Happy Birthday, Mac!

The Macintosh is 25! To celebrate, watch this:



And remember, without the Macintosh, we wouldn't have the iPhone or the iPod.

The Demon of Poetry Revision

Every now and then, and frequently in my case, a poet comes to the point where he and his poem are standing in the middle of dusty main street, looking squinty-eyed into each other's faces as a tumbleweed blows by in the background. As you can gather, being the perceptive type, that time is very much like thepresent.

I am in a poetry class, and part of that poetry class is the regular requirement to write poetry. Writing it isn't bad; I am all for writing poetry. The drawback is that, once the poem is written, I have to show it to people (and not the people of my choosing) for their feedback. Now, I have a real problem showing things before they're done, and this insight became the reason I sat down today with the germ of a blog entry in my head: before I show a poem to someone, it is mutable, elastic, in a transitory state from present to perfect. I can change whatever. But once I have shown someone, it becomes sedentary, the consistency of old honey, because I have put my name on it. I have presented it by saying, "This is my poem. These are my words." And in that moment, something shifts from "How can I improve this?" to "How can I justify this to myself?" I tell myself that the poem has to be good enough now, regardless of its actual quality, because to admit otherwise is to admit that it wasn't good enough then, when someone else read it and heard its imperfection.

Ideally, I could take a poetry class in two parts. The first semester would be just writing the poems. The second semester, with a summer or so between the two for cooling down, would be about revising those poems. That would give me the time to sit and chew the poems I've written for a few months before anyone else has to see them, so I have a chance to make them as good as they can be. Otherwise, what's the use of receiving advice when I know it's something I myself will change soon?

But then again, perhaps all that time would just make me like every word, every comma all the more, and I would be all the more resistant to change when the time comes.

Maybe I should just move to a cabin with a sheepdog named Roger and keep all my poems in a big iron-bound chest, only to be found years after my death.

If you have a cabin and/or a sheepdog that looks like a Roger, look me up.

Another Ennui-Laced Blog of Ennuiness

I have just spent about the last half-hour doing nothing. "Eff all," if I were to use harsh language. I've done nothing but look at websites that don't amuse me. Of course, I know what I should be doing: I should be finishing my homework for poetry class. Failing that, I should at least call one of my very good acquaintances and say, "What's up. Wanna hang out?" But I haven't even been able to do that. I've eaten just about an entire packet of lebkuchen cookies, but even that rush of sugar hasn't been enough to yank me out of my stupor. I feel as though all of my motivation has fallen off the bottom of the car with a "plunk" when I hit a bump. It's a dangerous time to be blogging, my friends.

Speaking of blogging, I am hereby putting a moratorium on the term "blogosphere." I just don't like it.

And between you and me, artist-formerly-known-as-blogosphere, I'm annoyed that I have to actively read the poetry of a small group student poets randomly assigned to me by my poetry class and try to make fruitful comments on it. Every week. As though I wasn't doing that enough already for the full-class workshops. That's reading and improving six student poems a week. How am I going to find the strength to write my own poems, I ask you, particularly after tromping through six more or less crappy poems and trying to give a damn about each of them? Particularly with the especially soul-sucking addition of knowing that the comments I finally do tear bloodily from my cerebrum will at best be ignored and will at worst cause offense and consternation not normally seen outside natural disasters. Don't tell my teacher I said this. I'm a good boy. I'll behave.

Oh, screw it. Come 'ere, last lebkuchen....

New(er) Blog Post

I typed this up a minute ago, but the internet erased it. As one colleage would term it, it disappeared into "dataspace," the realm electronic information goes when it doesn't go to its destination. That being said, the term already exists as merely the data storage role of the entire linked electronic system, which I think is a much more logical use for the term anyway. Sorry, colleague. You're going to have to coin a different word.

I dug out my old digital camera this Christmas and even recharged it, but I couldn't find any floppies to put in it. Yes, it saves to floppy. Yes, it is that ancient. It is practically a relic. It might count as a historic artifact. At any rate, I still don't have any pictures for you here. Just more words.

The resolution this year is the same it's been since 2002: finish a novel.

It's about damn time I did.

Back in the Cockpit

It seems that no matter how hard I try to be respectable, I just can't escape my Star Wars roots. Like the tentacles of the Sarlacc, it just goes too deep. Ever since my brother came to visit for Christmas, we've been doing all sorts of Star Wars things: playing video games, watching the animated TV show, and even watching the movies. Why is a grown man still playing with lightsabers?

Well, because they're just that cool.

