw it, at the very least I could get some experience on presenting myself at these things so I would be prepared when the AWC did this again in May, 2012. My book would surely be done by then and I would then have a couple pitch sessions under my belt so I'd know what to expect.

Now, after having done a pitch session, I can tell you it is a truly terrifying experience. I had written out a pitch before the conference but once there I realized it was completely inadequate and set about frantically rewriting it and trying to memorize it as best as possible before my session came up. I failed...miserably. Not only did I not have the pitch memorized, but three sentences in, the agent started asking a ton of questions that led waaaaay off the path of what the book was about, so that by the end of our ten minutes together it was clear to me she had no idea what I was talking about. The coup de grace was when she said that she "liked the idea of the book, but instead of doing a comedy or farce, I should just make it super serious, just dripping with pathos," and I was thinking, OMG, that's exactly the book I've written. But I had failed to explain it properly to her, and so she left the pitch session thinking I'd written a religious comedy about recruits in a heavenly army, when in fact I'd written a deeply serious book about Man's relationship with God...with splosions and monster, of course.

So, needless to say, I was little dejected. But, fortunately I still had one more shot with an agent who seemed like a good fit for my work. And the kicker is, she'd actually gotten to read some of it. I'd sent the agent the first 25 pages of the manuscript and a one sheet/bio about two months before, and she was supposed to come to the meeting with some pointed critiques. After the shellacking I'd taken in the pitch session I was hardly expecting this to go well, but when I sat down with the agent she pulled out the manuscript, flipped through it a little and then smiled and said, "You know, I really didn't have any critiques, I just wanted to talk to you about the world you're building here."

What!?

It was just about the awesomest thing that's happened to me so far in my very short, very meager literary career. I'd spent almost two years working on this thing with no clue as to its worth, and here was a professional, someone who actually knew what they were talking about, telling me that I'd jumped the first major hurdle of a work of fiction: after reading the first few pages, do you want to read more? Yes. Yes, I do.

The catch was that I now had a book to finish. It took me four weeks of intense writing, and then another four weeks of even more intense editing (culminating in a nine-hour final rally that went until 4 in the morning), but I finally have a finished novel*. I submitted it on Saturday. It's done. It's out of me. And it's as close as I've ever come to saying exactly what I wanted to say. I'm proud of these characters and what they've achieved and who they became. I'm proud of myself for working late night after late night and early mornings and not going out with friends and working through my lunch hours in noisy Subways and Starbuckses. For two years I emptied myself out onto the page, and now it's out of me and here and hopefully people like it. It doesn't really matter to me if they do or not. Certainly I don't want people to tell me I suck, but it was the completion that was most important. I had something to say, and it took me a long time to say it, but I did. I said it.

Let's see what happens now. I promise I'll be more present on the blog now that it's done. I might even post a few chapters here and there if I don't get too paranoid.

*And, boy is it a doozy. It clocks in at about 212K words (which is about 700 or so pages in real book pages), and that's after I chopped 10K+ words during the editing process.

Publication is mine...finally!

2011-11-08T21:16:00.000-05:00

The folks over at Camroc Press Review published my shorty short, "Baby's Gonna Be A Rock Star" the other day and I want you all to read it if you have a chance. It's a sad story.

Here.

Picks of the Week

2011-11-03T21:41:00.000-04:00

So, yeah, that's the second week I forgot to do this post. But, you know what? I'm nothing if not persistent, so I'm getting back on the horse today. There are not a lot of great games this weekend, but the ones that are, are really great.

No. 15 Michigan at Iowa
The last time Michigan went on the road they got chewed on by an especially tenacious Michigan State team. Iowa is not Michigan State and the UM team that came out ready to play against Purdue last weekend is not the same team that the Spartans ate up. I predict this one to be close until the fourth quarter, when the Wolverines pull away to win by two scores.
Michigan 35 Iowa 21

No. 9 South Carolina at No. 7 Arkansas
This is the game when one of these overrated SEC teams finally drop into the low teens. While both of these teams are overrated, I think SoCar is the most overdue for a serious butt kicking.
South Carolina 10 Arkansas 28

No. 1 LSU at No. 2 Alabama
This is the biggest game of the year. 1 v 2. LSU is the better team but they are at a disadvantage because they are heading to Tuscaloosa. I think they are the better team, though, and they will stop Alabama's offense.
LSU 28 Alabama 24

No. 14 Kansas State at No. 3 Oklahoma State
Oklahoma State is the sleeper team for the National Championship game, and the big showdown for them will be at the end of the year when they face off against Oklahoma. But they can't look passed K State, who are on a roll right now. I think the Cowboys are one of the best teams in the country.
Kansas State 35 Oklahoma State 48

Picks of the Week

2011-10-20T17:00:00.000-04:00

Last week could've gotten really ugly if I had thought to predict more games. Something like 5 of the top fifteen teams got beaten by lower ranked teams. It was hard out there for a pimp. As it was, the only game I got wrong was my Wolverines getting their asses handed to them by the Spartans, so my total only went down to 76%.

This weekend continues the trend of horribly boring match-ups. The SEC has a couple sleeper games that might end up interesting, and the Big Ten and Pac 12 have some key conference matches.

No. 20 Auburn at No. 1 LSU
If you were to go by the rankings this game might seem pretty interesting, except Auburn is still the same ole beatable team they were two weeks ago, and LSU is still the same high-flying, defensive-minded monster it has been the last six weeks. I expect this one to be close until around the middle of the third quarter when LSU stops messing around with Auburn and puts it away for good.
Auburn 17     LSU 38

No. 22 Georgia Tech at Miami (FL)
If it wasn't for last week this game wouldn't have even made it onto this list. But with GA Tech losing to Virginia last weekend, I have to suddenly wonder if they are on a downward spiral. This one comes down to the Yellow Jackets executing their trademarked triple-option. If they do it they will run up the score on this streaky Miami squad.
Georgia Tech 35     Miami 28

Tennessee at No. 2 Alabama
This is another game that looks very different on paper than it will probably play out. UT is staring down the barrel of a losing record in the SEC and 'Bama would be #1 in the country if it wasn't for the pesky Tigers two states over. But this is a heated rivalry and the Vols have a history of spoiling the Tide's party. Just think a few years ago when the eventual National Champions needed last second heroics to get past a rebuilding Vols team. I expect this one to be close.
Tennessee 14     Alabama 24

USC at Notre Dame
Neither team is ranked, but this classic rivalry game still holds a certain mystique. This could really be Brian Kelly's coming out party if he can steer his Irish past a middling Trojan squad. I think he'll do it.
USC 17     Notre Dame 28

No. 6 Wisconsin at No. 16 Michigan State
It is gonna be so pleasurable to watch the Badgers completely dismantle the Spartans in East Lansing. This one won't even be close.
Wisconsin 38     Michigan State 14

No. 25 Washington at No. 8 Stanford
This is a must win situation for the Stanford Cardinal. With the BCS poo-pooing their schedule, Stanford needs to make a statement with a solid defeat of Washington at home. Washington, for their part, aren't buying into the hype. They are undefeated in the Pac 12 too, and are not going to easily roll over and let the Cardinal take a victory lap.
Washington 28     Stanford 35

Picks of the Week

2011-10-14T22:29:00.000-04:00

BAM! I went 7 for 7 last week for a straight 1 double 0, to bring my total up to 73%. What we learned is that all of the big boys are legit. This week we don't get a lot of action except a whole lot of questionable teams get legitimate shots to prove their worth. In the Big Ten Michigan and Michigan State battle it out for the Paul Bunyon trophy and the frontrunner status in the Legend Division. In the Big 12 both Texas A&M and Oklahoma State are trying to stay neck and neck with Oklahoma. And in the Pac 12, Oregon needs a win over AZ St to nip at the heels of Stanford.

No. 11 Michigan at No. 23 Michigan State
The first big showdown of the day is between my Wolverines and the dreaded Spartans of Michigan State. The Spartans have managed to take down the Wolves three years running, but this year is trending differently. Michigan seems to have picked up a decent defense in the off-season and the offense is in the Top Ten in the country. While the game is in East Lansing, I think Michigan has the momentum. This one'll be close but Big Blue wins.
Michigan 24     Michigan State 21

No. 20 Baylor at No. 21 Texas A&M
The Aggies have had a tough road lately, with their stinging loss to their soon-to-be SEC conference mates, Arkansas. And Baylor is still licking their wounds from their loss to the surging Kansas State Wildcats. But this one looks to be a good match-up between teams that are battling for a spot in the Top 25 and a good bowl game if any of the top three in the Big 12 stumble. I think the Aggies roll.
Baylor 28     Texas A&M 35

No. 6 Oklahoma State at No. 22 Texas
Oklahoma State get their chance to prove they are just as good as the other Oklahoma team by beating up on the same team the Sooners hung 55 on last week. Certainly the Longhorns feel their chances are good, but I feel that the showdown for the Big 12 championship comes on December 3rd when an undefeated Sooners roll into Stillwater and face an undefeated Cowboys team for a slot in the National Championship game.
Oklahoma State 45     Texas 24

No. 18 Arizona State at No. 9 Oregon
Arizona State have been feeling pretty good about themselves after a good first half of the season. They have a legitimate shot at the Pac 12 South championship, but unfortunately the Ducks are going to wipe the mat with them tomorrow.
Arizona State 28     Oregon 38

Year of the Novel Meets National Novel Writing Month

2011-10-11T22:26:00.002-04:00

So, it begins again, sort of. Next month is National Novel Writing Month and the curious thing is that I will actually probably maybe be finishing the novel some time next month. Or rather, that is the goal. I'm going to hit the ground running this month and hopefully I will have enough of a head of steam that I will be able to cruise to the finish line with this behemoth of a book.

At this point I have finished just about all the main storylines, except the one about the two main characters. I would say, i have about 40K-50K more words to write which may seem like a crap ton of words, but if I really work hard, that is totally doable for me. All that will be left will then be to comb through the various storylines for terrible inconsistencies and grammatical problems. Then I will need to tie everything together in a satisfactory way and re-edit it. At that point it will have a "finished" manuscript.

So much work. But I'm really very satisfied with what is emerging. More info as we get there.

The Neo-Sentimentalists

2011-10-08T21:43:00.001-04:00

Again, piggy-backing off a post I had a while back that is now sort of, more or less, coming true*, I recently read this great post by Tony Woodlief about contemporary authors being tasked with stripping away all the bullshit of postmodernism and post-postmodernism and getting back to what is real about being a human being on this planet. David Foster Wallace talked about this in his amazing essay "E Unibus Pluram,"** in which he said that the next vanguard of authors will have to battle the circular logic of postmodernism in order to get to something real, or else the future of letters could be at stake. He suspected that the next vanguard of avant gard authors would be what he called Neo-sentimentalists who would be unafraid to be honest and earnest and who would leave irony by the wayside and speak directly and truthfully. That is happening now. The internet is filled with new authors who are not ironic, and if they use irony they use it in order to better facilitate the truth-telling. Whether this movement has legs or not, time will tell. Maybe American Letters have already died too much to be fully revived, or have any major impact on the larger culture. But I'm proud of these new authors, who are unafraid to be honest. Who are unafraid to be talk of love without flinching.

*This was actually an interview with the brilliant neo-sentimentalist, xTx. I think my long-winded "question" in which I lay out my theory about neo-sentimentalism is around question #7. For other neo-sentimentalists see Roxane Gay, Matt Bell, Ethel Rohan, me, Jason Jordan, Alan Stewart Carl, etc.

**Seriously, take the time and read this thing. It's brilliant.

Why I will never win a Nobel Prize for Literature

2011-10-07T21:26:00.000-04:00

Basically, I'll never win one because I'm a white American male*. Ok, maybe that's a simplification of the argument in the aforelinked article. But, I gotta admit, my first reaction to something like this is, how is a foreign-born immigrant writing about the experience of being a foreign-born immigrant any less solipsistic than a middle-class bourgeois white guy writing about the experience of being a middle class white guy? Essentially, what this article is saying is that it's not that American writers don't win the Nobel Prize because they "write what they know," but rather they don't win because no one cares anymore about what American's know. That's probably a valid argument. The world is bigger and more inclusive than it used to be, but please don't cloak that argument in the pretension that American writers are somehow more self-involved than writers of other nationalities. Writers are self-involved. We're only ever writing about ourselves. Let's just be honest about this.

Case in point, Roberto Bolano is probably one of the best examples of the type of Globally-minded, expansive, non-American writer that they're talking about, yet Bolano's last and greatest novel is basically about how tough it was for him to write that last and greatest novel. In fact, throughout his body of work Bolano referenced himself more than George Lucas. He basically was a literary movement unto himself.

The Nobel peeps are free to give their prize to whomever they wish, and I'm sure that person will be really great and all, but let's not disguise the truth. Americans don't win the Nobel Prize because we are just one country and there is a whole world out there now. Only one person out of millions of published authors can win. The world isn't a small pond anymore, even big fish can get lost.

Picks of the Week

2011-10-06T16:04:00.011-04:00

So, we figured some stuff out last weekend, didn't we? Wisconsin, Alabama, and Clemson all emerged as legitimate National title teams. I went 4 for 7 to bring my total percentage down to 61%. I have been going out on more limbs this year and some aren't paying off. I called the Pitt win correctly, but whiffed big time for being so high on Baylor and Ohio State.

This week is fairly calm, aside from some key match-ups for middling teams in the big conferences. The weekend is dominated by Oklahoma/Texas and Florida/LSU so those are the two games to watch.

No. 3 Oklahoma vs. No. 11 Texas

This is the key match-up of the weekend for the Big 12. Oklahoma has seen their ranking slip as Alabama and LSU have leaped the fore, but the Sooners have handily beaten every team they've come across and Texas would be a nice notch in their belt. I don't think Oklahoma will get through the B12 undefeated this year, but it won't be the Longhorns that knock them off.

Oklahoma 35 Texas 28

No. 17 Florida at No. 1 LSU

What a rough stretch Florida has this October. They had to take a brutalizing from Alabama last weekend and now they have to face LSU in Death Valley. Next up? Auburn, then Georgia. They will have three losses at the end of the month. This is going to be one of them.

Florida 10 LSU 35

Missouri at No. 20 Kansas State

This is one of those games that could be cool, or could be pretty damn boring. Missouri is not on anyone's radar, but Kansas State are a long shot for the B12 championship right now and a win over Missouri would definitely build some momentum after the Cats knocked off Baylor last weekend. I think the Wildcats are the real deal this year.

Missouri 17 Kansas State 34

No. 15 Auburn at No. 10 Arkansas

The SEC West (and probably the conference as a whole) is going to be decided early in November when LSU and Alabama face off, but that doesn't mean that Arkansas and Auburn don't have anything to play for in this game. For starters, Auburn technically hasn't lost a game in the SEC yet, and remaining unbeaten would be a huge feather in their cap. The razorbacks would love to ruin Auburn's undefeated status in the SEC, so look for Arkansas to throw the kitchen sink at them. And you know what? I think it'll work too.

Auburn 24 Arkansas 30

No. 12 Michigan at Northwestern

Michigan is on a serious role, having trounced the Minnesota Gophers 58-0 last weekend. Northwestern is coming off a heartbreaking loss to Illinois, but with QB phenom Dan Persa back in the line-up the Wolverines will have a hell of a test on their hands. This is Michigan's first road game and the Wildcats will be looking to spoil Coach Hoke's coronation. Unfortunately for them, I think this Michigan team is quickly looking like a one or two loss team and one of those losses isn't going to happen in Evanston.

Michigan 38 Northwestern 20

No. 24 Texas A&M at Texas Tech

Texas A&M is still in the Top 25 despite losing to Arkansas. This is partly because the pollsters think highly of Arkansas and also because aTm is looking like a team that might be able to finish in the top third of the Big 12. Texas Tech is probably wondering why everyone is talking about the Aggies when they are the ones with the undefeated record. This weekend, the Raiders will find out.

Texas A&M 28 Texas Tech 14

Georgia at Tennessee

Both UGA and UT have losses in the SEC...but so do every team in the SEC East now. Georgia still needs South Carolina to drop another one (which seems very likely) and UT needs Florida to drop another (ummm, which also seems likely), so both of these teams are in a good position to leap into the lead in the East after this weekend. The game is being played at night in Knoxville so the Volunteers have a decided advantage. The question is not whether the Vols can win this game but whether this UGA squad is looking like the 2009 team that finished with only one loss, or the last year's team which limped into a bowl game and lost. I'm getting a good feeling about these Dawgs.

Georgia 35 Tennessee 28 (sorry, Houston)

Anonymous

2011-10-04T21:26:00.000-04:00

This is the second time I've had occasion to write about the hacker group Anonymous.* The last time I was far more critical of the group because it seemed that they were just a petty, mean-spirited group of nincumpoops. But lately they have grown bolder and more organized, turning into something more closely resembling an actual insurgency in techno-sheep clothing. I must admit that every time one of these YouTube threats come online I get the feeling that this is a movie, or that I've seen this before. Certainly there is something vaguely deja-vuish about the group's use of the Guy Fawkes masks from V For Vendetta; there are discussions to be had about the post-postmodernness of all of this. The comic book creates an iconic re-imagining of a historical character in order to represent the rebellious animus, and at the same time creates a definitive anarchist anti-hero, whose masked visage is both frightening and strangely comforting. Then, partly inspired by the rebellious spirit of the comic book, protest groups around the world don the now-classic mask in order to conjure the same terror/comfort dual animus that drove the comic book anti-hero's lust for rebellious destruction in the first place, all the while struggling against the very sort of military-industrial pseudo-fascist corporate regime against which the comic book anti-hero was also struggling against.

There are two ways to look at this: either this is a perfect example of reality feeding art which feeds reality which feeds art which feeds reality, or Alan Moore was just a genius and he truly saw the future for what it was, a growing battle between the haves and have-nots and provided the perfect icon for the future struggle.

Either way, Anonymous plans on erasing the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) from the internet on October 10.

*I gotta admit, after re-reading that post, I'm a little struck by how prescient it seems, given the recent Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring stuff going on.

Statues of Famous Authors

2011-10-02T20:43:00.000-04:00

Flavorwire has a great compendium of photos of various authors' sculptures from around the world.

Story Idea

2011-09-30T17:00:00.000-04:00

If this doesn't get your brain waves firing, I don't know what could. Scientists at Berkeley have managed to turn brain waves into images. using YouTube. This is truly one of the most incredible things I've ever seen. Ethan Zuckerman has more about it here, and ties it into a little known movie from the 1970's.

Picks of the Week

2011-09-29T19:59:00.000-04:00

Last week I went out on a limb with a few of my picks and none of them worked out. I went 4 for 6, to bring my percentage up to 65% on the year.

This week is conference-amaggedon. There are several interesting match-ups that should do some clarifying in major conferences.

#16 South Florida at Pittsburgh
Now Pitt has had a bit of a bad run since falling apart in the fourth quarter against Iowa a few weeks back. The Bulls look like they are the obvious Big Easy conference champs but I think Pitt is gonna put up more of a fight than peeps expect. I think the Panthers are gonna take this one
South Florida 28     Pittsburgh 30

#14 Texas A&M at #18 Arkansas
So, last week was tough for both of these teams. Arkansas got embarrassed by Alabama and aTm got bit in the waning moments by some Cowboys. Both of these teams will be looking to get their seasons back on track, and aTm will be looking to prove they deserve their spot in the SEC. I think the Big 12 is better than they are being credited. The Aggies come out on top.
Texas A&M 45     Arkansas 42

Michigan State at Ohio State
Both of these teams have embarrassing losses at the hands of non-conference opponents, but this is the start of the Big Ten season, and the Buckeyes and Spartans will be looking to get things started off right. The Horseshoe is a difficult place to play at the best of times, but the Spartans are starting walk-on wide receivers on the offensive line at this point and the Bucks have an experienced D line. I think this is the beginning of a rapid decline for ole' Sparty.
Michigan State 17 Ohio State 28

#15 Baylor at Kansas State
No one saw this one coming at the beginning of the season. Both Kansas State and Baylor are in the hunt for the Big 12 title and looking for a big signature conference win. Kansas State has looked the least impressive. I give this one to the Bears.
Baylor 35     Kansas State 21

#13 Clemson at #11 Virginia Tech
At the season's start no one was giving the ACC any love outside of FSU. Now the Seminoles have two losses and Clemson has two big victories under their belt. Few expect this game to not be replayed in December when these two teams face off again for the ACC championship. But for now both teams can use this game to figure the other one out.
Clemson 24     Virginia Tech 21

#3 Alabama at #12 Florida
This is the second of the three conference championship previews this weekend. Assuming South Carolina implodes at some point, Florida should be able to cruise through a relatively weak SEC East to find themselves again in the SEC Championship game. Alabama, on the other hand, has to get through this game, as well Nov. 5 meeting with LSU, before they can claim their spot. The way their defense is playing, though, they have a good shot. Sorry Charlie, the Tide rolls again.
Alabama 28     Florida 10

#8 Nebraska at #7 Wisconsin
This is the third preview game. Both the Huskers and Badgers have a pretty easy road to the first Big 10 championship game, but unfortunately they both have to get through each other. For the Huskers a win a over the Badgers would be a hell of a feather in their cap, but it's the Badgers who need this win. They are facing down a skeptical public and a win over Nebraska is about the only chance they'll have all season to make a case for their NC hopes. I think the Badgers are the real deal this year.
Nebraska 13     Wisconsin 35

Picks of the Week

2011-09-22T17:00:00.003-04:00

So, I, um, like, forgot to post last week with my picks, but let's just assume I got 100%, because, you know, I'm awesome. Through three weeks I am not doing that great, though, going 64% in my picks. This week brings some super awesome matches all across the board. Let's get to 'em.

