bold like revolution

bing.

Page 94...

The book will never have as much eloquence as it did before I started writing it. But that's ok. That's just a part of it becoming a thing in the world.

It's the same as how a dream doesn't exist until we tell it to someone.

Sometimes the logo is the best part. (the emily dickinson "death is airTIGHT" mix)

I love making logos. Slogans. Rhymes. Doo-dads... Wordy Gurdys. Nick-names. Catch-phrases...insults...

Anything short that packs a PUNCH.

I'm tryin to cold bite a fucked up rhyme here. I'd like to emulate a killer polaroid; or a tiny detail in an epic film...


Pix with words are even better. Especially if they have an enigmatic quality to them. Like this one:






Or this one--in fact, if i'd swap this with good ole Aeon if I could figger out how to change my template:






This one's pretty hot too--kinda encapsulates the spirit of my writing:







I've had text only logos...such as:



Somewhere in space this could all be happening right now.



I lifted that from a sample on an UNKLE track. I really get kicks off of sampling a sample.



This is a good pic to go with said logo:







Of course, there's my OG logo, which I created at a Kinkos one rainy afternoon just before I left rehab:









I cut and paste the letters from a letter I'd scanned, written to me by a girl i went to college with. We nearly hooked up on the last nite of skule--a horrible mistake that left us awkward and shy around each other. It was a long letter filled with small talk and descriptions of Portland, Oregon and about how she was spending her summer as an unemployed hipster--drinking PBR and taking artsy pix of cars on cinderblocks on overgrown front yards.



She never mentioned what happened and she never wrote me again.



She never wrote me again. I used aspects of her personality to create Sterling Fassbinder.



Another of my fave blog logos was short and to the point:



The Velvet Undergound of Blogs.



Which is so correct--like the mighty VU, in some total, prolly only a couple of thousand people were or are ferreal readers of this site. But they are the coolest readers out there. The best of the best.


i luv u guys.


belee dat!


xoxo

p.s.
The one Hijacked is referring to, "What you really want is a master." That was said by Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, who is one of my day one heros.

He said it to an audience of French university students during the tumultous days of the late 60s, when all authority figures were being openly questioned. Lacan was telling the long-haired intellectual rebels that were heckling him from various corners of the lecture hall that what they really wanted was a father figure to tell them NO, this is where your desires and needs end and my dominance begins. Lacan felt that each one of us wants this--we want guidelines for what makes up a clear right and wrong. In addition to this we want to be punished when we transgress...we want an end to the over rich, indulgent exquisiteness of our guilt.

We want someone to wash us.

Bath time.

innernet

oh man. we are all going to die. well, that's no surprise but i mean a whole lotta peeps is gonna die real soon...ok so that is no surprise, that's true...right now people are dying en masse. in africa, and china and india...fucking hell.

it all just feels so bad right now, u know what i mean?

the vibration. the loneliness of death.

(out there beyond the wall breaking bottles in the hall)

can u feel me?

As this saga begins it's final lap, i'm beginning to imagine my next character(s).

One of them will be called Pharmakon, aka, The Poisoned Present. She will have the ability to see into the future, but it will be a vision so indeterminate, so devoid of actual information, that it isn't until after the event takes place that the repetitive dream make sense.

For instance, she dreams of a cloud opening up over the Twin Towers and snow softly falling in front of their shimmering frames. It's as though seen from a certain street in Brooklyn near her house...the same street where she and her neighbors would later gather to stare at the smokey shape in the sky on that first and subsequent nights.

Fucking hell, she'd think, lighting a Dunhill Green and flicking her jet black bangs.

This character will be a new face on the old mask of tragedy, asking anew its essential question:

"What good is foresight if u can't see straight?"

My compass is tried and TRUE

I felt a little uneasy on easy street
out of place and incomplete
call it guilt call it what you will

kissed goodbye the summer skies
hollywood and malibu tides
through thick and thin you got a good friend in me

just give me a beer and give me a bed
chase the demons out of my head
play me a song and sing me to sleep
and meet me in the middle of my dreams

well i've seen the sun rise from the cliffs of point reyes
and i've seen it set on thunder bay
but i always keep my compass set on you
when the night comes in and the stars come out
and the highway lines start to wear me out
it'll be ok cause i'm coming back home to you

distant salutation and silly souveniers
can't help your twilight loneliness or brush away your tears
i'll wire you some love today
there's so much more i want to say
i'm western union desperate in a payphone in the rain
and it's so insane... i'm rimbaud and you're verlaine

so hey, california here i come
i've got a backpack and a sunburnt thumb
i hope my compass is tried and true
cause when i need a friend it's still you...