It's worth thinking about, though. I think that we as a culture embrace some things as a guilty pleasure without stopping to consider their true depths. Star Wars is a fairy tale for the present, full of wise wizards, brave knights, even the princess in need of rescue. The same cultural principles that bound society for thousands of years continue to be passed on in this new medium, and we also encounter and experiment with new styles of thinking. That's one of the advantages of science fiction: you can create whole new worlds of thoughts and norms without having anyone label you a rebel (or perhaps they will... if they're Imperial! :)).

From ancient samurai to modern fears of an oppressive government regime, Star Wars is a chronicle of our culture. Best of all, the exploration of a galaxy far, far away helps us better understand who we are and what we could be.

Now, if only I could make things levitate with the power of my mind....

Fine Eyes

"I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow." - if you don't know where this quote is from, you don't get a cookie.

I haven't written about it in my blog before, but I felt it was time to do so. This blog really hasn't been so much about my life as about my thoughts, but over the last few months my thoughts have been very agreeably engaged in the company of the finest young lady I know. We met at the local poetry reading, and we are engaged in the same great enterprise - that is, of course, the infinitely noble pursuit of writing literary criticism nobody cares about, not even the writer. Of course, it's not half that bad most of the time, but this is Christmas vacation, when any thought of academia (or, even worse, teaching composition classes) brings the kind of hideous terror that only mention of Cthulhu usually produces.

But I'm on a tangent. The simple truth is that I'm finding myself becoming increasingly cheesy and even, dare I say it, cliche. There's truth to all those things that used to make me cringe, things like just finding joy in being in her company and feeling like I'm a better person when I'm around her. It's hard to talk about. Love doesn't lend itself easily to writing because it feels like everything wonderful and worthy on the subject has been written.

Let it just be said, then, that as I'm surrounded by my family for Christmas, and she is with hers, I am nonetheless filled with happiness and contentment. I feel like Scrooge waking up on Christmas day.

Merry Christmas!

In Like Him

I dreamed I was in an old-fashioned magical movie theater with huge ceilings and all sorts of carvings, and all the old stars from the black and white era were arriving. They came larger-than-life, fifteen feet tall as a solid hologram. Each name was announced as the star appeared by an invisible voice, and the huge image was a three-dimensional representation of the star from a famous role. Olivia de Havilland, Fred Astaire, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Katherine Hepburn. But I, of course, only wanted to see one person, whose giant Robin Hood made me just about pass out when I finally saw it. But as the stars became human and started to mingle, drinking champagne and laughing, he sat apart. While the others were themselves from their heydey, he was different, an air of palpable sadness and majesty around him.

Errol Flynn was his aged self, a faded relic, but he was sitting in a high-backed chair apart from the rest looking regal and wearing a blue tragedian mask, one half comedy, the other half tragedy. I had tears in my eyes when I saw him. I pulled up his mask just for a moment, and his hair was white and his face lined. I helped him put the mask back on, seeing that he wanted it that way, and he knew better than I that it was meant to be so. And when I spoke to him, he told me that he saw what his life had become, a symbol of an ephemeral ideal and a charicature of himself, the real man destroyed by drugs, alcohol, womanizing, and cigarettes. This was his final performance, as a shadow of himself, the man gone while the actor remained for one last show.

Novel FAIL

As much as I wanted to write a 50,000 word novel this November for National Novel Writing Month, I didn't make it. I could complain about having too much to do (I had my thesis defense and a lot of papers to grade, primarily), but that's not right. I have long been a believer in the fact that you find time to do the things you really want to do, and I just didn't come through.

That being said, over the last three days I dedicated myself to trying to get as close to 50,000 words as I could. I only started with around 16,000 and I told myself that I could do it if I really tried. On the last day, with the seconds counting down, I told myself that if only I reached 30,000, I wouldn't be an utter failure. When I saw the clock in the corner of my screen hit 12:00, I finished the word I was typing and took my hands off the keyboard. Microsoft Word told me I had exactly 30,000 words. Spooky.

That still doesn't disguise the fact that I was 20,000 words short of victory.

Cyberpunk FAIL.

That being said, I did learn an important thing. The key to cyberpunk is that feeling of hot tech. Of course, it's more than that. The two keys (or so I think right now) to making a scene feel cyberpunk are making it feel techy and making it feel crowded.

Oh, and also run down.

The three keys to cyberpunk....


Now, for something completely different:

One of my favorite websites.

There are fewer than 80 characters in the full HTML of the site.

Yakuza front for secret data smuggling, or just a really awesome website? You decide.