San Diego State at #22 Michigan
This is an interesting match because Michigan stole San Diego State's head coach. As Brian from MGoBlog put it, UM basically has the best scouting report ever. However, SDSU are no slouches and UM will have their work seriously cut out for them. I'll go with my alma mater because I think the Wolverines have a few more tricks up their sleeves than they've let on in the two and a half games they've played so far.
San Diego State 28     Michigan 35

#11 Florida State at #21 Clemson
At the beginning of the season I wouldn't have thought this was going to be a good game, but after Florida State held their own against the #1 team in the country and Clemson manhandled Auburn, this is suddenly far more interesting. I think FSU is the real deal in the ACC this year.
Florida State 38     Clemson 21

#7 Oklahoma State at #8 Texas A&M
This is probably the premier game of the weekend, with two of the top-ranked teams in the Big 12 facing off in Texas. Okie State have been demolishing everyone they've encountered so far and they probably have a lot of frustration to work out against the turncoat Aggies. I expect this to be an uphill climb for aTm.
Oklahoma State 45 Texas A&M 35

#14 Arkansas at #3 Alabama
Nevermind, this is the premier game of the weekend. Most everyone thinks that Alabama is the real deal, but the Razorbacks have something to prove, since they haven't gotten much chance to show themselves off against real competition. This is a heck of a way to start things off. Too bad for the Razorbacks that 'Bama has the best D in the country.
Arkansas 17     Alabama 28

#2 LSU at #16 West Virginia
LSU must have a death wish. This is only week four and they have already played Oregon and Mississippi State, and now they are facing the Mountaineers in Morgantown. This is gonna be interesting. I don't think West Virginia has the offensive firepower to compete with LSU's stifling defense.
LSU 21     West Virginia 10

#10 Oregon at Arizona
Most are looking at this game as a W for Oregon, but I think Arizona could put up more of a fight than is commonly believed. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that Nick Foles and his Wildcats come out swinging.
Oregon 42     Arizona 45

Picks of the Week

2011-09-08T17:00:00.000-04:00

Week One delivered little in the way of surprises, but it was still a fairly illuminating week of college football. The West half of the SEC proved they are too be feared, with LSU ripping off Oregon’s face and Mississippi State and Alabama hanging forty+ points on their opponents. It’s still too early to tell if Ole Miss should be embarrassed about losing to BYU, but Auburn dropped out of the Top 25 with their barely-face-saving performance against Utah State. Notre Dame dropped a deuce in their collective pants against ND alumni, Skip Holtz, and his South Florida Bulls. Texas A&M did their best to show the Big 12 why they’ll be missed when they jet for the SEC. Michigan played 2 and half quarters and still won by 24 points.

This week is all about clarification. Was that just first-game jitters from the Auburn Tigers or are they a middling team this year? Is this Mark Richt’s last year at Georgia? Can Miss State make a push for the SEC West or are they pretenders? These questions will be partially answered this week. See below.

Arizona at #9 Oklahoma State
Arizona and Okie State both put in good showings last week. Some people in the sports media are claiming this could be the year that Arizona actually has two good teams at once. Unfortunately for the Wildcats, though, they have to play the Cowboys a thousand miles away from AZ. I think OK State is the real front runners in the Big 12.
Arizona 21    Oklahoma State 42

#21 Missouri at Arizona State
Missouri barely made it passed a MAC team last week at home, and yet they are the ones coming into this match-up ranked. I think Missouri will finish middle of the B12 this year. Go Sun Devils!
Missouri 10    Arizona State 28

#12 South Carolina at Georgia
Mark Richt is clearly feeling the heat coming from his seat after getting annihilated on both sides of the ball by Boise State last week. This is a must-win for him and his Bulldogs if they hope to keep their SEC championship dreams alive, and if Richt hopes to keep his job. Too bad this is also The Head Ball Coach’s last legitimate chance at a National Championship with South Carolina before he fades into oblivion. I hate to do this to my Dawgs, but they looked like crap last weekend.
South Carolina 16    Georgia 10

Notre Dame at Michigan
This is the first night game ever played in the Big House and the electricity from that alone will carry the Wolverines ahead of the struggling Irish. I don’t think either of these teams are particularly great, but Michigan is a few confidence building wins away from being a contender in the Legends Division of the B1G. They won’t win it, of course, but they could push Nebraska and Michigan State.
Notre Dame 21    Michigan 35

#16 Mississippi State at Auburn
This is where Auburn shows how much they lost form last season, and where Mississippi State shows just how much they’ve grown.
Mississippi State 35    Auburn 32

#3 Alabama at #23 Penn State
Last year Alabama kicked Penn State out of Tuscaloosa with a severe black eye, and this year JoePa and his two-QB monster hopes to return the favor. Unfortunately for them Alabama has the best defense in the country and PSU’s offense is still trying to find an identity. The only chance PSU has is if Alabama proves to be equally confused on offense and this thing comes down to the wire. If so, I think 85K screaming Lion fans could be the deciding factor.
Alabama 21    Penn State 14

9/11 and the difficulty of depicting mass tragedy

2011-09-07T21:57:00.000-04:00

Adam Kirsch at the Wall Street Journal (yes, you read that right) had a great article today about the limits of literature in depicting modern tragedies. This is obviously yet another response to the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, but it is still interesting that ten years on, we still don't have a satisfactory method for dealing with the horrible senselessness of the tragedy.

Thursday Football Picks!

2011-09-01T17:00:00.000-04:00

It’s that time again, folks, when I waste your precious time trying to predict the unpredictable. College football has supposedly been rocked by various scandals, but it’s the same ole’ game to me, always will be, no matter how many super conferences or playoffs try to screw around with the formula. In the end you have two teams try to beat each other. It’s as simple as that.

Week One doesn’t have too much intrigue. It’s your normal slate of baby seal clubbing. Except for a few uber-match-ups the big dogs have largely avoided having to do more than field a team. Regardless, here are the top picks of Week One of the 2011 College Football season.

UNLV at #11 Wisconsin
Most think that the Badgers will be battling it out with Ohio State for the Leaders Divisional title in the B1G, and I happen to be one of those people. However, Wiskey will have to get through this moderately difficult season-opener first. I bet they do it in style.
UNLV 14 Wisconsin 35

Western Michigan at Michigan
The first game of the Hoke era of Michigan footbaw. First game of the season in the Big House. The first season UM actually has a returning starter at QB. I think this is gonna be a difficult day for the Broncos.
Western Michigan 21 Michigan 42

South Florida at #16 Notre Dame
Notre Dame is an unknown quantity at this point, but they get tested early with the Bulls of South Florida. It’s a home game so that should help, but the Bulls are many people’s top pick to win the Big Easy, and they will likely come into South Bend with a desire to prove themselves against what is likely to be a difficult Irish squad. Coach Brian Kelly officially starts rebuilding the Irish with this convincing win.
South Florida 14 Notre Dame 28

#3 Oregon vs. #4 LSU
This match-up would have been a lot better if Jordan Jefferson hadn’t gone and gotten himself suspended the week before the game. But the game is being played in neutral territory and both have a ton to prove to the national media. Both return a bunch of starters, but it’s Oregon who brings back the backbone of their championship caliber offense. I think this will be a very interesting match-up, but since I have to make a prediction I will lean toward Oregon, since they don’t have nearly the distractions that LSU do. Also, Les Miles’ luck has to run out eventually, right?
Oregon 28 LSU 24

#5 Boise State vs. #19 Georgia
This is the second of the “neutral site” games, both involving SEC teams playing one state away or less from their hometown. It’s also going to be the game that starts a whole lot of talk about Bulldog fever. Georgia is going to pull out a tough one in a crazy Georgia Dome.
Boise State 28 Georgia 31

Obligatory DFW Post

2011-08-24T21:35:00.002-04:00

I can't stand The Decemberists. But this video very well might change that.

Tuesday Writing Links

2011-08-22T21:59:00.000-04:00

This one has been making the round lately about Danielewski's House of Leaves and how to teach it in college lit courses. This will make no sense if you haven't read the book, but there are some interesting ideas here if you have. If you haven't, then you are seriously missing out on one of the most intense literary experiences of the last twenty years.

And here is your obligatory DFW link, this time from the New York Times. I'm not sure I agree with the author's stance, but it's still a good article.

Year of the Novel

2011-08-15T22:08:00.004-04:00

Alrighty-do! I am that much closer to being done. After taking over a week off because of my trip to the Great Lakes State, I hit the ground running earlier this week and finished up the second character's story. That makes two of the four story lines sewn up. Only, obviously, two more to go. One of them should be pretty easy because the characters don't have that much more to their story. The other storyline, though, is the biggie. Three of the main characters reside in this storyline and they are pretty darn important to the overall scheme of the novel. They are sort of the yin and yang of the story and it's important I get them right. That's why I'm saving them for last. I feel like if I have everything else figured out then it will be easier to slide the last section into the bosom of the rest.

So, that's the update. I'm in the homestretch, and I can feel it. Pray for me, my friends.

Backyard Reclamation Project

2011-08-14T23:49:00.000-04:00

It's been awhile, but I mentioned earlier that I would give you all a glimpse into my backyard project. While, many of these pictures are sort of anathema now due to the various diseases and calamities that have befallen my precious veggies, the pictures are still nice. They show my backyard garden in a simpler time, when dreams and hopes were planted and the pain of the future had not yet come to pass. So, without further ado, here you go.

Whodathunk!?

2011-08-13T22:06:00.000-04:00

Who would have thought that the sanest, most reasonable reaction to the riots in England would have come from none other than Russell Brand...yes, that Russell Brand.

Here ya go.

Off to the Mitten

2011-07-29T22:58:00.002-04:00

I'm going to Michigan to visit my family for the next week, so blogging should be light for the next week...LOL! As if that'll be any different than the last few months.

Backyard Reclamation Project

2011-07-28T17:00:00.000-04:00

The garden is a disaster. My peas got root rot. My green beans died inexplicably. My lettuce went to seed. My broccoli is being eaten up by bugs. The only thing growing are the carrots but they are growing slowly and fitfully so I'm worried they'll find some crazy disease to die of.

So, I tore everything up and planted again. The great thing about hobbies like gardening and writing is that you can always start over. As long as the will and the joy is there you can always pull it up and begin again, no worse for the experience. We'll see how this batch goes, and hopefully soon i will have some pictures of awesome carrots for you all to ogle.

As far as the rest of the backyard goes, I've started the mulch pile and so I should have glorious new dirt in a few months. I'm waiting for the late summer specials on swingsets for Lil' Man and once we have the set installed I can build the pathways and all the other doodads I plan on adding to the yard. I'm thinking everything'll be done by the winter...but then again houses are a lot like gardening and writing too, they're never really complete.

I'll post some pictures soon.

Mergers and Acquisitions

2011-07-27T17:00:00.004-04:00

Mergers

Moby Dick by Herman Melville - I have been trying to read this book for about a year but the rigidly Romantic prose and the overly long start kept me from getting too far, but about a month ago I decided to buckle down and finish the damn thing. I'm over 100 pages into the Dick and it's really starting to grow on me. It's florid, sure, and prone to bizarre flights of whimsy and academic naturalism, but there is a sense of foreboding and discomfort that is palpable and reading an author who immersed himself so intensely in his subject matter is instructive. I'll let you know how this goes.

Bon Iver, Bon Iver [+Digital Booklet]- Good Lord this dude is blowing my mind. My wifey decided to buy Bon Iver's newest record (self-titled) based on the recommendation of a friend, and from the first few bars of the first song I got the chills and knew that this record was going to latch onto my heart and shake me loose. It's gorgeous and billowing like a chilly Midwestern November wind, standing in the snow and looking through a frosted window at a warm fire and an empty room.

I liked Bon Iver so much that I immediately went out* and bought his first record, For Emma, Forever Ago, and haven't stopped listening to these two albums back to back to back for the last month and a half. They've so monumentally dug themselves into my consciousness that they have become my entire writing playlist, displacing almost everything else except Sigur Ros, choice Dylan, and The National. The long and short of it, buy both of these records. Now.

Mumford and Sons, Sigh No More - Poor Mumford and his poor, poor sons. If it wasn't for their broken-hearted soul-brother to the North, Bon Iver, this album would be the only thing I was raving about. Unfortunately Bon is too awesome to be second place, and so Mumford waits in the wings, perpetually the bridesmaid, never the bride. But this album is so great, from start to finish. I've heard this band labeled as freak folk and that tag suits me. It's like a mishmash of every folk genre, with a heavy dose of bluegrass and tied together with Irish punk vocals. It's a bizarre mix but it's earnest and cool and beautiful at all the right times.

Random kindnesses

2011-07-26T22:25:00.000-04:00

This is completely unrelated to writing, but I found this in my neighborhood on a recent run and it tickled me enough that I thought I'd snap a picture and show it to y'all. This tree has so many figs on it, I was really tempted to grab a few but I had no pockets and I was only half way done with the run, so I let it be. But I'll be back. Oh yes, I'll be back.

A Lament for Borders

2011-07-19T22:29:00.000-04:00

I read this piece in the Wall Street Journal and while I no longer have the fight left to bemoan the euthanizing of the world's bookstores* I did feel a brief moment of heartbreak at the hometown connection in the story. Being a graduate of the University of Michigan I used this store often. It was a staple of my college experience, and, being a bibliophile, it had a certain special place in my heart. I don't know if Borders was a badly-run corporation or what, but they employed 5000 people in the town I grew to love and call my own and that is no small thing.

Godspeed Borders, and may that location at the corner of Liberty and Maynard stay classy.

*I'll say only this: I think we will see a resurgence in book-making in our lifetimes. The writing, making, distribution, selling, and reading of books has been the staple of human civilization for at least a millennium, and the willingness of our generation to so readily toss 3/5 of this equation out the window seems short-sighted and terribly arrogant. I think it will come back to bite us in the ass.

Misopogon Talks About Harry Potter

2011-07-18T17:00:00.013-04:00

So, not sure whether this is making the rounds or if I'm just really excited to see HP 7 and 1/2, but Mister Booze sent this blog to me about the possible annual tuition at Hogwarts and I thought, "Oh golly, isn't that cute." But the irrepressible Misopogon read this and decided that the author was an idiot and that the question of tuition at Hogwarts warranted about 5K words. This is his response. As always Miso digs deeper than anyone ever thought to go, and comes out with something entertaining, thoughtful, and brilliant.

Scottish Alamo: The Historical and Economic Realities of Harry Potter's World

By Misopogon

The link was interesting but not much thought put into this. Comparing costs for the wizarding world to Muggle equivalencies is as useless as trying to convert 11th century prices to today, i.e. you can do it with large sums but not day-to-day items. Who knows what a wizard must do to create a robe, and if the raw materials and labor are anything like what it takes for Disney to mass-produce a robe and pay a stiff licensing fee to the Rowling estate and jack up the price to Disney levels.

Education in Britain is a massive industry. The schools who charge ~$50,000 U.S. per year are the tippy-top of that industry, and can justify their costs by the exclusivity as well as the opportunity they provide to only a tiny, tiny segment of the population. Hogwarts is a Specialty School serving one community, and virtually everyone in that community must attend. It might be one thing if Hogwarts was a boarding school that takes only a few kids a year from the greater population (e.g. Juilliard) then returns them. Rather the school mostly services a profoundly insular community, indeed a major source of tension in that world is from the inclusion of a small minority of non-community members.

How Do You Pay for Hogwarts?

We don't actually know.

Consider: the Weasley family is known to be quite poor—this is made clear throughout the series. Yet at any given time they have as many as five children (Percy, Fred, George, Ron, Ginny) enrolled at the school. How is Mr. Weasley paying $250,000 a year on a federal agency salary? How would he even get the loan?

If costs were anything like what this blog suggested, you would have a majority of students (pretty much everyone we know except the Malfoys) going to school on loans. It is possible this is true. If so, being a Wizard essentially means living your life in general poverty while you pay off your education, and the whole system being built on a population kept in line by massive debt.

Perhaps the Ministry of Magic puts you on a plan if you come work for them, and this is why so many Hogwarts graduates will go work for the Ministry in some capacity after Hogwarts. The Ministry then is essentially financing the school by payments on the previous generation's debt. Maybe Tom Riddle, whom to Harry and friends is seen only as an evil guy who does evil for evil's sake, is really just the Wizarding World's Tea Party, vilifying Hogwarts and the Ministry as an enslaving debt cycle being put under greater strain by the influx of "aliens" (Muggle-borns). Furthermore if the Goblins are in turn backing the Ministry of Magic, it would explain why Gringott's is so damn wealthy.

But it's hard to believe wizards would accept such an arrangement. It's far more likely that Hogwarts is paid for out of a general fund controlled by the Ministry of Magic, so that attendance is free for those who qualify, but the whole wizarding economy is actually paying to support the school. Or maybe the school has such a massive endowment it can operate in the clear?

What’s Hogwarts’ Endowment?

Hogwarts is obviously funded only partially by straight-up tuition if at all—not once in the series is tuition mentioned. Given its age and integral value to the community, Hogwarts’ main source of annual revenue is most likely endowment.

The school traces its history back to around 1,000 A.D. This was during the troubled reign of Ethelred the Unready in England, and concurrent with a period of revitalized Danish raiding. The motivation for English-based wizards building a castle in the Scottish Highlands is suspect—this is long before the Anglo-Saxons ever thought of the Scots as being tributary to them. It seems likely that the legends of the four founders are grossly exaggerated, as are most stories from that time. Perhaps the wizards were four different schools, or four different communities, embodied into four mythical figures.

A likely founding scenario is that wizards had allied themselves to remnant Brythonic elements in previous centuries (the Druids were pretty much gone 400 years before), living their lives on the margins of Anglo-Saxon society, which before would have been quite accepting of a few magical elements. By the time of the school’s founding, however, that was pretty much settled. England was Christian. However, Ethelred around 999 used a momentary peace in the Danish attacks to march to Scotland and kill a lot of Celts. What Ethelred was after was money to pay the Danegeld. The wizard community (probably at about 100 individuals give or take based on population estimates from 1066) would have been too small by far to face a direct “witch hunt” from the crown, but it’s quite believable that they, along with other marginal groups, got caught up in the wash. We have this from the books:

"You all know, of course, that Hogwarts was founded over a thousand years ago - the precise date is uncertain - by the four greatest witches and wizards of the age. They built this castle together, far from prying Muggle eyes, for it was an age when magic was feared by common people, and witches and wizards suffered much persecution."
-- Professor Binns (CS)

The founding purpose is important because the wizarding world of the U.K. would eventually come to revolve around Hogwarts. If indeed the school was founded as a refuge from persecution, it’s 300 years early—the English purification movement was more of a late-1200s thing brought on by Edwardian Nationalism (and the fact that Edward owed the Jews a shit ton of money). Higher founding principles are even more dubious, as 960 to about 1035 were backsliding cultural times when building a school was the last thing on anybody’s mind. Building a castle, yes, but whatever they built of Hogwarts at that time (almost certainly out of wood) has not survived since the current edifice is a distinctly Norman-Plantagenet design.

If we do take the founding story at face value, we can envision Hogwarts as a combination refuge built in the immediate wake of Ethelred’s destruction of Cumbria, where wizards took up hermitage far from the influence of Anglo-Saxon armies, alarmist ecclesiasts, and marauding Vikings. Those who didn’t come live at the new outpost would have necessarily blended into the population, their genes popping up in subsequent generations of “muggle-borns.” This would give the wizarding world of Great Britain plenty of time to grow into a separatist population. However strong elements of English wizarding society in Southern England suggest a second population of wizards either remained, or perhaps more likely came over as invitees of the Norman invasion, establishing the Ministry of Magic in concert with the founding of Westminster as a Thames powerbase.

(It’s notable that this would be an ideal period for Durmstrang to be founded in Scandinavia, as this was a period of great prosperity for the region, when a Norwegian location would seem far enough away to train specially talented Vikings, but still pretty close to one of Europe’s strongest economic centers.)

Old institutions in England are almost universally well endowed. This is due to the substantial increase in land prices over many generations, and resulting wealth created by renting large estates. Some cities still pay into the coffers of lords who own that land. Hogwarts, however, does not have a lot of land it can profit from. The Scottish Highlands are not heavily populated, nor ever were, and it was the expressed intention of Hogwarts to not have Muggles living there. Therefore its endowment is likely based almost entirely on the donations of generations of wealthy alumni. Presumably there have been many, as any British-born wizard to ever get rich would have probably been an alumnus. Due to the smaller population of the wizarding community and the general limits of their earning power in a separated economy, this endowment is probably nowhere near Oxford or Cambridge, but within the wizarding world it would certainly be among the richest institutions in the world on assets alone.

The school is likely further funded by the Ministry of Magic, as this would explain how the Ministry justifies its strong influence over the school. Outrageous expenditure by the school is justified by its endowment, plus the fact that so much of the wizarding world's economy is based on Hogwarts.

Genetics of Wizarding

There is strong evidence that wizarding ability is a genetic trait, as most wizarding parents produce wizard offspring, probably linked to a single “activator” gene (the presence wizarding ability is represented as binary). This gene (W or w) is almost certainly recessive—it is extremely rare for two wizarding parents to produce a non-wizard child because in order to be able to use magic both parents must possess two recessive alleles, i.e. both wizarding parents are “ww.” The appearance of Muggle-born wizards and witches among the general population is caused by two carrier parents having a child who inherits both recessive genes. Three out of four children born from two carriers would be expected to be non-wizards, so it is quite likely in a low-reproductive society such as the modern U.K. for many Ww-Ww parents likely never knew how close they came to having a wizard in the family. Wizard and non-wizard parents will not produce wizarding children unless the Muggle parent carries the recessive gene and passes it on to the child.

Harry’s aunt Petunia Dursley (nee Evans) is a good case example. We know Petunia’s parents were both Ww because they were both Muggles and they produced a witch, Harry’s mother Lily. Petunia may be WW (33% chance), and thus no longer able to pass on the wizarding gene, or she may be Ww (67% chance), in which case she may be a carrier. If her husband is WW as we would suspect given the general rarity of the w allele in the general population (that he’s called the “worst sort of Muggle” does not seem to be dependent on genes), their son Dudley has a 50% shot at being a carrier but a 0% shot at being a wizard.

It is rare but not unheard of for two ww (wizarding) parents to produce a non-wizard, or “squib.” This could be due to a mutation in the child. However the fact that the wizarding community has a name for it suggests that the occurrence of squibs is far too frequent to be explained by normal mutation rates. It could mean—as some wizards have suggested—that the wizard gene is more prone to mutate, and this would suggest wizards are slowly dying out. A more likely explanation is that many squib cases are the result of infidelity on the part of the child’s mother with a Muggle. Understandably, this is hard to track as most families will not care to admit such a family secret. It also explains why having a squib child is a stigma among wizards.