--Mary Lou Lord, "Western Union Desperate"

I like my sugar with coffee and cream.

Risky Business

Of course, there are also the times when you have to say

what the hell.

Those times--and only you can know from the voice inside when it is such a time--when you have to leave. Quit on the spot. Get up and walk away from the table.

go out for the paper, and never come back.


I've had to do that before.

Having character is always a risky business.

To the friend to whom i want to write back but i need to think about my answer...

Here's the thing: I believe in getting seriously educated while yr still young. For those of us without access to high end public schools or expensive private ones, this is something that has to be pursued at home, in addition to whatever shoddy shitslime curriculum that's being slopped out in yr local cinderblock square where the halls are lined with bullies and indifference. If yr lucky enough to discover it, falling in love with the search for wisdom is a life altering experience. At that point you have a decision to make: how do you want to live yr life? What does it mean for you to have a good life? Philosophy is something best learned when yr mind is still open and u potentially have the energy and time to pursue it full time--the way it demands to be pursued. That's what I did. The trick is not to get tied into some ginormous commitment of years and years and/or become encumbered with a huge debt. For that, I say go to a country that still has a socialized education system (i went to belgium for three years) and do it on the cheap. But don’t do it on the easy. There was nothing easy about my education; I made damn sure of that.

Once you agree to go to a university, i think it's a waste to spend your time bucking the system. By willfully entering the world of academia you consent to play by its rules. I don't resent the way I was graded or reprimanded for having inspirations that directly challenged the accepted readings of the canon at which we threw our the strength of our intellects at, like so many lemmings shooting over the cliff...

I always felt hopeless--as though I were banging my head against it, which, I suppose I was. I loved philosophy. I made a two year commitment to it--telling myself I would do little to no creative writing or any other kind of art. I studied, all day, every day. I wrote essays and a thesis on Heidegger. I was pulled aside and privately called a genius by several professors two weeks before a panel of their peers tore my thesis apart and nearly failed me.

I wasn't asked into the doctorate program, but I had never had an intention to go there...one of the reasons i'd chosen the school in the first place was that it offered a terminal masters...

anyways, fuckit...this is just me thinking out loud.

about yr question.

I flip through the TV channels and wonder how it’s possible to have so much money invested in nothing that anyone actually needs. Clothes, furniture, people… I mean, the world doesn’t need another American Idol. Or maybe it does. Maybe another American idol will help take our minds off the boring ugly real life (i.e., normal) teenagers one sees every day with terrible skin and chemically destroyed hair and jowls drooping like a depressed and overweight 45 year old. The boys have breasts and the girls front with their exposed midriff muffin tops like they’re all that. Which maybe they are…I mean, wtf do I know about normal anyway? Someday soon, it’s going to be “normal” to look around and see enormous mammal bodies rolling around on scooters and robotic easy chairs, feeding themselves constantly and living vicariously through reality tv as they sit heavily, encased in aluminum sided exburbs and surrounded by all the usual material trappings, which have become even cheaper to attain so that everyone has the latest phone and plasma screen TVs in every room… from the age of 16 it’s gonna be mandatory botox twice a year injected along the genetic trajectories of would-be wrinkles, eliminating age and emotion in one shot.



I wanna own only 55 things like this guy

“normal”

on the horizon of the network

now my heart is full

The blogness of the blog.

What makes us what we are in the end is the ability to sit for hours and hours on end in front of a monitor screen. In this we have much in common with gamers, porn addicts, tv-aholics,

We might, as individuals, fail in real life but on the innernet we know how to BE FERREAL, which has about as much in common with reality as your fave reality tv show. We become versions of ourselves. I don’t care if you are being as honest as you can on yr posts there is always some made up shit in there. You are always posing in yr self portraits, they become an endless variation on a theme that u post over and over and over.

Why? What is it that is so addicting? What makes you spend hours browsing thru videos on youtube, riding swells of popular links with the rest of the online hordes, and then breaking off to sites unseen…places u stumble upon by following link upon link off of technorati…what makes u spend all yr time writing and chatting and emailing…is this a new era of typing?

It’s like a performance without the stage. I think that’s what I like so much about it. Of course, I took it to the next level, but hey, that’s my stylo. Andy Warhol is one of my predecessors, and he championed the notion of BIGNESS. Why make something eight and a half by eleven when you can make it 12 feet tall? Why paint one soup can when you can paint the entire stacked up display? Why post on your blog as one made-up character when you can post as three?

If I could overcome sleep, I’d post as an entire neighborhood of people…I’d paper my walls with butcher paper and draw out the lines, the interconnections…the high ways and by ways of their communications…as well as the sideways glances, the unintended meanings in jokes that bomb at social functions…the unexpected hard-ons, the fantasies that slip, uninvited, into their heads… I’d have all of that down, in notebooks and on spread sheets and visio flowcharts…taking digi pix of the butcher paper and creating appendices of psychological motivations.