Wizarding alleles are evidently present, though somewhat rare in general human population. This frequency is somewhat determinable by the frequency of Muggle-born wizards, though this is hard to determine because the overall population of Muggle-born children each year is possibly less than 100 (Hermione is one of three in her class at Hogwarts, along with Dean Thomas of Gryffindor, Penelope Clearwater), not nearly a large enough sample to provide any surety.

As w alleles are dispersed to the general human population through wizard/Muggle relationships, it is expected that the percent of the total human population exhibiting the wizard trait will shrink, likely an important impetus behind the pureblood movement among wizards. However with greater dispersal the frequency of Muggle-born children should be expected to rise. It is likely that both have happened over many generations, and that w alleles are in fact quite spread out through the Muggle population. This is evidenced by the fact that Hogwarts, a castle built when Britain’s population was not a 10th of what it is now, is able to support a similar number of students as originally specced, without having to turn British-born wizards away.

Many other genes are likely involved as well, but these traits will remain dormant unless the double-recessive activator gene is present. These other genes control various wizarding abilities and their relative strength, e.g. Harry Potter possesses his father’s natural ability to maneuver athletically on a flying broomstick. The strength of these abilities are not tied to the activator gene except for the binary dormant/presence that gene exhibits, e.g. Hermione Granger, daughter of two Muggles, is among the strongest charm-casters in the series, while pure-blood Draco Malfoy

It’s notable that if talents are indeed genetic like wizard ability in general, that this would strongly suggest that DNA is passed along with a soul shard when making a Horcrux: The presence of a Tom Riddle soul shard in Harry Potter gave Harry strong dueling and parselmouth talents that belonged to Riddle, suggesting the soul encased in Harry affected his genomic structure.

The prevalence of strong Danish & Saxon (blond hair, rather tall, light eyes) and Celtic features (red hair, fair skin, freckles) among pure-bloods like the Malfoys, Weasleys and Lovegoods suggests that the genetic characteristics of 10th and 11th century Northern Britain remain particularly strong in the wizarding community, though the darker complexions of James and Harry Potter, Snape, the Blacks, and numerous other characters show plenty of gene flow from the continent over the last millennium. Non-European diversity in the present school population is easily attributable to recent British internationalization during and after the Empire.

The extent of Muggle intermarriage over the years—Hagrid notes in The Chamber of Secrets that there isn’t a wizard alive who isn’t half-blood or less—is strongly supported by the prevalence of non-Wizarding family names even among famous pureblood families like Potter (maker of pottery), and Black (common medieval nickname given to person of dark complexion, though sometimes English variant of French “Blanc” meaning “white”). It’s quite possible however that wizards simply copied English naming conventions. Other notable non-Wizard family names among supposedly pure-blood characters are McGonagall (Scottish clan name, Filch (suspected thief), Lockhart (Midlands derivative of French “Loach,” or “Lochet,” meaning river-fisher; equivalent of English “Fisher”), Burbage (Anglo-Saxon place name meaning fort on the hill/ridge), Pomfrey (“frey” or serf of someone named “Pom,” an Italian name usually meaning someone from Naples), Trelawney (Cornish place name meaning free-town near the water), and Binns (Yorkish patronymic from once popular name Binne).

Many names like Slughorn, Umbridge, Sprout, Vector, Moody, Fenrir, and Lupin bear striking resemblance to personal characteristics or professions. This may be a sign of residual personality traits of ancestors, or even—not impossible given the medieval characteristics of such a small population—that in the wizarding world it is still common for people to be given a late-life attributed surname instead of a family name. Small evidence for this exists in that Tom Riddle’s name change to Lord Voldemort was generally accepted, the stigma of a “Muggle” surname for 2nd or 3rd-generation wizards could lead many to change their name, similar to how many 19th and early 20th century U.S. emigrants chose “Americanized” last names.

The alliterative names of the Hogwarts founders are almost certainly nicknames based on family sigils (a badly drawn heraldic Griffin could easily have become a lion, probably at the same time the house chose red and gold as its colors, in mimicry of the ruling Plantagenet house’s sigil), and are not totally uncharacteristic of nobility in their time, though they sound silly or contrived today.

Is Hogwarts a Private School?

Hogwarts is less a “private” school, and more one owned by the community as a trust, as evidenced by numerous examples in the books of the Ministry interfering in Hogwarts business. In one telling example from the 2nd book, a 12-member "Board of Governors" from the Ministry are coerced into removing Albus Dumbledore from the Headmaster chair when he can't stop the petrifying attacks on students/teachers/cats/ghosts. It is clear from the reference that the board is strongly affiliated with the Ministry, possibly even a Ministry department. In Order of the Phoenix, the Ministry demonstrates exactly how much control it has over the community’s sole secondary educational institution, inserting its own Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher and curriculum, then extending their representative’s powers almost limitlessly–even placing her as headmaster of the school. Later, when the Death Eaters are in charge, the Ministry puts Snape in the headmaster’s chair and allows major laws to be broken (e.g. unforgivable curses practiced on students). A private school would have protections from govt. interference whereas Hogwarts does not.

And it makes sense that Hogwarts would be the Wizarding World's public institution, as it is the English Wizarding Community's greatest community asset. The school is huge, and the overwhelming majority of the adult characters are alumni. In the films Durmstrang and Beauxbatons are portrayed as single-gender institutions (suggesting they're private) but in the books it's pretty clear that they are the Eastern European* and French equivalents of Hogwarts.

Thus the schools are not so much private schools, but community-owned, virtually monopolistic institutions. Price is therefore not determined–as it is with comparable British Boarding Schools–by the maximal rate that wealthy parents will pay, but rather by what can be squeezed out of the community at large.

Let's look first at why we think Hogwarts is private. Most obviously, it looks and acts like a world class British private school. The lifestyle is based on English Boarding Schools, which are all private. It has a very select admissions process.

However we're applying some factors based on our modern market economy, whereas their economy is a sub-sector. The closest analogue is a school for nobility, ie one that accepts all students who are titled from birth. For admissions, it seems getting into Hogwarts doesn't have any tests or application process—they simply sense your ability and send you a letter by owl. It's not spoken of much, but it is stated that wizarding families—especially the more Muggle-born—have children ("squibs") who do not have the magical spark and must make their way in the Muggle world. Argus Filch is one such character. This is likely a primal fear for wizarding families, and a good reason that so many are willing to believe in the eugenic cause espoused by the Hitler figure of Voldemort. Anyway we meet plenty of kids who would not qualify academically for a prestigious school, e.g. Crabbe and Goyle. This all supports the description of Hogwarts as a specialty school servicing a single community, and where the community has no choice but to send their kids there.

How Many Wizards Are There

There is a major incongruence in the size of the school between what's claimed by Rowland and what can be clearly seen in the films. J.K. says there's about 1,000 students at Hogwarts (250 per house, ~35 per house per class). In the films it is more like 280-300 students, with 70-75 per house and 10-12 per class. This means each class would see 5 or 6 classmates of each gender, and this is supported as the only male members of Harry's class and house we meet are himself, Ron, Neville, Seamus and Dean ... 5 students. Hermione shared her dorm room with Parvati Patil, Fay Dunbar, Lavender Brown, and the unnamed ginger girl who was Lavender's best friend...5 students. These characters are referenced again and again during classes—either these dorm groups are pods within the house, or more likely they represent the entire class within their house.

Classes are often two houses together of the same age, and this too supports 280-300 students because that would mean class sizes of 20 (rather than 70 by J.K.'s figuring). The quidditch rosters also support smaller classes, since that would explain why there are opportunities for younger students to earn significant playing time. Harry may be an outstanding case, but it seems most quidditch players will be on the team for much of their scholastic careers. Draco Malfoy becomes a seeker as a 2nd year. Further evidencing this, when Harry comes to Hogwarts Ron's twin brothers are already experienced beaters despite being just a few years older than Harry & Ron. This would mean the twins made the team as the latest as 2nd years, when they were just 12 years old. Ron—not considered highly talented—made varsity in his 6th year. If the school was 1,000 strong, each house would have 250 kids from whom to build their rosters, and only 5% of the class would make the team, thus raising the level of competition dramatically and precluding all but the rarest 1st - 3rd years earning playing time (over what would be more than 70 potential players ages 16 or over). Thus I'm going to go with my estimate rather than Rowling's answer for this one, since it just makes way more sense for the story.

The size matters in figuring out the % of a population that are wizards. We can suppose that there isn't another wizarding school in England** (at one point during the Death Eaters’ reign attendance at Hogwarts becomes compulsory for all of-age wizards, yet Hogwarts was not in any way overflowing so if there was a competing school in England it was so small as to be basically insignificant). Since Harry's class is, according to Rowland and other sources, exactly contemporary with our class (Harry was born in late August, 1980), and because we know Hogwarts is the only school that services the U.K., we can look at the population figures of the U.K. and predict a % of population that are wizards. The UK census makes this easy: in 1991 (when Book 1 takes place) there were 5,487,098 full-time students 11 to 5 years old. By Harry's senior year in 1998, this population would exactly equivocate to that which would be in the schooling range that Hogwarts teaches. So 280 divided by 5.5 million equals 0.0051% of the population.

Now multiply that by any population to get an idea of how many wizards are produced by any given territory. For example, the United States in 1998 had a population of 275,854,000, suggesting a wizarding population between 14,000 and 15,000. In the United States there are at most 1 primary or secondary school per 1,000 kids (South Dakota) and at least 0.198 (Florida) per 1,000 kids, or 1 school for every 5,000 in population. That's with our 3-school system, and includes private schools. So ultimately what we're saying is to serve a community population of 15,000 individuals, you would have at maximum one or two secondary schools and three or four primary schools.

The U.K. with a 1998 population of 58,487,000 would have a total wizarding population of between 2,800 and 3,400. This population size is further supported by the dispersment of wizarding families: Only Hogsmeade is 100% magical; the rest like Godric's Hollow near Winchester, Tinworth in Cornwall, and Ottery St Catchpole in Devon, or Diagon Alley in Central London, have small communities of wizarding families who live beside muggles. Hogsmeade is so small that its economy can't even support enough stores to supply students with their necessary school goods (says Mrs. Weasley in Book 2), indeed Diagon Alley is portrayed as a market environment the week before school and otherwise generally pretty dead. This is further suggestive of a small and insular economy where the school serves as a primary economic driver, similar to how a castle and/or cathedral would dominate the economy of a medieval community (Hogwarts and the Ministry exhibit behaviors characteristic of both castles and cathedrals so it’s hard to say which is which).

These numbers aren’t at all perfect. For one, wizards seem to have a longer lifespan (Dumbledore was 115 or 116 when he died), so this might suppress the percent of the population under 19. However two wars within two decades (plus a third spoken of under Grindelwald concurrent with WWII), plus the increased risk of death in the magical world in general, probably keep the average life expectancy of wizards roughly in line with Muggles, with a more scattered curve of course. However it’s difficult to calculate how the percentage of humans who are wizards has changed over the centuries because intermarriage will have diffused wizarding alleles into the general population.

What’s the Wizarding Economy Like?

What happens to those who can’t pay their debts? We are constantly running into magical paupers. They are dirty, have torn and aged clothes, etc. Many, many wizards live in ramshackle lodgings of such old architecture as to suggest homebuilding is virtually unknown within the community. For a population equivalent to a small farming town, Knockturn Alley is surprisingly well populated by hoodlums and other folk living outside the law. Also 3,400 is a very small population to require such a massive and high-security jail as Azkaban Prison—I wonder exactly what percent of the English wizarding population was incarcerated there. All told it’s fair to say 15%—perhaps even as much as 30%—of adult wizards seem to living on the margins of respectable wizard society. How many of these people were at some point students at Hogwarts? From the series it’s suggested an overwhelming majority were, though many are probably drop-outs.

Note that the O.W.L. and N.E.W.T. exams are the primary impetus for students to learn at Hogwarts, and success there will allow you to get a government job (eg Auror) or teaching position. For those who don’t pass, their economic future doesn’t seem to provide much in the way of opportunity unless, like Fred & George Weasley, they are able to start a small business. Knockturn Alley shows us many of those small businesses are probably pretty seedy. There’s just not a lot of opportunity in this economy.

Market Day

Noticeably absent from this economy is food production. Foods consumed by wizards are similar to those in the Muggle world with a few communal eccentricities (butterbeer instead of chocolate milk, pumpkin juice for orange juice, firewhiskey as a locally favored liqueur, plus their own magical sweets). The only farming we ever see is subsistence farming. We do see food provided magically (eg the flash appearance of feasts at Hogwarts meals) but we also come across cooks and kitchens regularly, which suggests magically served food might be magically prepared but that substance itself was harvested somehow. In Deathly Hollows the characters do go hungry, and Hermione mentions she can transfigure food from other food, but can’t turn something inedible into something edible. It’s thus supposed that the majority of wizard food is somehow purchased, presumably wholesale from muggles. Here we see a possible control as the Ministry of Magic and Gringott’s probably do a lot of money conversion. In fact it’s not hard to imagine that they use this as a form of control on their population: Wizarding jobs pay in a different currency, so families must struggle to get British pounds. Even if you live in a Muggle town like Godric’s Hollow, how do you pay your mortgage, unless you do so through the Ministry (unless you own the property). How do you buy anything from the local grocery store?

Plus there’s feeding Hogwarts. All told I would guess the Ministry is a major wholesaler of food goods, dealing directly with Muggle companies set up through their connection to the Prime Minister, and that the Wizards in turn will buy much of their foodstuffs from the Ministry. I would bet there’s a Department of Transfiguration or some such whose job it is to turn GFS wholesale grain into sellable magical products. The specialty products of the wizarding world could thus be privatizations of offbeat Transfigurations learned at the Ministry (eg a guy turning vegetable oil into butter may have created butterbeer). A small manufacturer of food goods like Bertie Botts would still need to purchase commodity goods through currency conversion, as their distributors would be paying in wizarding coinage though they’d still need to be buying sugar from Muggle producers.

Another possibility is that wizards do farm, but that the U.K. has transitioned to a near 100% service economy. Perhaps wizards in the Caribbean don’t have a Hogwarts–they learn from their parents what they need to grow cane and beats and sell their product to Bertie Botts.

We’re still talking about an economy that is severely deflated. This is likely a hidden impetus for endowment-based families like the Malfoys and Blacks (and those running the major institutions) to keep it so. The Muggle-born issue is raised in racial terms, but there is a strong economic side too: the more Muggle interaction (eg Hermione and her dentist parents), the more access the wizarding world will have to Muggle currency without having to go through the Ministry, thus subjecting the insular, centralized debt-based wizarding economy to inflation, devaluing the debt owed by virtually everyone to the Ministry, undermining the Ministry’s role as sole intermediary between the wizarding and Muggle worlds, and devaluing the wizarding currency in general.

How the Hell are You Still Talking?

In summary the total cost of Hogwarts, actually the whole wizarding economic system, is more 10th century than 21st, except that for the U.K. specifically it seems to be almost 100% service economics. A massive bureaucracy is maintained for the expressed purpose of keeping wizards from realizing the full value of their talents from the rest of the world. They are tasked with keeping both themselves and arbitrary elements (why are dragons and hippogriffs not for Muggle eyes but dolphins and bald eagles are a-okay?) separate from the Muggle world, but for ill-defined ends.

We don’t know if Hogwarts is funded by a massive debt system, or if it’s a totally public institution that’s funded by the Ministry and endowment. Probably the latter but it doesn’t matter–the wizarding world must support this behemoth of an institution and an even greater governmental behemoth. Their insular world is kept so because unless you were born a Malfoy your are destined to go to Hogwarts with the best case scenario a lower middle class position in a government agency. Even the Great Harry Potter who saves the world from its Hitler figure ends up a cop.

In other words being an adult wizard sucks.

What is this system protecting? Well, the very problem with the series—and really all children’s fantasy—is the illusion of central position. Just as kid fantasy is predicated on childhood self-centeredness, the world of Harry Potter is set up to protect one thing: the Hogwarts Experience. So long as the rest of the world is kept away, special 11-year-olds get to enter secret train platforms, meet dragons and centaurs and giant spiders, fight ghouls, discover hidden passages, and cast spells, experiencing childish wonder at each turn.

Dumbledore’s back story—one of the most redeeming parts of the later books and sadly absent from the final film—actually gives us a young, highly ambitious example of a wizard who seriously questioned the separatist, needlessly bureaucratic nature of wizarding society. It is Dumbledore, not the eponymous child, who is the true protagonist of the Harry Potter series. Dubmledore’s arc—from plans of wizard dominance over Muggles to establishing Hogwarts as his indefatigable power base—perfectly demonstrates his world’s competing values of wizard society and the medieval society it mimics: A. Power, or B. Institution

Ultimately the series roots for and settles on Institution. Ironically considering the author’s stated non-ecclesiastic predilections, the Millenial generation’s signature myth-epic is one long (and quite entertaining) tale of extreme order defeating extreme chaos.

Notes and Errata:

* Their champion Viktor Krum is obviously Bulgarian (Khan Krum is Bulgaria's most famous king—it would be like a British character named John Plantagenet), but I believe the school itself is in Russia. Other names mentioned in Goblet of Fire are of varied Slavic origin—characteristic of Russian mixing—and they are welcomed as "our friends from the North." It's suggested by their cold-weather costume and choice of a sailing vessel as official transportation that the school itself is in Scandinavia, probably Norway or Sweden ("Durmstrang" being a Germanic name).

However the remoteness of the school is not to be taken as a sign that Durmstrang is local, but that like Hogwarts it's important for the security of the Wizarding World that the school be situated far from population centers. It's strongly suggested by the terrain (hills, forests, and a deep private lake) and weather patterns (heavy snow beginning in late November), plus the travel time by train and difficulty of transportation to the Ministry for non-apparators that Hogwarts is nestled in the Scottish Highlands. Likewise, Durmstrang is probably somewhere in Norway off the Arctic Coast, carved out of no-man’s land and made habitable by magic, but meant to serve the population centers of Russia and Northeastern Europe.

That the Bulgarian Krum would attend Durmstrang is demonstrative of the small overall population of wizards, and the far reach of the institution. However it’s also quite likely that Southeastern Europe has its own school (Greece a likely spot) but that Durmstrang is a more renowned institution which recruited the star seeker. If so, it must be supported by a greater endowment and population than one closer to Krum, the most likely being German/Prussian/Russian.

** Except “charm school.” Education before Hogwarts is rarely spoken of, and I think there's a tendency to believe children are home-schooled in the wizarding world. However there is some evidence that wizards have interacted with each other. Malfoy's pre-existing friendship with Crabbe and Goyle could be explained by familial friendship (so the boys were probably playmates as young children, no doubt at Draco's family home where he established his dominance in their relationship). But then there's evidence of many other children having widespread social relationships beyond those you'd expect from parental or community circles, suggestive of some sort of formalized primary education being available.

There is a brief mention in the books of having attended "charm school" by a 1st year student, and charm school is referenced again in the 4th book. The reference is always lowercased, suggesting this is an elementary level of school for wizarding children. There may be more localized charm schools, but again you're running into a very low number of supportable primary schools. There may be only one or two in all of England. I wish we knew more about Harry's classmates before they came to Hogwarts.

It would make the most sense to me that there were two charm schools available, and that 75%+ of the students went to one of those, with the remainder coming from Muggle schools. Among Harry's class, Harry, Seamus (half-blood), and Muggle-born Hermione and Dean are known to have attended Muggle primary schools, while Ron, Lavender, Parvati, and Fay had some sort of magical primary education, either formally or at home. It can be supposed that had Harry's parents not been murdered he too would have attended a wizarding elementary school. This would support the separateness of the wizarding world, and also how so many of the kids knew each other before Hogwarts. I say two because Draco did not know Ron Weasley (but knew his family) but did have a history with Neville. Pansy Parkinson knew Neville before as well, and Pansy in turn knew Parvati. Most likely they all attended school together before.

References available upon request (but you have to be willing to discuss this first)

Year of the Novel

2011-07-14T17:00:00.002-04:00

I'm just going to stop starting these updates with some form of an apology. At this point I don't think anyone really expects more than sporadic "pop-ins" from me here at DECW. I've been working my booty off on the novel and it is going swimmingly. Thus so little time for blogging.

I am now fully engaged in Operation-Separate-all-the-Characters-and-Write-Their-Parts-Individually, and I've already finished one of the main character's section, totalling about 60K words from start to finish. His storyline dovetails with four others so by finishing him I've more or less created a good skeleton for the remainder of the book, since all action save the epilogue needs to happen before his "cathartic moment." This is huge progress for me and I'm proud of the work I've done already. So, cheers.

One thing that keeps coming up, though, is that I keep realizing there are major (but easily fixable) discrepancies in the text. I guess this is bound to happen when you are working on something this big for this long, you're going to forget you wrote things about a character and now have to find a way to either reincorporate it, or go back and write it out of the earlier section. Exempla gratia, I had one character break his leg, but then forgot that I'd done that, so in a later section he walks out of the hospital a few days later miraculously healed. I mean, c'mon, there's Deus ex Machina and then there's just insanity. It works better if he just doesn't break the leg since he has to do all sorts of heroics by the end of the book, so that will be getting the axe in the second draft.

I think the reason I've been working so frantically is that I've just sunk $200 into an individual pitch session and critique with two agents who seem like they could be good fits for this novel. The pitch and critique are for the Atlanta Writers Club Semi-Annual Conference, and it ain't til November but I don't have any time to waste. I know I won't have this thing done by then but they only want the first 20 pages and I will have at least 75% done by then. My calculation is that, because I know how everything is gonna work out in the book, if they like my writing style and are interested in the story idea, they will understand if I need a second to finalize a draft. Maybe I'm being a bit presumptuous, but I figure it's no more presumptuous than thinking my novel is gonna somehow stand out in the nine billion pitches they're gonna hear that day. I mean, we're talking 1 in a million type chances anyway, so I think not having the book done will be the least of my worries. All I'm really looking for is some validation that the idea is solid and the writing is "there." If I can get those things, then I can always send them the finished manuscript when I get it done. Also, AWC is doing another these things in May, and I should most definitely have the for reals manuscript done by then. So, I guess I can think of the November conference as a dress rehearsal.

So, there it is folks, the shrill neuroses of a novelist. Enjoy.

Publication is Mine, Finally! After What Feels Like a Billion Years!

2011-07-13T00:26:00.000-04:00

The good folks over at Full of Crow have taken on the admirable task of ushering my short story, "Lil' Smokey" to publication. It's a violent, cathartic, and very much NSFW little gem that took awhile to find a home, but I couldn't be happier with the one it found. This is my second piece in Full of Crow. I'm beginning to wonder if the name has anything to do with why they keep taking me on.

You can read the story here.

Friday Writing Links!

2011-06-24T17:00:00.001-04:00

Let's start this off right! Obligatory DFW interview from way back...like back when he was alive.
Money Quote:

"For someone like me who grew up in the sixties at the height of the Cold War and whose consciousness was formed by, “we are the good guy and there’s one great looming dark enemy and that’s the Soviet Union,” the idea of waking up to the fact that in today’s world very possibly we are the villain, we are the dark force, to begin to see ourselves a little bit through the eyes of people in other countries—you can imagine how difficult that is for Americans to do. Nevertheless, with a lot of the people that I know that’s slowly starting to happen."

The Millions brings the heat with a great article about Philip K. Dick.

I met the author of this book the other day and she is the nicest person ever. It's cool to meet people who are a little further along the path to super-stardom than me.

Speaking of superstars, if you haven't bought xtx's Normally Special then you're a certified idiot.

I'm thinking about reading James Joyce's Ulysses after finishing The Help. Does this make me a crazy person? Discuss amongst yourselves.

The Language of Dissent

2011-06-23T17:00:00.001-04:00

"The Language of Dissent" is one of the only songs I ever wrote completely wasted that actually turned out half-way decent. It was late at night and I was in the basement that Oblivion practiced in, sitting on the nasty cement floor and strumming some simple chords that required about zero in the way of ability to move my fingers, which at the time was not something I could do all that well. Something in those chords, though, tickled something in my heart and it vibrated and it vibrated and I started to sing about all sorts of things that were weighing heavily on me at the time.

I was growing concerned with my penchant for writing obtuse music that, while interesting in a mental masturbation kinda way, was not doing a particularly good job of letting anyone know my true heart. This song was supposed to start turning the tide. It was supposed to let the listener know that I knew I was an over-educated little twit and that it was causing me as much pain as them. That this song would end up smack in the middle of all the lyrical pretension of The Garden in the Machine is probably ironic, since I'm not sure I understood the juxtaposition at the time, but I just wanted to be honest.

The music featured a whole lot of truly stellar performances by everyone in the band. Jason played the hell out of the piano and Ben probably laid down one of his best ever guitar solos. It's lyrical and epic and gorgeous. There's also french horns and trumpets that were arranged by some U of M students who came up with it and played it for free, and who had to deal with me nervously hovering over them throughout the entire process even though they had more classical music proficiency in their thumbs than I had in my entire body. The whole, overblown mess of this song is still so enjoyable for me to listen to. I didn't realize it was too big for its own good at the time. And now that I'm seven years older I don't care. It's like an old VHS film of yourself as a child pretending to wear your parents' clothes. For awhile it's embarrassing, and then it's sort of cute, and in the end you wind up finding out a lot about yourself.

Who am I dissenting against? Myself, of course. Always myself.

The Language of Dissent
Music and Words by  Tres Crow

All those dreams I had when I was too young to notice that they’re never coming true
All those beliefs I had when I was too young to notice the machinery
Took a stand if only for a moment to lift my lips to sweetness
And I traded my clean robe for some nice new clothes
and I’ve hidden in corners with metaphors for way too long

this world is underway
what’s past is over

all those dreams I had when I was too young to notice the machinery
all those ghosts I trusted so deeply now they are merely mist
and I traded my best parts for a good entrance
and I’ve hidden in corners with metaphors for way too long

this world is underway
what’s past is over

Lyrics reprinted by permission of Shire Reckoning Publishing House

Friday Writing Links!

2011-06-17T12:00:00.003-04:00

Yes, kids, you too can have a children's book smash hit.

Bolano.

Obligatory DFW link: Movie posters from the films of James O. Incandenza.

Roald Dahl was a douchebag. But, damn! Those stories. Those stories.

The Millions has another classic, this time about short stories.

And I'd be a jerk if I didn't link to Mr. Canavan's latest project. Here it is, he can explain it better than I can.

Mergers and Acquisitions

2011-06-15T17:00:00.011-04:00

Not so many acquisitions these past few weeks, my friends. But there are some definite mergers that are kicking my ass.

The Weepies - This cute little musical duo has been kicking around my WMP for about two years. Their song "Keep It There" has been a staple of my "Writing" mix for the entire writing of this novel-in-progress. But recently I decided to look a little bit more into their oeuvre and I found that they are the greatest thing ever!!! Their album Say I Am You is basically the sound that I was trying to achieve for about three of the last five years of my musical career. Absolutely beautiful and brilliant in a "Yesterday" kind of way. It's like that tune you wake up humming and don't know where you heard it from. It's from the middle of you. That pace that will always be eleven years old, no matter how many times the dagger gets stabbed in.

The Tree of Life - If you are familiar with Terrence Malick's work and have already decided you don't like his films then stay far far away from this one. This is the most "Malick" he's ever been, but I can't even begin to explain how beautiful this movie is. He sets out to make a movie about no less than the entire scale of life in this universe and...well, he actually succeeds. Brad Pitt is devastating. The cinematography is devastating. This won't win Best Picture because the Academy is a lifeless zombie addicted to cheese whiz but in a perfect world this movie would be the only one nominated. Four days later I'm still thinking about this*. Four days from now, I probably still will be.

Queen - Yes, that Queen. They are so over-the-top amazing that my face becomes an elongated banana grin every time I hear the classic opener "I'm just a poor boy..." I don't even care that Adam Levine and co. butchered the Royal catalog on NBC's early-summer "smash" The Voice, this music is so much a part of me that sometimes I just wanna put on my spandex body suit and grab a hairbrush and chase after some fat-bottomed girls. Cuz, you know, they make the world go round.

X-Men: First Class - Best one yet. Simply put. In fact, it'd be the best comic book movie ever made if it wasn't for that pesky Brit Christoper Nolan. For an interesting take on the film that in no way takes away from its filmic awesomeness, go here.

*For those of you who go to see it, there is about a forty-five second sequence in which the beginnings of Sean Penn's character's life are shown, which basically summed up the last two years of my life. I cried. I really did. It was so perfect and beautiful. If you have kids you'll know what I'm talking about.

Apocalypse Watch

2011-06-14T17:00:00.001-04:00

This was a great day for bizarro news from around this great nation of ours. American exceptionalism is alive and strong on this, the tenth day of June in the year of Our Lord two thousand and eleven, my friends. here's a small collection of greatest hits from two papers of record.
The question reads: The stock market swoons, but are we in for an all-out pass-out?

Infrastructure? We don't need no stinkin' infrastructure. Detroit opts for air-conditioning au-naturel.

Arizona on fire...again. I'm sure it's all because of illegal immigrantion.

A large pack of dogs is killing livestock in Washington...yes you read that right.

Chicago is preparing for more "flash mobs," and not the cuddly kind that dance on YouTube.

But don't worry, everyone, Texas is here to save the day. That is, as long as you pay no attention to the accounting tricks behind the balanced budget.

On a related note, my little garden is doing wonderful. I have beans a growing. I have broccoli a sprouting. And home gardening has become such a thing* that it even now has corporate sponsorship. Who knew Triscuits were made on small farms in backyards all across American suburbia? Strange times we live in, folks.

*Seriously though, just about every adult I know with one or more kids is growing at least one vegetable in their backyard. I thought I was a weirdo when I started this until I started talking to everyone else. I think this is a legitimate "thing" now. Is it because of the economy? A general unease with the future of this country? A desire for something real amongst all the lies? All three for me. I dunno about everyone else.

Year of the Novel: The Great Disappearo!

2011-06-13T17:00:00.002-04:00

Yup, I know, I know. I'm well aware that I now have the uncomfortable habit of disappearing off the face of the planet and then reappearing in a fit of blog posts weeks later. The reason for this is simple: I can't blog at work. That means I have to blog at home, but the problem is that I can't actually justify spending good writing time blogging when I'm 60% done with a novel that I've spent over a year on already. So, I guess what I'm saying is, get used to the new normal, people.

On the novel front, I am now officially working on the longest piece of continuous fiction I've ever written in my life. Last I checked it's around 112K words or something like that. I am very proud of myself for continuing my writing routine as best I could even after starting the new job, but lately I've encountered a fearsome and unexpected beast: I'm a little burnt out. I think I worked so hard during my 8-day hiatus that now that I'm back into a normal routine of working 9+ hours and writing when I find time, I'm finding it difficult to muster the energy to do so. But it's more troubling than that, really. Because it's not that I don't know where to go with the story, it's that I don't actually feel much like writing. That's the sort of writer's block they don't talk about. It's a little frightening, actually.

If there's one thing life has taught me, though, it's that everything is temporary. I know I will once again feel excited about this story and these characters*. This is probably a function of going 100 mph for a brief period of time and then abruptly slowing down again.

Another thing I've encountered is that the different story lines are finally starting to intertwine and I'm realizing that not everything lines up perfectly. The main storyline is going in a direction that not only doesn't work for the timeline of the other characters, but is also straying too far away from my original idea for these main characters. This means that about 1/3 of what I've written for Part Two is going to have to be rewritten. This was at first heart-palpitating, but then I realized what I think might be an interesting way to keep the momentum going on the novel and also fix the timeline issues.

To give you a little back story, basically this novel is the story of about five people whose lives slowly grow more and more entangled in new and (hopefully) interesting ways. It was easy to keep them straight when they weren't hanging out with one another, but now two of the five are in a training camp together and the other three are hanging out back on Earth where are sorts of crazy shit is going down. What I was doing was writing each chapter in order, skipping from character to character and just spewing the novel onto the page, but, as I mentioned earlier, that was getting confusing and also the characters in the training camp were moving at too slow a pace for the other three.

So, what I've decided is that I will just write each character out like a smaller novella, and then assemble the chapters after the fact based on overall chapter theme and timeline. That way, the three Earth-bound characters (whose story-arcs I understand more fully than the other two anyway) can help create the structure of the rest of the novel. I feel like if I can get to the end of this thing with one of two of these characters then it will be easier to coax the other ones to the finish line. Am I right, or am I right?

I've started with the drunk, Chuck. He's emerging as a sort of moral center to the whole piece. I love him. I hope things work out for him in the end.

*In fact, to be fair, I am only writing this blog post right now because I've just had a good 1500 word writing blitz on the novel and feel like I can justify this bon bon because things are feeling back on track. I think I just need to relax a little and not feel like every single second of free time needs to be devoted to the novel. Sometimes these things just need to breathe a little.

Marty

2011-06-02T17:00:00.003-04:00

The kettle started to shriek and Marty snapped the book shut and grunted out of the chair. He went to the stove and removed the kettle from the stove, pouring the steaming water into a coffee mug with a picture of a cartoon bear on it. The mug said Yosemite National Park on it in script that wrapped around the picture of the bear. His sister had bought him this mug when her and her husband and her brood of kids went to the park. She was always going places. She lived currently in Galveston, TX where her husband worked as an accountant or an actuary or a gravedigger.

Marty reached in the cupboard for a box of tea bags. There were two of them in the cupboard: a yellow box for the morning and a blue one for the evening. He grabbed the blue box and pulled the last tea bag from the box and soaked it in his mug.

“I’ll need to go to the store tomorrow,” he said and nodded his head in agreement as he bobbed the bag in the water. Vapor condensed on his wrist.

He thought about his sister and the places she’d gone. He didn’t understand her, never had, not even as kids. One day she’d called to him and told him to follow her, and when he rounded the house he saw her standing over a spot on the lawn and looking down at something in the lawn. He walked up to her, reaching for her hand as he always did at that age. On the ground was a tiny bird and it opened and closed its beak in silent suffering.

“Where do you think its mama is?” His sister had asked and Marty hadn’t answered. He was horrified by the tiny creature. It’s eyes were milky and black all at once, like a blood blister, or a film negative of an egg yolk. “I think we need to bring it inside.”

Marty shook his head no, but his sister either didn’t see him or was ignoring him because she cupped her hands and gingerly scooped up the bird. It made a sound like pebbles clicking together and opened its beak wide.

“It’s cute, isn’t it, Marty?” asked his sister.

Again he didn’t answer but he followed her to the house where she went inside and found a shoe box to put the bird in. She filled the box with shredded tissue paper and set the bird under a lamp and then went out into the yard to find some worms to feed the bird. Marty stayed behind and he stood over the bird and looked at it as it silently begged for food from a mama that would never come.

Marty understood several things about the world as he looked at the bird: that sometimes shitty things happened to even the most innocent and helpless things; he felt helpless in the facing of suffering; and he hated himself for his helplessness. He looked out the window and saw his sister scouring the dirt of the flower beds for worms and felt a nascent pity for her, a pity that was too developed for his five-year-old mind to fully incorporate, and which sank in him like bricks in a nylon stocking. He tore at the seams. He pitied her because she labored in vain in the face of certain defeat.

Marty reached into the shoe box and grabbed the bird in his hands and he squeezed as hard as he could and he could feel the bird writhing against his skin and its claws scratching at him and a tiny, sharp peck from the beak, and then there was the sound of a snapping pencil in a backpack and the bird went still. Marty let the bird fall to the shredded tissue where it seemed to take on a weight in death in never had in life.

His sister came in then, with a handful of worms still wriggling between her fingers. She looked down at the bird and at first she didn’t understand what had happened. But then her face became like the sun blackened by clouds and her mouth opened and shut like the bird's had just moments before. Then she looked at him and her face was inscrutable. It was the most complex look Marty had ever seen up to that point and he simply didn’t understand it. He couldn't understand it; it was white noise. Then she said his name, once, “Marty…” and walked away from him, to her room where she closed the door and didn’t come out until their mama called them for dinner. By then Marty had buried the bird in the flower garden and thrown away the shoe box, and washed away the bits of feathers and blood on his hands.

It wasn’t until much later, as he slipped out of this world and into the blackness of sleep, that he realized what he’d seen on his sister’s face. There had been revulsion, surely, and disappointment, and anger, but it wasn’t any of those emotions that had scrambled Marty’s signals so thoroughly all those years ago. What had confused him was the depth of the sorrow he saw etched there. It was as if she felt a sadness beyond tears, beyond wailing, beyond groping frantically for another human being. But it wasn’t for the bird that she felt this, the bird’s death had been inevitable to her. No, she felt her sorrow for her little brother, because in that moment she saw something in him that he wouldn’t see in himself for a very long time, if he ever really saw it at all. It was the first time she saw the terribleness of G-d when all His glory was refracted through the prism of Man. She saw an empty space in her brother that would never be filled, and if it ever was she hoped she wouldn’t be around to see it. It made her sad, and to a certain degree she would never be consoled.

Year of the Novel: Vacation Blues...JK! Vacation Awesome! Writing Staycation, 2011!

2011-06-01T17:00:00.003-04:00

So, as it turns out, not having a job is really very good for writing novels. I put my two weeks in at the bank about eight business days ago and, as is common in the banking industry, I was immediately terminated. Don't worry, y'all, me and the bank are still cool but they just didn't want me stealing trade secrets or customer info or whatnot. At any rate, since I wasn't starting the new job until after Memorial Day, I decided to pretend that I was a real professional writer and get some serious work done on the manuscript.

I found out a few things about my writing self during the eight business days of writing staycation, 2011.

1. I really really really like not having a job to go to and being able to devote my entire day to the literary and domestic arts. My plants are doing great, my laundry is folded, and I made dinner for my family everyday.

2. I can write like a son of a bitch when I actually have large blocks of time to commit to it. Exempla gratia, in eight days I wrote over 30,000 words on the novel. Given that the manuscript was at around 79,000 words before going into writing staycation, 2011, that means that a third of all the words written on the novel in the last year have been written in the last eight days*. Now think for a moment what that would mean if I had a month or a year or a decade to write. It turns out I am a prolific writer trapped in a busy man's body. Fortunately the new job will both start later and give me more time to write in the morning, and will also actually give me a full lunch hour (I know, how nice of my new employers, right?).

3. I have done a great amount of the heavy lifting for Part Two and can now coast a little bit. I've gotten through a good chunk of the stuff I really didn't have mapped out in my head yet, and several loose storylines have tightened themselves up. I even found connections that I hadn't known were there, but which suddenly just popped out of thin air, and I was all like "wow, you know what, that makes perfect sense, yo."

4. Did I mention that I really like being able to devote 100% of my time to writing and doting on my family? Oh, I did? It was bullet point #1? Oh, my b.

Anyway, this small vacay seriously helped me hone in on where this novel is going and also has given me some initiative to get this done and out there for the world to see. I see the promise land, brothers and sisters, and it looks a lot like Panera for three hours every morning, and making dinner for my family and tending a garden and oozing every fiber of my being onto the page like it's my job, because, well, it is my job. I will get there some day, I can feel it. May the Force be with me!

*For more cute little stats, here you go: 30,000 words over 8 days means I wrote on average 3,750 words per day. My weekly goal proior to quitting my job was 4,500 words. I wrote on average 4 hours per day, which means I wrote about 937.5 words per hour, or 15.625 words per minute. That doesn't seem like a lot, when you break it down to that level. That's only like two sentences per minute. Sheesh, what the hell was I doing with all the other seconds?
**Oh, I also introduced my son to the glories of Star Wars.

I Swear the Bear's Head Looked Too Small Last Year: Thoughts on Bear vs Shark and Bear v Shark

2011-05-31T17:00:00.018-04:00

During my time in bands I played with a great many artists that would later be fairly successful artists, not in a Rolling Stones kind of way, but in an able to make a living off of music for a few years kind of way, which is a big freaking deal in the modern musical market. At one point I played with these guys, and this girl, and these guys, and these guys too (in fact they ended Oblivion's ten-win winning streak in battle of the bands in Southeast Michigan, no small feat, I tell you), and some guys who later went on to make this. While all of these bands and artists are very talented, I rarely went to see any of them unless my band was on the bill with them.

Only one "local" band ever had the distinction of making Tres Crow a huge freaking fan of theres. That band was Bear vs. Shark from Ypsilanti, MI. I was introduced to these guys when Ben and I were freezing our asses off trying to tape flyers for an Oblivion show to cold streetlights, and we kept seeing BVS flyers everywhere. We covered most of them up because it was a dog eat crow world in the U of Michigan music scene circa 2001and clean streetlamp real estate was hard to come by. Anyway, we were in the midst of covering up one of these BVS flyers when someone walked by and told us we sucked balls and that Bear vs. Shark was better than our shitty band. This person actually said that to us. We looked at each other, then shrugged and kept flyering, but from then on I started to pay attention to BVS because I hated them because they had at least one fan more than we (Oblivion) had. I was jealous back then, a lot.

Eventually the time came for me to see the vaunted Bear vs Shark in a dive bar in Detroit opening up for some band whose name I don't remember now. There was no more than twenty people in the bar, and there was no stage lighting...in fact there was no stage at all. It was the least flattering environment I've ever seen a band play in. They slaughtered me. I left the bar in a heaping pile of schoolgirl giddiness. It was embarrassing.

Bear vs. Shark released only two albums, both on Equal Vision records. Their first, Right Now You're in the Best of Hands... was brutal and loud and brash, but also included this gorgeous little gem:

Their second album Terrorhawk could have been something monumental. It delivered on every promise they made on Now You're in the Best of Hands... and also bandaged over every scar left on every bleeding post-punk heart after At The Drive-In sploded into a million little slimey prog rock wormlets all over the indie rock scene. This is a record that never ceases to amaze me with its blistering aggro-garage sound and its glittering diamond choruses, its use of horns and guitars and basses and all sorts of cool percussive tricks, and that organ. God, that organ. Goddamn, that organ! This is one of the best records of the 2000's and I was there, man. I was there when it was all getting made and the new songs were being tried out on the audiences in small clubs packed to the gills with sweaty punks and indie kids and stoners.

I saw BVS four times in six months and they were some of the best shows I ever went to. They were dynamic and crazy and so much fun. They had a whole lot of this:

And then there was some of this too. It was so beautiful.
But then there was also this: the band decided on its name at the exact moment Chris Bachelder was writing his brilliant debut novel Bear v Shark. Neither one was aware of the other, and yet both BVS's music and Bachelder's book explore the same disillusionment, the same numb TV culture. Given this bizarre synchronicity, and that both of these cultural creations had such an enormous impact on me and yet so little impact on the wider cultural landscape, it makes me wonder if it's my tastes that are so out of step, or if it's the world's. As they say, if everyone around you is crazy, then it must be you.

Bear vs Shark broke up in 2005, citing unhappiness with road conditions and a general malaise about the direction the band was heading in. It was a banal ending to something that was magical while it was happening. This band was brilliant in a way I haven't seen close up before or since. Not a year goes by when I don't put those records back on and listen to the sound of a revolution that just never quite took.

Dragonfly

2011-05-27T12:00:00.001-04:00

Like all albums, no matter how good, there are usually songs that are there primarily to fill space. Of course the author doesn't tell the song that at the time. It's kind of like a girl or a boy that you don't date for very long. You say nice things and smile and make out and stuff but deep down you know things ain't gonna work out. Some songs are like that.

"Dragonfly" is like that. I swear I meant it when I said I loved this song as Oblivion sweated away in the basement of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house, building each verse and chorus just the way we liked it, and building up so much animosity among the frat bros that we would practically be forced at gunpoint out the back door three months later*. I swear I wasn't lying as we added the awesome guitar breakdown toward the end. I swear I wasn't faking it when I belted that big "yeah" before the last chorus.

Still, more than five years on, I don't really like this song all that much. The lyrics, which meant so much to me at the time, now seem kind of stupid. If I recall properly, they are about staying up late into the night tossing and turning and thinking whether or not you should break up with someone, or something like that. Considering the heavier lyrical fare on TGITM, "Dragonfly" seems like a creampuff.

The twin guitar soloing toward the end is the best part. It's some of the best guitar work Ben and Jay ever laid down on record. I listen to this song still mostly for those forty seconds, when I can close my eyes and lay back and listen to Jason and Ben sing to each other, and remember what it felt like to be 22 and be absolutely certain that I was a part of the greatest thing ever.

*Which turned out to not be all that bad of thing. Not only did the whole having a common enemy thing really build some great comraderie amongst the band dudes, it also sent us reeling into the 308 Days, a swoon we wouldn't ever really recover from...in a good way.

Dragonfly
Word by Tres Crow
Music by Oblivion

The sheets feel like a death robe
Gracing me with its presence
The hard lines of my bed
Frame this portrait of anxiety

All my thoughts empty
Into my throat damming
The very breath it would take to keep the peace
The fluid quality
Of these emotions is so much
Like the flood of my own dreams

I am so fearful
That when the dam breaks I will be washed away
This feeling is so hauntingly familiar

And the pressure is
Building a navy
Too great to overcome
Rolling and thundering

And the pressure is
Building a navy
Too great to overcome
Rolling and breaking me down

But when the water’s raging
Rushed down to fill my lungs
All those fears and doubts that plagued me
Released their hold on me

Lyrics reprinted by permission of Shire Reckoning Publishing House

Why We All Felt Like It Mattered So Much

2011-05-11T17:00:00.006-04:00

I know that the timing of this post is a bit awkward given the light-speed of the news cycle, but something about the killing of Osama bin Laden and the subsequent national outpouring of hysterical excitement has really not sat well with me. On the surface (and for much of the passing week) I've assumed this is because I have never had a comfy relationship with violence of any sort. Perhaps it is a hair-trigger empathy gag reflex or something, but I have never been able to glory in death or violence perpetrated on anyone, whether they had it coming or not. This is why I don't watch torture-porn, or overly violent movies. I am literally unable to not place myself in the victim's shoes. Surely this reflex has a great deal with why I felt sick to my stomach watching people celebrating in the streets and waving American flags after finding out that yet another human being had been killed in this ridiculous decades-long blood-letting.

But in the last day or so I've begun to suspect that maybe there was something else going on, in both my reaction to the death and celebration, and also the celebration itself. For those born after 1970 it would seem that there has been very little for the US to celebrate. We've witnessed a great deal of amazing things, earth-shattering things, but very few of them have been celebratory. We've seen the embarrassing defeat of our military in Vietnam, the endless parade of failed nation-building exercises, the destruction of the banking industry...twice, a space shuttle explode, a president (nearly) brought down by a blowjob, the bursting of the only employment bubble of our lifetimes, two hazy wars, 9/11, decreased job prospects, lower wages, race riots, the explosion of wealth inequality to levels never seen in the history of this country, and the destruction of trust at all levels of the social contract. Yes, we've seen a whole lot of really big, fascinating shit, but nothing to get all happy feet about.

On the flip side, we are a generation(s) of images. Damn if we haven't seen that V-day kiss, with confetti falling from the sky as if God himself were pissing streamers in celebration of America's blessed goodness, a million times, a billion times. We've seen countless video streams of people in other countries dancing in the streets at the election of some godsend of a politician, we've seen the smashing of the Berlin wall by exuberant, hysterical teenagers. We've seen all these things and these images have been passed on like some sort of birthright, something we should be proud of and contented with, a legacy, the American way. And yet in our lifetimes every single moment of national unity has centered not around celebration, but tragedy, senselessness, a creeping certainty that we are living on the tail end of something that used to be cool, that used to be something special. We are like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, hiding in our magnificent castle and praying the angry hordes will just stay outside for a few more minutes, a few more minutes, wondering why this is our lot to bear. We were only doing what our fathers did, and their fathers before them.

I see it in my thirty-something friends who should've already bought houses and gotten married and should be working on at least their first kid if not their second. I see it in the increasing restlessnes of the static shrillness of YouTube and Facebook, a rising wail of morbidity that feeds on itself, a biomagnification of sorts that distills the negativity of the national mood to a higher and higher proof until we've created the emotional equivalent of Everclear. I see it in the waiting and waiting for something to happen, for some corner to be turned so that we can all get on with our lives.

But we begin to fear that maybe nothing will change, that it is our destiny to preside over the slow decay, to ride the black wave until all those images of confetti and celebration feel no more real than dageurrotypes of nameless babies from 150 years ago. And that fear coils us tighter and tighter until one day a famed terrorist is killed in a far-away country and we spring on the occasion as our ticker-tape parade, our V-Day, our Berlin Wall, because we've waited so long and we've been so patient, and damnit we deserve something to celebrate, don't we? Don't we? This is why we acted like it mattered so much, because we truly wanted it to. We truly wanted something to just end for once, to be black and white, to be easily understood and agreed upon.

Nevermind that a quarter of us don't believe bin Laden is dead, or believe that he wasn't killed on May 1, 2011 but died years ago from renal failure. Nevermind that bin Laden wasn't even an effective terrorist leader anymore and that Al Queda had moved on, had splintered into a thousand shiny knife points, glistening in the Middle Eastern sun. Nevermind the emptiness that crept back in, the blackness at the heart of it all that peered right back at us ten minutes after the cameras shut off and the reporters walked away, and the cries had finished echoing off the walls and cement, and our flags wilted like unwatered flowers. Nevermind that bin Laden's death is a pale imitation of V-day, a penny candy to a wedding cake, a fragmentary delusion of national pride for a fractal and delusional time.

Maybe that's why I felt so unhappy watching the celebrations, because it didn't make any sense in context. It seemed too hysterical, too excited, a dramatic exclamation of exuberance that when you squinted didn't seem a whole lot different than Palistinians burning effigies of Bush in '03. Either way peeps were happy a dude got swallowed in flame. Seems a funny thing to cheer about to me.

I think it's easy to forget in a time as dismal as this, that the reason that young sailor grabbed that woman and kissed her in the streets of New York was not because the US had won World War II, not because we'd killed all those Germans and Japanese, or because the US had proven its superiority, no, he kissed that girl because the war was over, and because he was alive. And those things are worth celebrating.

Friday Writing Links!

2011-05-06T17:00:00.003-04:00

Tony Perrottet of the New York Times gives a little insight into the long and interesting history of literary marketing (authorial whoring?). I guess I don't feel so bad now.

The Millions, as always, has an excellent article on the difficulty of writing novels in the face of the rising tide of electronic inundation.

Short Round over at Alternative 1985 has some truly interesting/bizarre things to say about a recent study that found people became frightened when a prosthetic third arm was threatened with a knife. I love this man's mind. I must admit this.

China Mieville manages to blow my mind in a single sentence. As a parent of a two year old I see anthropomorphs constantly and yet I've never thought critically about the very real (il)logical boundaries placed on anthropomorphism. China, you the man.

As usual, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows has yet another amazing new word for you writers to use.

aoyaoia
n. a musical flavor found in electric guitar solos that compels you to snarl, squint and bend your spine like a longbow being drawn back to fire a warning shot to your distant ancestors, so they may know that your domestication will not go unavenged.

And, lastly, another awesome article from the NY Times about the powers of social persuasion in determining successful commodities in the cultural marketplace.

Year of the Gosh-Darn Novel, Ya'll

2011-05-05T17:00:00.002-04:00

Not too shabby of a week at all, my friends. I actually completed over 3K words and am nearly half-way complete with Chapter Two of Part Two, in which our heroes actually meet each other and realize they still have no idea why the hell they are where they are. The angels aren't really helpful, because honestly they don't know either. They have stories, but their stories don't match up. So goes life in the bureaucracy.

I've decided that since Part Two is called "The Midway" each chapter will be named after a different circus midway staple. The first chapter is tentatively called "The Fattest Man In The World," though I'm not entirely sold that that is the proper name for that chapter. Maybe "The Carnival Barker" since the chapter is really the entrance to the second Part. Hmm, that might be a good one. That way I can save "TFMITW" for a later chapter that involves a lot more emotionally heavy stuff.

"The Bearded Woman" is definitely reserved for my fav character Katrina. She's a bad ass, emotional wreck. Beard indeed.

I'll update next week with some garden stuff. I need to take some pictures first so you will be able to see how beautiful my little babies are. My green beans have little beanlets growing off them. I'm so proud. I wonder if now's a good time to have "the talk" with them about using protection.

Initiation in the Freak Parade

2011-05-03T17:00:00.001-04:00

I had my first reading of my writing career last night. I was invited by the good people at Loose Change to join them for part of a Wonderroot/Loose Change open mic mash-up, tangentially celebrating Cinco de Mayo, but really just celebrating being alive. It went late into the night. I'm really tired right now.

During my decade as a musician I went to a hell of a lot of open mic nights, and almost all of them were soul-sucking affairs in which everyone swam around the bar eating each other for that highly unlikely chance someone of any importance was there. Perhaps I went to far too many open mics in the insanely competitive city of music, Nashville, but I was entirely unprepared for the bizarro love-fest that Wonderroot threw last night.

Hosted by Cameron ? (I actually never got his last name) in full-on Andy Kaufman mode, the event featured some forty+ poets, songwriters, electronic musicians, rappers, spoken word slam artists, novelists, and one ukulele player named Jesse, all packed into a 10x10 basement with a few folding chairs and cracked-out couches. At some point this guy and his buddies told us all to shout that we "lived for this shit" and we did and it was glorious. At another point a girl named Anna played two heartbreakingly beautiful songs with her back turned to us, stopping at least three times per song to moan "Oh God" into the microphone in horrifed dejection, as if the very act of singing these songs was some form of Draconian torture. It was awesome.

I read about 1/108th of my novel-in-progress at around 12:43am, after spending four hours with all these strangers who now seemed really very familiar to me, when I had to work only six hours later, in my polo shirt and flip flops, having not got the memo about the dress-code and the suspenders and the short skirts and the horn-rimmed glasses. I read as best I could but knew I was rushing the words that I'd spent so much time tearing out of me. I knew I was strangling them with my stage fright and my blurry eyes and my paranoia of reading over-long and boring everyone. But when it was done and I wandered away to take my seat, the applause was just as genuine as it had been for everyone else, and I realized I was among brothers. We all had ugly facial scars and knock knees and it was all good that I had on a damn polo. In a room full of freaks, it's fine to not fit in. It's impossible. To fit in, I mean.

I'm officially a PAID Amateur!

2011-05-02T17:00:00.000-04:00

So, I just received my first official payment for my writerly services the other day. The fine folks over at Psuedopod saw fit to pay me a small fee for my short story "A Murder of Crows," which will be featured sometime this Fall.

I could have saved this money for a rainy day, but I've decided instead to spend it on some Tiny Hardcore Press products, the most electrifying literary events of the year! Seems fitting, I guess, to spend my writing money on reading material. Once I get the books, I'm sure I'll do a little write up on 'em. Get psyched, Fifi, get psyched!

My First Reading

2011-04-29T17:00:00.005-04:00

My good friends over at Loose Change will be hosting an Open Mic/reading to celebrate Cinco de Mayo this Monday, May 2nd, in the great city of Atlanta, GA. Furthermore, they've invited me to read a little somethin somethin for everybody, so if you're in the Atlanta Metro area and feel like hearing me "err" and "umm" my way through a small section of my novel-in-progress, I'd love to see your beautiful faces.

Loose Change is a great new 'zine, and anytime you get a chance to support local literature, it's always a good thing, like petting puppies or not talking about Fight Club.

Here're the dets:

Monday, May 2nd, 2011 @ 9pm
Wonderroot Community Arts Center
982 Memorial Dr. SE
Atlanta, GA 30316

Year of the Novel: ...

2011-04-28T17:00:00.003-04:00

Bah humbug. No time, no inspiration, distractions e'rwhere. There is a light on the horizon that tells me I just might be able to get back on track, though. Maybe. Just maybe. I'll keep looking into that light. Maybe...

New Fiction over at DECM

2011-04-27T17:00:00.003-04:00

Adetokunbo Abiola brings us a harrowing look into African street politics in "Initiation."

You can read his story here.

Completely Beatles!

2011-04-26T10:18:00.002-04:00

The fine gentlemen over at Beatles Complete on Ukulele have again asked me to write a little somethin somethin about a Beatles song. This time they asked me to write about my favorite Beatles song, so this one is extra special. You can read my words here. Thanks to Dave for continuing to trust me with his crazy vision of a world filled with ukulele.

Year of the Novel: In The Trenches

2011-04-20T17:00:00.001-04:00

I finished Chapter One of Part Two in a Panera Bread this week. It would have been better if I hadn't forgotten my headphones, but it felt good to finish the chapter. I feel like I've sorted some of the crap out in my head and can make a smoother road through the rest of this section. Some things emerged in the story that I wasn't expecting. That happens sometimes. Stephen King once said that writing a novel is like archaeology, in that you start with a bone sticking out of the ground and you start to dig and then sometimes it's just a bone, but other times you dig out a fucking Brontosaurus. That's both the horror and the adventure of writing. It's also a secret of the book biz. Writers usually don't know what the hell they're writing until they're writing it. At least I don't.

The last half of Chapter One was a pretty classic moment in Tres Crow writing history. I started writing this whole series of events for a character named Katrina, which I didn't know was going to happen when I sat down to write, and then mid-way through writing it I started getting hives because I thought I was wasting the reader's time and was just stalling because I didn't know where to go next. I sat like this for a week feeling bad about my novel and about my writing ability. But then I thought about what was happening to this character, and where she was going to go later on, and it clicked that what I was writing was actually a pretty perfect book end to what happens to her later, and in fact foreshadows those events. Not to mention it gives the archangel Gabriel a chance to kick some ass. So then I felt awesome about what I was writing and I went to Panera and I wrote like a madman and then I was done with the chapter.

Classic Tres.

The rest of Part Two should go a little bit smoother because the characters are starting to arrive at the training camp for G-d's army and all sorts of funny business will ensue once they are there. It's a strange thing to have expectations; they do something to people. Let's see what expectations do to my characters.

Also, Earth is pretty much gonna go to hell in a hand basket during this section. These should all be fun things to write.

New Fiction over at DECM

2011-04-19T17:00:00.003-04:00

G. David Schwartz graces us with a surreal look at the various ways Genies can be treated in his flash piece, "How To Treat Genies."

You can read it here.

Friday Writing Links!: DFW Edition

2011-04-15T17:00:00.001-04:00

The Millions has a kick-ass review of DFW's new novel The Pale King.

The Guardian UK has a kick-ass interview with DFW's widow about helping shape the latest novel and how she's coped with the loss and subsequent canonization of her husband, lover, and friend.

Michael Pietsch, DFW's longtime editor, writes about the massive task of taking David's unfinished manuscript and assembling it into something that could be published.

The New York Times sort of writes a review-thing about the novel here.

And lastly, if you haven't done it already, buy Infinite Jest and read it while studying this website. It will seriously change your life.

Cold Light

2011-04-13T17:00:00.014-04:00

Part of the reason I was so eager to divest myself of Oblivion in our last year was that I felt divorced from the concept of the band itself. Oblivion was a hard rock band with (what we thought was) intellect and soul, but I no longer listened to heavy music. My personal tastes were doing a 360 and peeling back to those groups that had gotten me into music in the first place: The Beatles, The Beach Boys, Oasis, Weezer, Radiohead. I was also listening to a ton of Sigur Ros. All of these bands put melody and songwriting ahead of brashness and intensity, and most of the songwriting I was doing at the time was just as quiet and introspective.

Not seeing much of an outlet for these new songs within Oblivion's playlist, I decided that I would team up with Ben Began (the producer of Oblivion's second LP) to make a small EP that would showcase the new direction I was heading into. The idea for the EP wouldn't come to fruition until a year later when I took the jumbled ends of this session and re-recorded two of the songs to create what would become the Maine EP. But in the Spring of 2004 it was me and Ben doing the best we could with a drum machine, some studio musicians and myself. "Cold Light" was the only fully-formed track that made it to the final EP, and that is largely to do with its spare arrangement. Not much needed to be added to it. It pretty much ended up on record exactly as I had imagined it. A tiny prayer whispered to the stars.

My friend Dawn Perry played piano on this track and she did a phenomenal job. I accidentally forgot to give her credit on the Maine EP for her efforts and so I will mention it again. Dawn Perry played piano on "Cold Light." She's amazing. She's kind. She's a beautiful performer. Thank you, Dawn.

The concept of the song is simple, really. The first two verses are me speaking to God. The repeated refrain is God's response. That's all there is. I was reading the Bible for the first time when I wrote this. I grew up in an agnostic household where spirituality flowed like water, but dogma did not exist. I always believed in God, I still do, but religion has always been a difficult thing for me to wrap my head around. It always seemed like trying to explain the intricacies of a great novel in one sentence. It can be done, but never well.

I've always been very proud of this song because it was my first real production and I think I did a pretty good job of translating my ideas to tape, especially given my limited budget and limited confidence in myself. I guess as far as prayers go, this one can be put in the 'answered' category.

Cold Light
Words and Music by Tres Crow

Cold light is filtered through the moon to lie here
Boldly you crept across the page to reach me

Alive
Feel the pain subside
And drain our cups of pride
And cry and cry

When you learn to love yourself then you can learn to love me

Lyrics printed by permission Shire Reckoning Publishing House

Gabriel

2011-04-12T17:00:00.002-04:00

Gabriel didn’t sleep, not in any way that could be understood by humans, but he did rest then. It was nothing that could do him any good. It was a catnap stolen by a soldier standing in a trench, the sounds of war exploding all around him, the sound of his own tortured heart echoing within. Gabriel saw faces. He heard voices. He felt G-d burning on his cheeks and the back of his neck. Millions of faces folded on one another until they became one face, the face of the girl, the face of the girl, but which girl? Which one? It didn’t matter. Both girls. One girl. Both girls.

He heard his own voice quietly whisper the prayer,“אלוהים, מברך את הילד הזה שאני שואל אותך לקבל לתוך החן מהמלכותשלך.” Lord, protect this child as she prepares to do your bidding. It was a simple prayer, general and clichéd but it was all he could think to say as he stared down at the girl in her bed, as she clutched at her bed sheets and tried to not cry at the burden they hoisted on her.

She asked only one thing, “Is there no other?”

She’d been fourteen. Too young for this.

Michael responded, “No. It has to be you.” He stood over her with his wings spread wide, majestic and magisterial, as beautiful as a thunderstorm. “It’s an honor,” he said as if honor were all there were in the world.

Gabriel hardly spoke throughout. His face remained stoic but his mind was distant, scanning the horizon for the loss that all this would bring, this latest great plan. He saw the exodus, the scorn, the raising of the boy, and the final catastrophe at the heights of Calvary. He saw further: the girl, now aged, the weight of the years crinkling the skin at the edge of her eyes and yet still the same scared fourteen-year-old child at heart, moaning at the feet of her son as his blood dripped into the dirt. And Gabriel went to her and he ignored Michael’s protests and he struggled against the bonds of the Lord so that he kneeled down next to her. He looked in her eyes and he reached out his hands, took hers in his own, and in that moment he showed her everything that would happen, the birth, the baptism. He showed her the battered corpse of her son hung for the carrion birds, and she tried to pull away but he held onto her hand until the last of it poured into her and the tears streamed down her face. He wanted her to cry all her tears now so she could be strong when the time came. He wanted her to feel all the pain of a lifetime in this one instant so that she could then sleep and when she awoke be free and happy and beautiful the way she’d been intended. He wanted to carry this for her. He wanted to be exploded.

He said: “Lord, protect this child as she prepares to do your bidding.” And then he kissed her forehead and imparted as much of the light of the Lord as he could, then stood. He spread his wings until they covered the whole room, so filled with the fury of millennia of helplessness was he.

He said: “Be brave, Mary. The Lord has not forsaken you, no matter how dark the horizon.” Then he smiled as best he could and turned away from the girl. Michael said his name and put a hand on his shoulder, but Gabriel pushed passed him and stepped to the window sill. He launched himself into the blackness of the night and disappeared. Michael watched him go, then turned to Mary, whispered a prayer and left.

Mergers and Acquisitions

2011-04-11T17:00:00.010-04:00

For a primer on what the above title means, click here.

This was a relatively slow week for cultural consumption and takeover, but here goes.

Mergers
(There's) Always Something There To Remind Me (2004 Digital Remaster) - Most everybody knows the Naked Eyes version of this song, but I recently found out that a chica by the name of Sandie Shaw recorded a version of this way back in 1964, and it's AWESOME! It starts out with this bossa nova groove and then explodes into pure girl-group pop awesomeness by the chorus. I've been listening to this on repeat for about a week now. I'm a nerd. Also, this song has a pretty ridiculously storied past. It was written by Burt Bachrach and Hal Johnson and was demoed by Dionne Warwick. It ended up charting in the Top 100 in the US three separate times over thirty years. Wow. Just wow. Talk about a song having legs.

The Known World - A friend told me this book was awesome, and then followed that up by letting me borrow this awesome book, which was in and of itself awesome. And then I started reading it and, like, the darn thing is totally awesome! I'm only a quarter of the way through, but a story about a black man in antebellum North Carolina who owns slaves himself is too good of a premise to screw up. And to think, this thing is sort of based on true events.

Acquisitions
Mod 60's: The British Invasion - I bought this at Target for $5. It's one of those collections of rare tracks from the 1960's, and by rare I mean they are the crappy songs that no one wants...except for me. This was a super-awesome purchase. It has the afore-mentioned Sandie Shaw version of "(There's) Always Something There To Remind Me," but it also has the only other two Zombies songs you'd want to own outside of Odessey And Oracle. It has some Hollies, some Donovan, some Lulu, and Dusty Springfield. It gives me chills just listing all these names. This was a damn good purchase.

Mystic River - I found this on the street in Brooklyn. It looks like someone crapped on the back third of it, but it was free, and now it's mine. I'm happy.

Friday Writing Links!

2011-04-08T16:59:00.004-04:00

The Millions bring the awesomeness as always. A great article about the 40th anniversary of Fear And Loathing.

I am not unique in calling anyone's attention to this (Thanks Mister Booze and Gerry Canavan), but it is still one of the better DFW articles I've read recently. It's ambitious. Like DFW himself.

China Mieville unleashes a rejected proposal for a new comic hero. You have to read this, especially if you're interested in the woes of the Rust Belt. It starts off sounding cliched, and ends sounding absolutely brilliant because of its cliches. Read it here.

Year of the Novel: Where O Where Have The Days Gone?

2011-04-06T18:49:00.019-04:00

Seriously, where have they gone? I feel like I blinked and suddenly three weeks had passed and I hadn't written a damn sentence. Various things conspired to keep me from my keyboard, among them are child-rearing, lethargy, laziness, working for a living, a trip to NYC, and writer's block. I'll talk only about the last and the second, since they feed into one another.

I can tell you that any number of distractions are easy to get over if you know where you are going in your story and your'e excited about it. However, if you are unsure of the shape of your story and aimless, then it can be equally easy to just not get up early in the morning or watch that extra TV show. That has been my last three weeks. After the glorious triumph of finishing Part One, I sat down at the computer to begin the next section and realized, horribly, I hadn't the foggiest idea where to go next. Well, that's not entirely correct, I have a foggy idea, but fogginess is only ok for future chapters that you haven't gotten to yet, not for chapters that are staring at you from a blank word document. So, I did the only thing any uber-distracted writer with writer's block does, I procrastinated and stopped working on the novel.

Now here's the part where I don't lose heart and turn this into a woe-is-me-I'm-quitting-this-crap post. I have been doing this long enough to know that sometimes, especially after large benchmarks like finishing parts of a book, you need a little space, and pushing through only makes for a lot of revision later on. Creative inspiration is not a well that can merely be pumped and voila! out shoots awesomeness. No, it's something that takes time sometimes. It's good that I've grown slightly more patient in my old age because I was able to realize I needed a little space from the story, and focused on any number of other things I needed to do, until the beginnings of Part Two started to coalesce in my mind.

This week I started up again and made a lot of headway. I've written almost 2700 words with four more days left in the week, and I'm starting to see the shape of Part Two more clearly, which will help significantly in the coming months. I don't doubt that I will be stricken again with the lazies, but with any luck I will be able to get my word count back on track and still have this thing done by the end of the year. Either way, though, I think I'll have a better manuscript because of the time off than I would have if I'd just berzerker'd my way through the writer's block.

Pocket Book Review: 2666

2011-04-04T19:00:00.008-04:00

I'm not really certain how I can do a pocket review of this massive book. At 900 pages, 2666 pretty much kicks its readers' asses the entire way through. It took me about six months to read it, partly because it wasn't all that fun the entire time, and partly because it takes me a long time to read books, which is itself partly to do with my limited reading time and also my slow reading ability.

2666 is really five inter-connected novellas that span the globe from the UK, Spain, Mexico, the US, Germany, the USSR, Italy, and France. Each novella swirls in some way around the fictional city Santa Teresa on the Mexico-US border (and based on Ciudad Juarez), where hundreds of women have been found raped and murdered in the desert, picking up bit characters and detritus and grime as the story blows through these countries, and these people. Despite each novella being inter-connected*, they really have their own unique character and pacing and depth, designed for different purposes, to tell different stories about the character of brotherhood and violence in our modern world.

The book starts with the easy-going "Part About The Critics" which introduces the two main ideas that anchor the remainder of the novel: The whereabouts of the mysterious author Benno von Archimboldi, and the violent character of Santa Teresa. Most of this section is a melodrama about four European Literature critics who bond, fight, and ultimately fall apart over their love of Archimboldi's work. Largely responsible for bringing his work such notoriety and acclaim, the critics forge life-long bonds that are tested when they catch wind of Archimboldi's living in Santa Teresa. They fly to the border city and from there everything they know about the world seems to fall away and become meaningless. What starts as an enjoyable study of academia and the politics of fame grows dark and foreboding once it touches on Mexican soil.

That darker character deepens throughout the next three parts, as Bolano tells the tales of an academic stuck between the world of words and ideas and that of the evil festering in the desert outside Santa Teresa; of a music critic sent to Mexico to write about a boxing match, and winds up closer to the heart of this darkness than he ever intended; and ultimately the tale of the murders themselves.

It is this fourth part, "The Part About The Murders," that tests the reader. Arriving nearly 500 pages into the novel, "The Part About The Murders" is the longest section, an unceasing depiction of violence, frustration, and loneliness, set to the constantly repeating refrain, "...there was evidence of vaginal and anal tearing." It's brutal, brutal stuff and only a sadist would blame someone for losing the heart to slog through the bitterness. But there is a beauty to what Bolano is doing here as well. If 2666 is partly about madness and obsession, the murders are a subtle depiction of both. The madness of the murders themselves are obvious, but this section is also about the madness and obsession of the police officers and politicians who spend day after day in this darkness, risking life and limb to shed even the smallest bulb of light.

It's also an incredible piece of performance art, in that by repeating murder after murder after murder, Bolano forces the reader into the same sort of numb denialism that has taken root in Santa Teresa. It's impossible to care about every victim, to get invested and really feel each murder without quitting the book entirely. Therefore, in order to finish the book, one must see the victims in the abstract, deny their humanity, or else the moral weight of so much bloodshed becomes impossible to bear. That Santa Teresa is merely a stand in for a very real, and very dangerous place just makes it all the more hard to swallow. This section doesn't offer any answers, nor does it place blame, but suggests that violence is so pervasive that only a madman would stand in its way.

The final section is "The Part About Archimboldi" in which Bolano answers all the questions about the mysterious author, while subsequently not answering anything at all. It is to Bolano's great credit as an storyteller that he can tell the reader all of the who/what/why/when's of Archimboldi's life and yet in doing so create so many unanswered questions.

2666 was the second most satisfying read of the last five years for me**. It is beautifully-written and contains all of the characteristics one wants most from a 900-page book: humor, terror, intensity, and moral complexity. It's a deep look at the darkest parts of human nature, and a shining light blinkering in the abyss.

*For instance, other than the Santa Teresa connection, I noticed that each successive novella takes a side character from the previous novella and blows them up into the main character in the next novella, e.g. Amalfitano shows up at the end of "The Part About The Critics" and becomes the main character in "The Part About Amalfitano".
**Two guesses as to what was the most satisfying read.

Talkin New York City Lyrics

2011-03-25T12:00:00.006-04:00

"Half of the time we're gone
but we don't know where,
and we don't know where.

Tom, get your plane right on time
I know you've been eager to fly now.
Hey let your honesty shine, shine, shine.
Da-n-da-n-da-n-da-n-da
The only living boy in New York.
The only living boy in New York.

Here I am..."

-Paul Simon, "The Only Living Boy in New York" from Bridge Over Troubled Waters

"Ahh Brooklyn, Brooklyn take me in.
Are you aware the shape I’m in?
My hands they shake, my head it spins.
Ahh Brooklyn, Brooklyn take me in."

-The Avett Brothers, "I And Love And You" from I And Love And You

"Ramblin’ outa the wild West
Leavin’ the towns I love the best
Thought I’d seen some ups and downs
’Til I come into New York town
People goin’ down to the ground
Buildings goin’ up to the sky

Wintertime in New York town
The wind blowin’ snow around
Walk around with nowhere to go
Somebody could freeze right to the bone
I froze right to the bone
New York Times said it was the coldest winter in seventeen years
I didn’t feel so cold then"

-Bob Dylan, "Talkin New York" from Bob Dylan

"The world won't wait, so I better shake
that thing right out there through the door.
Hell, I still love you, New York."

-Ryan Adams, "New York, New York" from Gold

"These vagabond shoes,
they're longing to stray
right through the heart of it.
New York, New York."

-Ole'Blue Eyes, "New York, New York"

See y'all Monday. I'm off for the Big City.

Mergers and Aquisitions

2011-03-24T12:00:00.000-04:00

In these heady economic times, there are a great many changes occurring. No neighborhood is immune from the devastation. Mine is no different. Most of my neighborhood was built in the mid-1960's as a bedroom community for those who wanted to escape the hub bub and bustle of Atlanta. If most of those first time homebuyers were in their twenties, and the 1960's were almost fifty years ago, you can imagine what is happening to those first time homebuyers. They're dying. In droves. This is bad for them, but really good for me, because it means that basically every weekend there is a really kick ass estate sale. Estate sales usually mean a whole lot of interesting antiquey furniture, bad shoes and clothes, and books galore.

Judging from the books at the latest estate sales I've gone to I can make a few guesses about what this neighborhood must have been like in the 60's. Either it was the type of neighborhood where the parents got together and had key parties and got wasted on martinis and foreign beers and spent most of their adult lives having interesting convos about politics and race relations and stuff. It was like that, or it was the most boring place on Earth and their kids spent their teenage years reading awesome books to escape the boredom of their lives, and eventually left home never to return, leaving behind their awesome book cache.

I don't care which it was, just that I keep finding amazing deals on paperbacks at these things.

So, all of this is to basically segue into a new post series I'll do occasionally when I feel like it: Mergers and Aquisitions. By merger, I mean things that are knocking me out for whatever reason. I'm waaaaaay behind the times so it'll prolly be stuff that y'all thought was cool like back in tenth grade, and I'm just now getting around to. Aquisitions is all the stuff I pick up at these estate sales.

Mergers for the week of 3/13/2011:
Odessey and Oracle by The Zombies - Misopogon disagrees with me, but this is one of the coolest records to be released by any British Invasion band of the 60's. Other bands may have been better, but only a select few managed to get this many catchy, meticulously-crafted pop songs on one record. And to think, these guys broke up right after the record was released, never to reform, despite the record housing their biggest hit ever, "Time of the Season".

Fox on Tuesday nights and NBC on Thursdays - Between Glee, Raising Hope, and Traffic Light Fox pretty much has my undivided attention on Tuesdays (except for the incredible NBC vehicle Parenthood, which blessedly keeps me from having to watch Real Housewives of Douchebag County in real time). Thursdays belong to the greatest night of comedy ever. I truly believe the hyperbole to be necessary here. Community, Perfect Couples, The Office, Parks and Recreation, and 30 Rock (The only misstep is the clever-or-incredibly-racist Outsourced) makes for two and half hours of the best comedy television ever assembled. I literally groan out loud whenever there's a week of re-runs.

The last part of 2666 - After the waking nightmare of "The Part About The Crimes," "The Part About Archimboldi" is a blessed relief, and is strangely touching and pleasant despite the fact that it basically follows a kid in the Nazi army.

Aquisitions:
On Saturday I picked up all these books for $5. You read that right, $5.
Deliverance by James Dickey
Little Big Man by Thomas Berger
Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin
Them (Modern Library) by Joyce Carol Oates
Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Atlas Shrugged by Rand Paul...oops, sorry, Ayn Rand
Light in August (The Corrected Text) by William Faulkner
Harry and the Terrible Whatzit by Dick Gackenbach (which looks like it'll terrorize my son's dreams the way Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series did mine. I can't wait.)

The New "The" Bands

2011-03-23T13:03:00.000-04:00

What the hell is up with bands named "Blank the Blank"? I mean, right now the radio is populated by bands like Young The Giant, Portugal The Man, Cage The Elephant, Foster The People. Was there some indie-rock conference where these sorts of things are decided, or is it further evidence of the pervasive hive-mind of American culture? Not only are these stupid names*, but any novelty that might have been derived from them has been completely obliterated by there being a billion other bands with the same darn naming structure. Instead of being the one crazy bunch of guys at the party wearing panda suits, there's, like, half the party in panda suits and everyone's just standing around shuffling their feet and mumbling about it sounding better when they were stoned, or something like that.

For what it's worth, Cage The Elephant is the best name of the bunch because it's evocative and can possibly spark some conversation about what the "elephant" is and why it should be caged. Foster The People is a stupid name because the band doesn't sound even remotely as revolutionary as the name would suggest. They're basically warmed over Peter, Bjorn, And John. But Young The Giant's song "My Body" has been playing on constant rotation in my head for about two weeks, and Portugal The Man has a song that's preety alright too.

*Mainly because they're awkward to say, and hard to remember, which are two of the cardinal sins of band naming. Yes, I am aware that Oblivion is a stupid name. We knew it at the time, but were loathe to change something we'd spent years building into a mini-brand.

Pocket Review: Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream

2011-03-23T12:00:00.001-04:00

In the mid-1990's three respected architects (Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck of DPZ Architectural Firm) who had been influential in building the Congress of New Urbanism, decided to write down all the aspects of suburban sprawl which made it such a wasteful and psychologically damaging way to build, and contrast that with the ways in which traditional neighborhood structures correct for these mistakes. Those writings would eventually become the book Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, a comprehensive guide to the evils of sprawl and the common beauty of traditional neighborhoods.

Originally published in 2000 to a skeptical architectural community, Suburban Nation has taken a long and winding journey from outsider manifesto to growing acceptance to canonization in the latter part of the last decade. Now, ten years after its first print, the book has been reproduced in a nice 10th Anniversary edition with new forewards by the authors. Largely written by Speck, from the ideas and principals pioneered by Duany and Plater-Zyberk, the prose is easy and concise and filled to the brim with snarky honesty. Speck takes full aim at the main purveyors of sprawl and pulls no punches in explaining how ugly and dysfunctional modern American design is. No one is immune from his pen, architects, designers, zoning boards, politicians, everyday consumers, and developers all get their moment under the heat lamp.

But this is no dry, political manifesto, this is a field guide for a revolution, with pictures, diagrams, and plenty of suggestions for what each an every one of us can do to affect change in our neighborhoods, and cities, and regions. What I liked so much about this book was exactly that, that it didn't simply bemoan the ways that sprawl is ugly and dysfunctional and terrifying, but devoted nearly two thirds of its pages to ways in which traditional design can be fashionable, forward-thinking, beautiful, and profitable.

This is necessary reading for anyone whose spent an hour in traffic, gazing out over the sea of cars and wondering how the hell we got here as a nation. This book is for anyone whose ever wished they could just walk to the supermarket, or walk their child to the playground, or grab a beer with friends without worrying about car accidents and DUI's and blood on the highway. This is the future, if we choose to grab it and make it our own.

Publication is Mine!

2011-03-22T12:00:00.002-04:00

So, Patrick and Amber and all the other beautiful people over at Emprise Review saw fit to publish my zombie-but-not-really story "Stillborn" in their totally rad magazine. Not only that (which would have been enough), but they also featured the darn thing on the front page of their newly-renovated website. I'm tickled. I really am.

You can read the story here*. And make sure to peruse the rest of the magazine. It's really awesome.

*FYI, the story has some swear words in it and has zombies and stuff, but otherwise it's a touching look at the inner workings of a marriage. I promise.

Spring has Sprung!

2011-03-21T12:00:00.004-04:00

I have lots of little sproutlets growing in my greenhouse now and I'm so excited. About half the broccoli plants have poked their little green heads out of the soil, but almost all of the iceberg lettuce plants are peepin. The green beans are keeping it coy, but I planted them about 1 1/2" inches deep so I imagine it'll take longer for them to find their way to the surface.

Anyway, the next week is gonna be mostly focused on clearing out the backyard of all that god-forsaken ivy and getting things set up for the garden and my son's playground. It's gonna be an exciting week, folks.

After

Here's some pics:

Before

After

My Preciouses

Friday Writing Links!

2011-03-18T12:00:00.014-04:00

The Times has a neato essay about Michel de Montaigne as the first blogger. I've never read Montaigne, but I've heard many times I should. Maybe I will now.

This story comes via Alan Stewart Carl, who suggested it as a must-read. I agree. The Collagist pretty consistently publishes great work like this, so if you aren't checking it out every month, you're missing out.

Not really writing news, but awesome nonetheless. The Military ranks of the British Invasion (via Gerry Canavan).

Obligatory DFW Link: The First Sentence of DFW's posthumous novel, The Pale King, set for release next month. New DFW!!!! AHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!

The Fever Dreams of the Postmodern Mind

2011-03-17T16:57:00.000-04:00

I found this post from The Retroist (and accompanying video) to be very interesting not only for the subject matter but also for what it says about our TV-saturated culture. It's terrifying to me that whole groups of people can have the same half-submerged memory of trauma that never existed except as a television fantasy. Everyday we are inundated with millions of images of sex and violence and bizarre juxtapositions that tantalize and demonize and horrify, and then when we wake up the whole churning mess starts again, leaving us wondering if what happened the day before really happened at all or if we dreamed the nightmare up. The turning over of images and ideas in the cultural landscape is like a compost heap, old images break down and disappear and become part of the morass of memories and nightmares, even as new images are tossed on the pile and shuffled in.

I wonder how many things I remember that never happened. I wonder how many nightmares of Hollywood writers became my nightmares. And I wonder how many of them are now yours, like a copy of a copy of a copy of a picture of the chupacabra. I wonder what all this amounts to, or if, like the roar of a stadium full of cheering fanatics, the endless stream of garbage is good only for cheering the players on the field as they punt the ball over and over and over again.

New Fiction over at Dog Eat Crow Magazine

2011-03-15T12:15:00.002-04:00

I just posted a new flash piece by the enigma that is Ron Koppelberger. This is the third piece I've published by him and I still don't understand a word he writes. But it's gorgeous stuff, and as long as he keeps sending me these beautiful amuse bouches of craziness I'll keep publishing 'em.

Enjoy it here.

Part One is Done!

2011-03-14T12:00:00.002-04:00

So, after all my rambling about how difficult it would be to finish the last chapter of Part One because of all the info I had to stuff into the chapter without things getting overwrought and lame, I managed to sit down in one night and rattle the whole thing off. I'm satisfied with it. With first drafts all I'm hoping for is to get the ideas down on paper. I can fiddle with execution later on. Part One is now done and Part Two can begin.

Now that it's done, I need to adjust my figures a little. Part One ended up clocking in at around 70K words, so that means the final book could be closer to 190K-210K words. That is slightly less intimidating.

The next section is a lot more chaotic. The characters will now start to dance with each other a little. It'll be interesting to see how they like each other.

Friday Writing Links!

2011-03-11T12:00:00.005-05:00

The New York Times has a good little essay about abandoned novels. Being an author who has an abandoned novel sitting on his hard drive shivering in the cold and wondering what it did wrong, I can fully understand the need to address this issue. The reason I abandoned my novel is simple, I'd spent waaaaaay too long on it, and it got shoved aside by a new, shinier novel which suited my 30-year-old self a whole lot better than the one I started when I was 25. Is that fair? Probably not, but in the cutthroat world of the Crow's brain, only the newest, sexiest ideas get through the door.

The New York Times also had a very small blurb about the need for the novella to stay sexy and interesting and not get a lot of attention so it can stay sexy and interesting. There's definitely something about this blurb that smacks of insider complaining, but I still found it interesting. You might too.

Obligatory DFW link: The New York Review has a cool article on the David Foster Wallace industry.

Also, the coolest thing ever! A hand-drawn poster detailing the history of Science Fiction from "Fear" and "Wonder" to modern Space Operas. Just awesome. (via Gerry Canavan)

It's Planting Time

2011-03-09T12:00:00.006-05:00

The time has finally come to put my newly cleaned out greenhouse to good use. I decided to go with six veggies in order to get a good idea of what I'm good at and what I'm not good at. I'm going with broccoli, green beans, peas, iceberg lettuce, carrots, and summer squash. The squash, peas, and carrots have to be planted directly into the ground a week after the chance of ground freeze has passed, so I'll wait until the greenhouse plants are ready to be planted and then plant all six in the garden together. This is probably for the best since it means I only have to focus on three plants while I finish cleaning out the backyard. I'm probably super over-killing here, but I planted about 18 seeds of each veggie (lettuce, beans, and broccoli) assuming I will find a way to kill at least half the plants. Right now my main paranoia is that I will drown the seeds with all the water I poured over them, but everything I read called for a good, solid soaking at the outset, so hopefully my paranoia is unfounded. I think there will probably be a lot of unfounded paranoia throughout this process. I think I'm just beginning to realize what farming means: waiting a long time for less-than-obvious results. If there is a better physical embodiment of patience, I don't know what it is.

As far as the backyard goes, I'm about 40-45% done cleaning out the ivy, which means in about four weeks or so I should be in a position to till it all up and start landscaping. This should be about the time the plants are ready to put in the garden, so the timing should be just about perfect. I found a ton of random clay pots buried under about two inches of soil and ivy. I mean, I literally found about 30 clay pots, most of which were smashed but some of which I'll be able to use in the greenhouse. I also found some slate pieces and some walkway bricks which I'll certainly find a place for.

I also found a grenade a few weeks back. My wife pointed at it half-buried in the soil and asked what it was. I said, jokingly, that it was a grenade and then kicked it and it totally was a grenade. We called the police and they sent out a county cop and a dude from the bomb squad and our neighbors poked their heads out their doors to see what craziness was going down. I explained to them all that I had a grenade in my backyard and there was nothing to worry about, which made them really worried. Then the bomb squad guy looked at the grenade intently and turned it from side to side then said something into his walkie talkie. Then he said it wasn't a live grenade and the neighborhood was safe for human habitation. We breathed a sigh of relief and they left with the grenade. Then I went back to my ivy pulling. It was a crazy time. You shoulda been there.

So the next few weeks will be about pulling up ivy, watering little plantlets, and constantly worrying I've screwed something up. Stay tuned for my neurotic blubbering.

Year of the Novel: Everybody's Working for the Weekend

2011-03-07T12:17:00.000-05:00

This was the first difficult week of the YotN project. I managed to finish only 850 words. Ouch. This was partly due to the fact that I only managed to carve out a few hours to write because of my work schedule and sick children and various other distractions. It's also partly to do with the chapter I'm working on.

This is a keystone chapter, in which a lot of important information needs to be doled out, but it needs to be given in such a manner that I don't give away the whole farm. I need to tread lightly. I need to be coy. I don't do coy very well, so this chapter is taking me a little longer than normal. Also, the whole thing is told from the perspective of an angel, and I'm still having a little trouble resolving their relationship to Earth and God and all that. I can feel what it's like to be an angel when I close my eyes, but for some reason I'm having a tough time putting it into words satisfactorily right now.

In a version of this post I just removed about three seconds ago I told ya'll all about the cosmological workings of this novel, but then I re-read the post and got extraordinarily paranoid about saying so much when I have at least a year left before submitting this work to agents and publishers. Not that I don't trust you, but when you spend this much time on something you get a little paranoid about anything spoiling it. And the internet is just so vast.

So, let's just say that writing all this down really helped clear my mind and that I think it'll help with the writing of this chapter. Thanks for listening, even if you didn't really get a chance to...you know...actually listen.

Friday Writing Links!

2011-03-04T12:00:00.007-05:00

Here's a Metafilter post about an independent author named Amanda Hocking who has apparently sold over 100K copies of her supernatural love thrillers entirely through on-line channels like Kindle and iTunes. I'll avoid my obvious inclination toward snarky backbiting* and just say bravo to her and keep this in the back of my mind as a possible back-up plan if my attempts at getting properly published fail spectacularly, as they probably will.

Speaking of DFW**, the man has new fiction in The New Yorker. My God, this dude writes better stuff as a dead man than I'll ever put on the page, alive or dead.

The Millions has a very good article about writing from the perspective of the opposite gender. I can seriously relate to this, since there is a female character in my novel that is also a different race from myself. Talk about stepping outside your comfort zone.

The New York Times has a hard-hitting piece of journalism that asks the tough question, "Is reading hurting our spines?"

*Like maybe the irrational exuberance over such an incredible success should be tempered a little by considering the good fortune of Ms. Hocking's chosen genre and delivery channel (i.e. supernatural romance thrillers ala Twilight and the Internet). The obvious next question is: "Would something hardcore literary like Infinite Jest^ have a snowball's chance in Hades of selling 100K copies without massive promotional support from the established publishing mechanism?" Sure, one can sell a bajillion copies of vampire romance novels to Internet-literate Tweens, but what are the ramifications for the wider publishing industry?
^Actually, with it's insane amount of footnotes, Infinite Jest would probably make a crazy good e-book since all the footnotes could be turned into hyperlinks, thus eliminating the need to flip back and forth constantly from the front to the back of the book. Although that would completely destroy the reason for all those footnotes. DFW himself said that he started putting footnotes in his writing so that the reader would have to flip back and forth, thus reminding them that they were reading a book and not a website or a magazine. He wanted the reader to be conscious of the format. Very meta, Dave.
**Of course, if you haven't read the first footnote and footnote to a footnote, you wouldn't know that I have already spoken about DFW. Shame on you for not reading my footnotes. I work hard on these footnotes, and occasionally there's actually some useful information in them. *smiley face smiley face*

Backyard Reclamation Project: Update

2011-03-03T12:00:00.002-05:00

Well, after nearly a month of work, I've finally finished the greenhouse. Just in time for planting season, too. I replaced and cleaned all the panes of glass, tossed out about 20 5-gallon buckets that were gathering spiderwebs, and raked out the pebble floor and spread out a couple more bags of pebbles to make the floor even. I have to admit, the place looks remarkable compared to how it looked before. I broke a few panes of glass and had to create make-shift replacements for them, but those panes are primarily hidden behind hedges so they're hardly noticeable, and, judging by the temperature in the greenhouse this weekend, they aren't effecting the greenhouse's functionality.

Next weekend I'll start planting the veggies, though I haven't officially decided just what I'm going to plant. I'm gonna grow green beans and squash for sure because those are O's and C's fav veggies respectively, but as far as the rest, I'm torn. I think peas would be good, or spinach...maybe tomatoes? I'm open to any suggestions. It would probably be best for me to focus on something that is easy to store and not too hard to grow.

I'm going to start by putting the seeds in these nifty things--

--and let the seeds germinate inside the greenhouse until early April when it should be properly rainy and sunny and the little plants sufficiently strong to withstand any weather disturbances. Therefore I have to finish the backyard in the next six weeks or else I won't have nowhere to put the little guys.

As far as the garden goes, I waffle back and forth between buying a pre-fab garden square, or buying the lumber and building it myself. I mean, it's just a square of wood, how hard could it be? I'll probably do that. It'll probably be cheaper in the long run too.

So, basically, things are going well and are coming according to plan. I'm getting all the infrastructure completed to get my family just a little lower carbon and have an awesome backyard for entertaining and playing alike. If any of you have experience growing stuff, leave your tips in the comments section, or write me directly.

More Beatles Completely Ukulele-d Out, Man

2011-03-01T12:00:00.000-05:00

I had so much fun recording the cover of "Paperback Writer" that I went back and asked David at Beatles Complete on Ukulele if he needed help in the essay department. Turns out he did. This is what I came up with for the song "I'll Cry Instead" from A Hard Day's Night.

Enjoy.

Year of the Novel Update: Y2K edition

2011-02-22T12:00:00.003-05:00

Ole' Crow hit a few technological snags this week as I sat down to make some stories. My wife was set to go out of town for a few days on biznass so I was chuckling mischievously and rubbing my hands salaciously together at the prospect of several nights of boredom-induced writing time. But then,on the first night of writing I found out--to my great dismay--that my laptop cord had a short in it and would no longer keep my 'puter charged. I went through all the stages of loss while I spent twenty good writing minutes (as well as the correlative battery minutes) trying to beg and plead the cord to work. Eventually I gave up and used a few more battery minutes rush ordering a cord from Amazon* so that I would be able to salvage the last day of writing time**.
So, basically, all that's to say that I didn't get nearly as much as I was hoping to get done. But I did finish off the chapter I was working on, which leaves only one more chapter left in Part One. I hope to finish that this week or next.

*As I stated before, here's a shameless plug for Amazon.

**I spent the night without a working computer catching up on my latest bizarre hobby, whittling. I've been working on a walking stick for the last few weeks and got a few more inches of it done, so that was nice.

Friday Writing Links!

2011-02-18T12:00:00.008-05:00

The New York Times published a piece Tuesday that deconstructs the influence of copyright law on the explosion of artistic talent that emerged in the late 16th century. Naturally there's a moral: artists should be relatively certain of receiving the financial benefits of their hardwork, because art life is the cornerstone of great cultures. Read it here.

The Great Gatsby for NES.

And a Russian writer published a retelling of the Lord of the Rings trilogy from the perspective of Mordor around 15 years ago and now it has been translated into English. Umm, yes please. You can download the book, titled The Last Ringbearer, for free here.

Since Shakespeare's works are not exactly subject to copyright law anymore, MIT has put every darn word he ever wrote on the internets. Here.

Year of the Novel: The Update

2011-02-16T12:00:00.002-05:00

Three weeks in and I have been sticking to my belated New Year's resolution. It's the second week of February, so I suppose that is a victory in and of itself. Here are some numbers and esoterica from my last three weeks.

-I have written between 1/20/2011 and 2/11/2011 around 13,400 words, which makes an average of 4466 words per week. At this pace, with 46 more weeks to go in 2011, I should be able to rattle off 205K more words before year's end. That should more than take care of the rough draft of this book.

-This week was my best yet, with me finishing off almost 5K of those 13,400 words, and completing the longest chapter of the book so far.

-I lied in the first YotN post. The book so far is only 56K words, not 80K as I'd written previously. The 80k had come from my estimation about the probable length of Part One of the book, which (as I just said) is currently 56K words with one and a half chapters left to write. Each chapter has been between 7K and 12K words so far, so I projected that out to get the 80K total. That projection still stands, and if taken to the logical end, still makes the book a 240K word monster, though I have a feeling the last third will be shorter than the first two. So, maybe 220K is a more probable word total. Is this too long? Probably. When I send this out to my writer friends and trusted allies in the literary war, and take a second look at the manuscript myself in early 2012, I'll probably find about 30K-40K words that are superfluous, which is usually my style. Write, write, write, overwrite, and then chop like a madman before sending the work out for (hopeful) publication.

-Here is a teaser of what I've written so far and what comes next. A skeleton, let's say. Be forensic scientists, my friends, read the bones and decide what the face looks like.

Prologue: In The Beginning...
Part One: Freaks, Geeks, and Punks
Chapter One: Josh Stone takes His Medicine
Chapter Three: Chuck Gardner Meets An Old Friend
Chapter Three: Katrina Freeman Kisses Her Mother Goodbye
Chapter Four: Chuck Gardner Sees Some Crazy Shit
Chapter Five: Katrina Freeman Also Sees Some Crazy Shit
Chapter Six: Josh Stone Gets His Rest

Intermission One: Marty Stedman Opens The Mail
Intermission Two: Tommy Portula Gets His Punk (currently working on)
Intermission Three: Gabriel's Dream #1

Part Two: The Midway
Chapters One-Six: I Have No F-ing Clue

Intermission: Gabriel's Dream #2

Part Three: The Greatest Show On Earth

Epilogue: Gabriel's Dream #3

Call Me Somehow

2011-02-14T12:00:00.008-05:00

I'm posting this today, on Valentine's Day, because "Call Me Somehow" is probably the simplest, most honest love song I've ever written. It was written for a friend's wedding, and it was written about my wife. It's about as "Valentine's" as they come.

It was also the last recording Noble Three ever did, and as such it exhibits all of the best and worst things about Patrick and my's pairing. On the one hand, I think it's one of the best songs we ever recorded. I laid down a solid enough vocal, and Patrick's subtle, understated instrumentation is perfect for the track and keeps it from sounding twee. On the other hand, we barely recorded this song together. I came in, laid down the guitar and my two vocal tracks, and then I left. And then over the next few weeks Patrick added all the stuff that make the track great, electric guitar, keyboards, piano, backing vocals, the awesome Beach Boys breakdown at the end.

I was a few weeks away from moving to Atlanta from Nashville when we did this recording, so it holds that interesting position, literally the last song I wrote and recorded...probably ever. That's pretty strange for me to wrap my head around, even now, two years later.

It also holds the dubious position of being the only song I was ever commissioned to write. One of my good friends, Tondar the Destroyer, was getting married and he asked me to write something that I could play at his wedding for either he and his wife's first dance, or maybe during the wedding ceremony itself. By the time he asked me to do this there was way too much inertia driving me out of music and into what my life has become now, so the idea of playing live was downright terrifying. I balked and told him I would write and record a song for him which he could then use in whatever way he saw fit.

It took me months to write this song. I hadn't written in months; I hadn't even picked up a guitar in months. I had a relationship with my guitar like an ex-girlfriend you meet on the street who you hadn't thought about in years, and when you see her there are so many memories that come flooding back that you don't hardly have any words for a moment. Only in this case the ex was an inanimate object and it was living with me, in a closet. All the same, though, I had no words.

But then I found out my wife was pregnant with our first child and everything changed, musically, spiritually, emotionally, financially, everything. I found the words. I wrote about myself and my wife and the future and all the things that seemed so important as we took that last deep breath before the clamor and raging storm of parenthood, the last gasp before plunging into the sea.

Some things that come to me now as I listen back to this: 1.) it's funny that I refer to our child as a girl, since I wrote it before we knew we were having a son. I truly thought we were having a daughter. A month later I knew better; 2.) I find it curious that the last song I would write before leaving Nashville would follow the most hallowed of country music cliches, the tri-part life-cycle song in which the main hook of the song is used in three different contexts to signify the different cycles of the narrator's life (i.e. "Don't Take The Girl"). In the case of "Call Me Somehow" the three contexts are: calling to me through the fog of sleep, calling through the fog of parenthood, and calling through the veil of death. Clearly Nashville had an effect on me.

Tondar's instructions for this song were to write something in the 1970's singer-songwriter style (ala Dan Fogelberg, Cat Stevens, et al) and though the final product is far more contemporary than I think he had in mind, there is a simplicity of vision and execution that made it a perfect fit for he and his wife's first dance. They were happy with it, so that makes me happy. The track also gives me pause whenever I listen to it because Patrick's instrumentation is so beautifully constructed. He really is an amazing musical talent, and it was an honor having played with him.

As far as swan songs go, I could have done a lot worse than this.

Enjoy.

Call Me Somehow
Words and Music by Tres Crow
Performed by Noble Three

It's late in the evening you're asleep in my arms
and all I can be is your warmth.
Your eyelashes flutter with the dreams that you dream
I wonder what sleep has in store

And I know that you call me somehow
I know that you call me somehow

I run off to meet you at the edge of my dreams
I can't bear to brave it alone
You're the one who was chosen for me to the last
cause we're not supposed to do this alone

I know that you call me somehow
I know that you call me somehow

It's been all of nine months the days they have past
and each one our little one shows
But we're still right here and we talk of those things
we hope for our girl as she grows.

And I know that you call me somehow
And I know that you call me somehow

I run off to meet you at the edge of our dreams
I don't wanna do this alone
You're the one who was chosen for me to the last
cause we're not supposed to do this alone.

I know that you call me somehow
I know that you call me somehow

And I'll call the kids to the edge of the bed
as you close your eyes

It's late in the evening, I can't fall asleep
cause each night I'm missing your warmth
Still I'm not worried about anything
cause I know what my life has in store.

I know that you call me somehow
I know that you call me somehow

I run off to meet you at the edge of my life
cause I can't bear to brave it alone
You're the one who was chosen for me to the last
cause you're not supposed to it alone

I know that you call me somehow
I know that you call me somehow

Lyrics reprinted by permission Shire Reckoning Publishing House

Friday Writing Links!

2011-02-11T12:00:00.003-05:00

Easily Distracted has a very interesting essay about the change in literary critique that took place in the 1960's here.

No matter how badly your rejection letters have stung, I can practically guarantee they haven't been as mean-spirited as this one. See, and Gertrude Stein's career didn't turn out too bad, did it?

And this one don't got nothin to do with literature per se, other than it's a very well-written and researched essay about the now-outdated Marxist distinction between labor and capital. The author, Michael Denning, argues instead that the true distinction is between those working in the formal and the informal economies. I swear it's not as dry as this synopsis suggests. This is some very interesting stuff. Check it out here. From The New Left.

Yeah, um, like, buy this book. Not only are you supporting ole' xTx, but this is also the first book published by Roxane Gay's new micropress, Tiny Hardcore. Check it.

Oh yeah, and here's 97 things you didn't know about William S. Burroughs.

Emily St. John Mandel writes in The Millions about the horribleness of bad reviews here. I'm going to give her a pass here and not say something snarky about complaining about bad reviews when so many authors would kill to get reviewed at all. She covers her snark bases early in this essay which makes for a nice, engaging read.

A Small Word about your Dog Eat Crow World

2011-02-09T12:00:00.001-05:00

For those of you who have been checking out the site for awhile, you may have noticed a growing predominance of Amazon product links. Please don't judge me, but this is my feeble attempt to monetize this site in the easiest and least intrusive way possible. For those of you who don't use Amazon that's cool, I understand, feel free to not click on the links. For those of you who do use Amazon, though, know that when you click on one of these nifty product links and then ultimately end up buying something, you are helping support an aspiring writer and father and husband and frontiersman and are pretty much being totally awesome.

So basically, if you like me then click on the links and buy stuff from Amazon. If you don't, then don't. I won't hold it against you. Promise.

End of PSA.

Backyard Reclamation Project

2011-02-07T12:00:00.008-05:00

I've been meaning to write about this for awhile, but wanted to attach all the photos I've got before I did. Now that I've finally uploaded the pictures to Picassa, here's the post.

Picture of spiders in my backyard.

So, my backyard is a jungle. It's fairly large, with a gentle inclining slope from the house to the property line, filled with tall, old trees, and covered in English Ivy. Ivy is really great for those who don't want to have to take care of their yards. It is not so good for people with young children who are bizarrely paranoid of their children getting bitten by snakes or spiders.

I also randomly have a greenhouse attached the back of the house that was left over from the previous owners of the house. I would be lying if I said that the greenhouse wasn't one of the reasons I liked the house so much.

Backyard as seen from back of the house.

Anyway, another part of the weird-30-something mood I've been in lately is that I've become very preoccupied with my inability to make anything, or know anything about survival outside of turning on a computer and using a microwave. To combat this growing paranoia about my relative uselessness, survivally-speaking, I've decided to reclaim my backyard and greenhouse for my own, and take it once and for all form the forces of nature.

The jungle.

In order to do this I need to tear up about 25 square yards of ivy and then plant grass seed and/or find a nice landscaping option. I will also need to completely dismantle the greenhouse and clean it and replace the missing panes of glass, and re-lacquer the wood parts that have been exposed to the elements for nearly a decade. Both of these may sound like weekend projects, but to give you an idea of how large my ambitions are, I have filled over 30 yard bags* with ivy over the last several weekends and am only about 1/5 of the way done with the backyard. I spent four hours last Sunday replacing 5 (yes, only 5) panes of glass on the greenhouse. There are 32 panes of glass on this thing.

The greenhouse.

So basically, like, this is a pretty big project, but in the end it will be way worth it, if only for the education of it all.

Here are some tentative plans for the backyard: plant grass so that my son has some good running room back there, plant a small garden to grow veggies that my fam likes, create a cool landscaped path that winds through the trees, have a compost heap in the very back of the property to teach my son about death and other cool things.

Here is my plan with the greenhouse: to grow small edible foods to transfer to the garden once the weather gets good enough. That's why I've focused all my energies on the greenhouse, because in March I can start planting things like squash and green beans so that they will be germinated and ready to transfer to the garden by mid-April.

So, there you go. There's my plans for my Backyard Reclamation Project. Pictures and updates to follow. Hopefully by the end of the year I will have a reclaimed backyard and finished novel to share with y'all.

Wish me luck.

*Which, BTW, filling yard bags have become super easy with the invention, and purchase by me of, this little doo-dad...

...now I got a cheap one from Home Depot, but you get the idea. A funnel. Go fig, right?

Pocket Review: "Apples & Eve" by Neulore

2011-02-02T12:00:00.002-05:00

Nashville-based Neulore's first EP "Apples & Eve" is the sort of opening statement that most bands would kill for. It's expansive, thought-provoking, and honest, a concept album that never strays too far from the concept but which never bludgeons the listener with the message. Ostensibly a love letter from Adam to Eve, the record wanders the paths where intense love can lead: heartbreak, anger, and salvation.

The EP begins with the gorgeous "I Will Come Alone" which blossoms from a piano-based folk rock tune into shimmering waves of prog rock. Adam is alone, and the wonder of the new world he's inherited--and the constant presence of God--fill him with color and beauty and life. He is entertained but lonely.

"Eve" fades in from the last gasps of "I Will Come Alone" and proceeds to dominate the record from the first notes. It is the most maturely produced of the seven tracks, and shows how developed the band truly is. It also introduces the character which will ultimately weigh so heavily in Adam's life, his bride and co-conspirator, Eve.

From then on the record floats on alternating waves of folk and prog, detailing the travails of these star-crossed lovers as they discover love and loss, and learn the true depths of belief and betrayal, until the end when they are expelled from the garden and pass into what will become their destiny.

The final track, "Garden Gates," is beautiful, incorporating all of the loss and hope that must have accompanied this chapter in human history. Here are two people, just beginning to get their feet under them, filled to the brim with a wealth of information they don't even begin to understand, and divorced from the only father they've ever known. It's a heartbreaking image.

"Apples & Eve" is undeniably Biblical in its worldview, yet the story it tells could just as easily be any couple who take on the long journey that is marriage. With every relationship there comes that point of discovery, when you realize exactly what you've gotten yourself into whether for good or bad. Not every man's wife gives him an apple that obliterates their collective lives, but every marriage will encounter a deceased parent or child, or a car accident, or drug-habit, or money problems, and it is what one does with those apples, no matter how tempting or dangerous, that determine the worth of the relationship. Adam chose to stay with Eve. He didn't throw her under the bus. He took responsibility for the part he played in their fall, and in the end they populated a world together

That's what makes the ending of this record so brilliant, that amidst all the heartbreak there is hope too. If the rib was part of God's plan, then so too was the apple, and whatever faithlessness Adam and Eve showed to God, they never forsook each other. And that is something worth celebrating.

New Fiction over at Dog Eat Crow Magazine

2011-02-01T12:15:00.002-05:00

I've posted a new, brilliant, short short fiction over at DEG Magazine. The auhtor is Randy Lowens, and the story is very nice. I think you'll like it.

For those of you too lazy to click the link for DECM on the side bar, you can click here.

Publication is Mine!

2011-01-31T12:00:00.000-05:00

The wonderful folks over at Loose Change have published my short story "The View From The House Of Cards" as part of their second ever issue. The editors of this awesome magazine gave me some wonderful critiques to help make this story the best it could possibly be, which was a first for any pub I've submitted to, so i will be forever grateful to them for that.

Also, Loose Change is based out of Georgia, so that's cool. Go on and support 'em, people.

You can read the story here. It has some strong language and adult themes, for those of you with a faint heart.

Obligatory DFW post

2011-01-27T12:00:00.002-05:00

This one involves David Foster Wallace only tangentially. It's an article from the Times about the co-mingling of fiction and philosophy. Considering Wallace was a Philosophy major, and wrote his first novel The Broom Of The System as a fictional discussion of Wittgenstein's ideas, it seems appropriate that he would be mentioned in this article. The only thing is, they make no mention of Infinite Jest , which is itself a philosophical omnibus (and the better of the two novels by far).

But, regardless, it's a great article. You can read it here.

Year of the Novel: Version Tucker.0

2011-01-26T12:00:00.002-05:00

So, after all my harping about National Novel Writing Month I've decided to do my own NaNoWriMo, only mine is gonna be a National Novel Writing Year. I dunno if this makes me a hypocrite, but the new year, combined with turning 30, has brought up all sorts of pre-mid-life crisises for me, and I am now consumed with a desire to not let any day pass without doing something productive. I gave up on NaNoWriMo primarily because the novel I'm working on is a beast and there was absolutely no way I was going to get the darn thing done in a single month. A year, however, is another thing entirely.

Right now, the book is about 80K words and I estimate that I'm about 35-40% done with it, therefore I have about 160K words left to write. There are approx. 49 weeks left in 2011, so I would have to write about 3300 words per week to finish this novel by the end of the year. I now blessedly work a schedule that allows me more time to write, in the mornings before work, so I estimate I could write on average 4 mornings a week. That makes 850 words every morning that need to come out of my brain and into my word document in order for The Greatest Show On Earth* to be completed in the year of Our Lord 2011.

That is very doable.

So join me people as I start this long and winding journey of finishing my first 700 page novel**. I'll update ya' when I feel like it.

*This is the title of it. Maybe someday I'll explain the meaning. Yes, there was a movie by the same title. I realize this. The titular similarity is intentional. There are a whole lot of circus references in this thing.
**I think that is how many pages 240K words is approx.

The Beauty of Despair, and the Possibility of Renewal

2011-01-25T12:00:00.000-05:00

A great photo essay of the ruins of Detroit from the Guardian UK.

Here.

A Place For Book Lovers

2011-01-24T12:00:00.001-05:00

The Times has a great article about Norwich, England, which is apparently a great getaway place for book lovers.

Here.

Writing as an Act of Faith

2011-01-19T12:05:00.000-05:00

Coolness from Age of Uncertainty.

Two-Spacers: The Scourge of the Literary World

2011-01-18T12:00:00.000-05:00

Here's a funny article from Slate about the unambiguous wrong-ness of using two spaces after a period.

Here.

Letter from the Birmingham Jail

2011-01-17T12:01:00.000-05:00

Here.

Matt Bell is your new God

2011-01-07T12:00:00.000-05:00

Read it. "Ten Scenes From A Movie Called Mercy" from Emprise Review 17. Gosh this dude is good.

Pocket Review: Juliet, Naked

2011-01-06T12:00:00.004-05:00

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

In Juliet, Naked Nick Hornby (About A Boy, High Fidelity) does what he does best: he writes about lonely people who obsess about music to assuage their loneliness. Only this time one of the lonely people is actually a musician instead of just a music nerd. Juliet tells the story of a couple of long-time lovers, Duncan and Annie, living in a decaying seaside town in the North of England, who share a singular obsession with a vanished singer-songwriter named Tucker Crowe. Crowe's final album, Juliet, is considered one of the lost greats of his generation, and his sudden abandonment of his career has made the album all the more mysterious.

Hornby sets all this up in a few early scenes, the lovers' obsession (Duncan's more so than Annie's), the lovers' lack of obsession for one another, etc., and so when Duncan cheats on Annie in a fit of irresponsibility, the reader is left with a book that seems to have jumped the tracks before it ever even got started. Duncan is an unlikeable cad and Annie makes it clear from the opening pages of the break-up that she won't be having him back, but then Annie receives an unlikely email from someone claiming to be Tucker Crowe, a response to a negative review she'd posted on-line of a re-released, acoustic (naked), version of Juliet. It is a testament to Hornby's abilities as a storyteller that this unlikely meet cute doesn't come off as ridiculous, because in less capable hands this story would have ended up back on the bookshelf in about twenty pages.

After the break-up Duncan spins to the peripheral of the story, leaving Annie and Tucker to occupy the novel's center, but it is Tucker who proves to be the most interesting. Hornby knows this and metes out the truth about Tucker's past in very small, measured doses that make the final epiphany all the more cathartic. By the end the reader has seen Tucker from just about every possible angle: from the view of the rabid fans who stalk his ex-girlfriends for clues, from Annie's neediness and early-middle-aged loneliness, from Tucker's own guilt-ridden and ultimately unrealistic take. It's a curious thing, the demons that haunt us, and Juliet, Naked proves to be about just that, the ghosts that seem to cast such long shadows over a man's life.

And that's what makes this such an excellent book, that it takes its time letting you see all the ways in which Tucker is right to feel the way he does about his career, only to reveal, in the end, that the ghost Tucker's spent 20 years obsessing over is really a coat rack with some clever lighting. But isn't that sort of the way it is with everyone?*

*I must admit that Tucker resonated with me in a very personal way because, though he was a successful musician with an album that fans obsessed over and I am decidedly not, his view of his own musician-hood seemed literally to be taken from my own thoughts**. I'm often asked how my music is going, or if I ever play out, and my standard response is that I don't play music anymore. Almost every time the questioner follows up with, "Why not!? You were so good" or "Wow. I can't believe it. If I had your talent I'd play everyday" or some similar comment that is both insulting and flattering at the same time. I usually just look at the ground and shuffle my feet to make clear I don't want to talk about it, but the questioner always seems to want some sort of explanation for my sudden and, I guess, heretical abandonment of my "God-given gift". The truth is, I can't really explain why I don't play anymore. Lack of time is certainly a factor. Bitterness at the amount of time and effort I put into it and the total lack of repayment for that time and effort, is another one. Maybe writing stories has sort of stolen my creativity from my music?

But I think the more mysterious answer is that I don't really know why I don't play anymore. The thing is I didn't choose to be a musician, or write songs like I did. Music chose me. I picked up the guitar and that was it, I was hooked, I was an addict and for over ten years I chased after something ephemeral and indistinct, just out of reach. I channeled something more powerful than myself and I wrote and wrote and wrote, and then suddenly whatever it was was gone. The truth is I never liked playing my guitar, I liked writing songs, and without songs to write I didn't want to play guitar. I guess the answer is that God-given gifts can also be taken away, and who am I to complain, really. It wasn't mine to begin with. Maybe I should just be happy with the ten years I got, and the fact I was able to record so much of it down.

There's a point in Juliet, Naked when Tucker realizes that being a songwriter forces you to view life as an outsider and distill what you see into easily understood nuggets of conventional wisdom, and that, while that's great and all for writing songs, it makes actually living life a miserable mess. Life is to be lived, in the present, and standing around watching your own as if you were an outsider is to actually avoid living the very life you're observing. I can dig that. Maybe systematically posting every song I've ever recorded is a way of making sense of the years I spent believing something that wasn't true, something about my essential self. That way, when all the songs are out there, I can accept that, though I'm never getting those years back, they were still worth something, 40+ recordings worth. I dunno, maybe that's something. Better than just memories, I guess. You can't sell memories on iTunes.

**Oh yeah, and we also have the same last name. Duh.

The Camp David Chord & If:Then

2011-01-03T12:00:00.006-05:00

I was in a curious headspace during the recording of The Garden in the Machine. At once I was the front man, and principal lyric/songwriter* for a proggy hard rock band and very proud of that, and on the other I was listening to less and less hard rock bands and more indie and plain ole' pop music. This complication in personal taste made my contributions to the record borderline schizophrenic, which wouldn't have been a problem if I hadn't also had such an inordinate amount of influence on the band's sound. As I just stated I was writing all the lyrics, I was creating all the vocal melodies, I was the voice, and I wrote a third of the music for the record as well**. Therefore, when I went a little off the beaten hard rock path, so too went the band's sound.

My wavering commitment to hard rock, or at least the effect it had on the final product, is one of the things I'm most proud of with this album. Sure it makes for uneven listening, and to some ears it makes the record too hard to classify (a record that upsets everyone, and satisfies no one), but to me the ambition of shoehorning as many elements as our young minds were capable into a hard rock record still makes me happy.

However, expanding outside of a genre is never going to come without a few missteps, and two of the most glaring are the "electronic" tracks I forced onto GITM, "The Camp David Chord" and "If:Then." As I'd done on Ellipsis, I followed my belief that great records need to set a mood from the outset, and, since I believed GITM to be essentially a political record, I wanted to make sure the audience was aware that they were going on a dark trip through the political landscape of 2003. War, catastrophes, politcal unrest, these were the things going on in that year and I wnated the record to feel like it was taking you to those places.

"The Camp David Chord" is an unsettling bit of noise, which probably does a pretty good job of setting the stage for the darker aspects of GITM. It starts promising enough: it has a clever title***, the snick of a tape recorder being turned on draws the audience in, and then the slow fade in of the mingled screams of all those tortured souls, followed by the pounding of the drums of war. This is the stuff of nightmares, the sounds heard on the other side of the door to Hell, as you wait your turn to join the fracas. But then I ruined it with a stupid quote from the devilishly good film Session Nine. "I live in the weak and the wounded." Ugh. If only I could take that one second away from this track, and I think I might have crafted the perfect beginning to this record. Perfect, but for one callow, arrogant mistake. Oh well.

The cool thing about this track is that it sounds very simple, and yet took a remarkable amount of time and tracks to complete. There are 4+ vocal tracks as we took everyone we could muster into the studio to howl like werewolves to get that screechy, tortured-soul sound. There are two tracks of the war drums, there are two tracks of the marching steps, both taken from a sampler/synthesizer I'd been given by a zealous Oblivion acolyte. There is a deep, thudding bass note to give the war drums sub decimal depth. There are at least two tracks of ambient, unsettling noise to bolster the screams. And to start it all off there is the tape recorder being turned on, which was in fact an actual reel to reel tape player that I found on the street during a spring cleaning trash day, that not only still worked but also came with a box of reel to reel tapes that provided fodder for two other interludes on this record. The first you can hear about two minutes after the end of this track. The other comes near the end of "Sagawa's Son," a ten second clip of the Michigan Marching band playing sometime in the 1960's, flipped backwards and sped up.

The second electronic track on GITM was the misguided "If:Then." Again, the track is cleverly titled (certainly I was a decent, if obtuse, song titler), but the ridiculously obvious cribbing of Radiohead's way more better "Fitter Happier" is really too much for me to bear these days. This is a throw-away track that should have been left on the cutting room floor, even if it does create a pretty darn good bridge between "Ophelia" and "Homeric Epic, Exit No. 3." The plagiarism is unforgivable; a magician never shows his tricks, but I was too young to realize how obvious I was being.

The track features me playing piano, and a few keyboard loops. But the part I was most proud of was the vocal, which was taken from the "poem" printed in the middle of the CD sleeve, and which was made from me writing each of the phrases backwards and then reading them into a 4-track recorder backwards. Once the recording was flipped forwards, it created this bizarre effect, in which I said the phrases correctly, but which also had the fade-in effect typical of things recorded backwards. It probably was kind of clever, but unfortunately it sounds just like the computer voice from "Fitter Happier," even if the effect was created using completely different methods.

So there you have it, folks, two of the blackest musical eyes I have in the closet. Very little of the music I made I'm embarrassed of now, but these two top the list. I hope you can find more to like about them than I do.

*That's not to belittle the massive amount of effort the other guys put into the record. The best songs on the album were the ones that were written by all of us, working together to craft something bigger than any one of us would have been able to do on our own. Even on the songs I wrote, they were just guitar/voice demos until the rest of the guys came in and dressed them up in fancy clothes that made them appear better than they really were.
**Again, I mention this as a fact, not as some dig at the other guys. There were 12 tracks on GITM and 4 of them were written by me. They weren't the best tracks on the record by far; they were mostly filler, proving incontrovertibly that I needed the other four guys to make my music good.
***"The Camp David Chord" of course referencing the Camp David Accord, which President Carter brokered to bring peace between Israel and Egypt. If that accord brought peace, this chord brings war, or at least a cynical unbelief in high-level brokered peace deals. This could be said to be the main thesis of GITM, that the governments of the world could be counted on only for photo ops and treaties and very little else. Oh so cynical for such a little child.

The Camp David Chord

If:Then

Beard Trustworthiness

2010-12-30T12:00:00.001-05:00

I know this has been going around for awhile now, but this is the first time I've had a chance to post this. I'm not sure whether I'm happy or a little disappointed that I have the most trustworthy beard type. I guess parenthood really has taken the edge off. Someday I'm gonna let it go and become the Philosopher, though. Honest.

Beard Trustworthiness Index.

A few notes about the Apocalypse

2010-12-29T12:00:00.004-05:00

So, as I've mentioned before, I'm currently working on a piece of apocalyptic fiction involving angels and demons and the mortal peeps caught in the crossfire of heaven and hell*. And since I've been spending a lot of time thinking (obsessing?) about the end of the world, which happens with me a lot around the ending/beginning of the year, my eye has been drawn to all of the apocalyptic talk about the economy and the social order here in the ole' US. It seems I'm not the only one thinking about the end times** so I figured I would let loose with a bunch of apocalyptic linky-dinks. Think of this as a potpourri for Armageddon, if you will.

1.) I'll start by with the Grand Marshall of the Long Emergency himself, Mr. Jim Kunstler of Geography of Nowhere*** fame. Kunstler has been ranting about the impending oil/structural crisis for over a decade, but only recently has his shouting started to become less hysterical and more prescient. To sum up his theory, the US economy is entirely based on cheap oil (for food production, manufacturing, importation of cheap goods from China, the economy of scale logistics that allow Walmart/Target/et al to bring these cheap goods to market, gasoline for the cars that allow most Americans to get to their jobs 30+ miles away from their houses, which are themselves miles away from commerce/industry/etc.), and when oil is no longer cheap (for a variety of reasons: peak oil, wars or embargoes that force the chief oil manufacturing countries to choke off oil supply, the Chinese and Indian middle classes start to drive cars as much as Americans do) the upside-down triangle of an economy the US has built over the last half century or so will come crashing down on itself in spectacularly horrible fashion. He dubs this the Long Emergency, by which he means the US economy will slowly and painfully contract, with all the attending social and cultural strife you would a imagine such a drastic economic change would bring. He believes that it is possible to reverse this trend by curbing suburban sprawl, building walkable cities, and reviving the decrepit rail system in order to decrease and/or end America's dependence on fossil fuels. Not only would this avoid the catastrophe that awaits us, but it would also create jobs, spur the economy, and as an after-effect make for a less hostile and more beautiful America.

Every Monday Kunstler posts on his blog Clusterf**k Nation and tells the world what he's thinking about our status as a people, country, and economy. This week he's in Paris and his post struck me as being especially interesting. You can read it here.

He also has a monthly feature of his website called Eyesore of the Month where he highlights some of the architectural abominations this country and Europe have inflicted on the world. If you're like me and view the prevailing attitudes about architecture to be almost panic-inducing this feature is hilarious.

2.) Next we have a duo of Bob Dylan lyrics from his first couple of albums. Dylan's wit, especially predominant on his acoustic albums, was always acerbic and bitter, but never more so than on his "Talkin'" series of blues ditties in which he uses essentially the same chord progression in order to "talk" about some subject or another. There's not much melody to speak of, just a guitar and a dude rapping about how he sees the world.

The first lyric I'd like to highlight is from his first, self-titled record. The song is called "Talkin' New York," in which he tells the story of his coming to the City from "out west" and getting a job. It's mostly humorous given what history shows became of him once he came to NYC, but toward the end there is a line that is so razor sharp, and not only has insight into his own generation but ours as well, that it literally made my jaw drop when I heard it this morning.

Talkin' New York
Lyrics and music by Bob Dylan

Ramblin’ outa the wild West
Leavin’ the towns I love the best
Thought I’d seen some ups and downs’
Til I come into New York town

People goin’ down to the ground
Buildings goin’ up to the sky
Wintertime in New York town
The wind blowin’ snow around
Walk around with nowhere to go
Somebody could freeze right to the bone
I froze right to the bone
New York Times said it was the coldest winter in seventeen years
I didn’t feel so cold then

I swung onto my old guitar
Grabbed hold of a subway car
And after a rocking, reeling, rolling ride
I landed up on the downtown side
Greenwich Village
I walked down there and ended up
In one of them coffee-houses on the block
Got on the stage to sing and play
Man there said, “Come back some other day
You sound like a hillbilly
We want folk singers here”

Well, I got a harmonica job, begun to play
Blowin’ my lungs out for a dollar a day
I blowed inside out and upside down
The man there said he loved m’ sound
He was ravin’ about how he loved m’ sound
Dollar a day’s worth

And after weeks and weeks of hangin’ around
I finally got a job in New York town
In a bigger place, bigger money too
Even joined the union and paid m’ dues

Now, a very great man once said
That some people rob you with a fountain pen
It didn’t take too long to find out
Just what he was talkin’ about
A lot of people don’t have much food on their table
But they got a lot of forks ’n’ knives
And they gotta cut somethin’

So one mornin’ when the sun was warm
I rambled out of New York town
Pulled my cap down over my eyes
And headed out for the western skies
So long, New York
Howdy, East Orange

The next lyric that struck me as relevant to the modern climate, was a number from his second album, the oft-covered Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, titled "Talkin' World War Three Blues". While much of the song trades in the paranoia and imagery prevalent in the sixties about nuclear war, Dylan himself is far more concerned with the sights and sounds of a post-modernity world and the found-hilarity in the abrupt obsolescence of an entire way of life. While it starts as a humorous jaunt through the post-nuclear world, it ends as a sharp dissection of exactly what Dylan thinks ails the US, an entire generation that believe they are beautiful little snowflakes.

Talkin' World War III Blues
Words and Music by Bob Dylan

Some time ago a crazy dream came to me
I dreamt I was walkin’ into World War Three
I went to the doctor the very next day
To see what kinda words he could say
He said it was a bad dream
I wouldn’t worry ’bout it none, though
They were my own dreams and they’re only in my head

I said, “Hold it, Doc, a World War passed through my brain”
He said, “Nurse, get your pad, this boy’s insane”
He grabbed my arm, I said, “Ouch!”
As I landed on the psychiatric couch
He said, “Tell me about it”
Well, the whole thing started at 3 o’clock fast
It was all over by quarter past
I was down in the sewer with some little lover
When I peeked out from a manhole cover
Wondering who turned the lights on
Well, I got up and walked around
And up and down the lonesome town
I stood a-wondering which way to go
I lit a cigarette on a parking meter and walked on down the road
It was a normal day

Well, I rung the fallout shelter bell
And I leaned my head and I gave a yell
“Give me a string bean, I’m a hungry man”
A shotgun fired and away I ran
I don’t blame them too much though, I know I look funny

Down at the corner by a hot-dog stand
I seen a man I said, “Howdy friend, I guess there’s just us two”
He screamed a bit and away he flew
Thought I was a Communist

Well, I spied a girl and before she could leave
“Let’s go and play Adam and Eve”
I took her by the hand and my heart it was thumpin’
When she said, “Hey man, you crazy or sumpin’
You see what happened last time they started”

Well, I seen a Cadillac window uptown
And there was nobody aroun’
I got into the driver’s seat
And I drove down 42nd Street
In my Cadillac.
Good car to drive after a war

Well, I remember seein’ some ad
So I turned on my Conelrad
But I didn’t pay my Con Ed bill
So the radio didn’t work so well
Turned on my record player—
It was Rock-a-day Johnny singin’,
“Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa
Our Love’s A-gonna Grow Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah”

I was feelin’ kinda lonesome and blue
I needed somebody to talk to
So I called up the operator of time
Just to hear a voice of some kind
“When you hear the beep it will be three o’clock”
She said that for over an hour
And I hung up

Well, the doctor interrupted me just about then
Sayin’, “Hey I’ve been havin’ the same old dreams
But mine was a little different you see
I dreamt that the only person left after the war was me
I didn’t see you around”

Well, now time passed and now it seems
Everybody’s having them dreams
Everybody sees themselves
Walkin’ around with no one else
Half of the people can be part right all of the time
Some of the people can be all right part of the time
But all of the people can’t be all right all of the time
I think Abraham Lincoln said that
“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours”
I said that

3.) Even the New York Times is getting in the act, with a recent cavalcade of Op/Ed pieces that are very much concerned with the inability of the US Congress to act in the face of overwhelming concerns about climate change, globalism, infrastructure reform, and the growing corporatocracy.

Here Paul Krugman yacks about the end of everything.

Thomas Friedman has some good ideas about cutting in some places and investing in others here. It even comes with a cameo from Atlanta's own Kasim Reed.

Frank Rich worries that the American Dream is dead because we have nothing to believe in. Seems a little simplistic, but plausible as a partial cause.

4.) The latest paranoia: Forget about Peak Oil, people, let's start thinking about Peak Everything.

5.) Then, of course, there's this looming for the first half of 2011.

6.) My good buddy, Mister Booze, has a funny little prediction about the next big arts movement of 2011.

6.) And lastly, if for no other reason than to raise your general feeling of uneasiness about the modern world, I bring you Atlas Obscura, a compendium of the world's most bizarre places. I could spend hours on this site.

So, there you have it, folks, five reasons to enter 2011 with a heavy heart. But, the good news is, there are about 900 novel ideas folded between the lines of all these reports and paranoias. If the world is coming to an end then surely there is a lot to talk about, right? So get cracking on your stories, everyone. I imagine we'll need some entertainment before the year's through****.

*Which, despite the YouTube link, is not actually funny at all. I'm taking this thing dead serious. As of now I've written about 76K words and am about one third of the way done. One of the main characters is a drunk who chose alcohol over his family and now must quite cold turkey (because the angel Gabriel patted his back) just as the apocalypse is starting. Another is an obsessive hermit who writes letters to people bemoaning the current world order. By the end of the book he'll be sending mail bombs instead of letters. Fun stuff, I tell you.
**And I don't even mean this as a religious thing, either. It's quite possible that the "world" could end as far as the US is concerned, and yet the actual world continue turning. This is, of course, a philosophical question: if the US goes into third-world type decline in our lifetimes, isn't that basically the same thing as the world ending? To us Americans, at least? This seems to be the real question everyone's asking. Is the US about to the go the way of Rome and England and Greece, and if so what will that look like?
***One of the most interesting books I've ever read. Still one of the most influential on creating my current world view, for what it's worth.
****Stay tuned for more light-hearted fare starting next week.

Noble Three complete on ukulele

2010-12-28T12:00:00.000-05:00

Noble Three has reunited once more to bring the masses a cover of The Beatles classic mid-sixties jaunt, "Paperback Writer." It was for the coolest project ever, The Beatles Complete on Ukulele, in which David Barrett records a cover version of all 185 Beatles original recordings, all complete with a ukulele track on each of them. Before you think this ridiculous, listen to some of these tracks and be amazed at the ingenius way Mr. Barrett manages to put uke in these songs.

Patrick and I decided to go with a faster song and slow it down to a bluegrassy swing. Mr. Barrett then took our source tracks and made it into a puff of glass. It's beautiful. I hope y'all like it.

You can read Mr. Barrett's hilarious and insightful essay, as well as listen to our cover version, here.