I'd have that shit wrapped up TIGHT.




-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

book blitz
The Novel, 2.0
Will MySpace and e-mail produce great fiction?
By Walter Kirn and Gary Shteyngart
Updated Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2006, at 12:26 PM ET

Click here to read more from Slate's Fall Fiction Week.


--------------------------------------------------

From: Walter Kirn
To: Gary Shteyngart
Subject: The Odyssey in 2006Posted Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2006, at 6:57 PM ET

For this year's Fall Fiction Week, Slate has invited novelists Walter Kirn and Gary Shteyngart to discuss a question that's been on our minds: What is the role of fiction in the age of the Internet? By "Internet" we mean not just the web itself but also the notion of constant connectivity. Today, in this age of the virtual network, the concept of being "out of reach" has begun to seem quaint, and our experience of the world has become more fluid—with, perhaps, less room for solitude and concentration. So, we've asked our critics to address the following questions: Does the new age of connectivity have any ramifications for the novel? Has human experience been altered? Have the conventions of storytelling begun to change—and if not, should they?

Walter Kirn is the author, most recently, of The Unbinding, a serial novel published online in Slate that tried to make use of the inherent properties of the medium. Gary Shteyngart is the author, most recently, of Absurdistan, a comically surreal journey through a post-national world of fluid identities and disorienting cultural collisions. He is currently at work on a novel set in a future where language ceases to matter, except to an elite group of people.

Gary,

In the age of networked everything, life moves sideways and covers lots of ground—covers it while barely touching the earth. The events of the other morning spanned several continents, brought me into contact with dozens of people, touched on themes that ranged from sex to war, and nearly cost me my identity. It was an odyssey through time and space, and it should be the stuff of a novel, but I can't write it yet. I wouldn't know how to set the scenes because they have no scenery. I wouldn't know how to describe the characters because most of them never fully showed themselves (and the features they did reveal were posed and unreliable). Worse, when I go back over the morning's dramas, I realize that most of them occurred offstage, which leads me to question whether I, or anyone, is the protagonist of his own story.

I need to be specific.

A few minutes after I woke up, I sent a text message to a girl I love who lives most of the time in Colorado (I'm in Montana, 600 miles away, and we've romanced each other, I've come to realize, primarily in the ether, over the wires), and while I was awaiting her reply, I read and answered several e-mails (most of them from New York publishing types whom I've never met in person), called up my mother's machine in Minnesota (which informed me she was in Boston), listened on my XM satellite radio to a live report from Baghdad (where I think a friend of mine is fighting but won't know for certain until he gets in touch with me, assuming that he's still alive), refreshed my computer screen, read something that scared me, dialed a toll-free phone number (in India?) to report a PayPal phishing scam (originating in Brazil, I learned), and then drove to a coffee shop in town, where I had to wait to get a muffin while the counter girl chatted on her cell phone. Afterward, I headed to the gym, ran on the treadmill, watched more news from Baghdad, and wondered why my girlfriend still hadn't called me. An hour later, writing this to you (someone I've never passed a living word with but whose last novel I reviewed—positively—in the New York Times), I still have no idea where I stand with her. She's out there somewhere, to be sure (and I'm out here somewhere, too, I have a sense), but there's been no connection for several days. The reason for this may be that when I saw her last she snooped in my Motorola and read a message from a woman in Portland I hardly knew but who, because of the tenor of her text "voice" and the late hour that she wrote me—2 a.m.—came off as an intimate. (Damn.)

My point being this: I'm thrown by this new world, both as a novelist and as a person. These two confusions are one confusion. They come down to the fact that I still think (and can't help but read and write) in linear terms, but I find myself living in infinity loops. Too much happens each day, it happens all at once, and yet, in some ways, nothing happens at all. A day that's spent processing electronic signals like a sort of lonely arctic radar station (my day, your day, a lot of ours) is hard to dramatize.

I read somewhere once that in the 1960s fiction writers were troubled by the notion that life was becoming stranger and more sensational than made-up stories could ever hope to be. Our new problem—more profound, I think—is that life no longer resembles a story. Events intersect but don't progress. People interact but don't make contact. Settings shift but don't necessarily change.

Can written narratives represent this world? Can they convey what it feels like to inhabit it? The movies, of course, have given up trying. The best they can do in order to travel the hidden channels through which fate conducts itself these days is cut back and forth between shots of people on phones or show someone typing on a keyboard and then display what's appearing on the monitor. Novelists, with their access to the invisible, ought to be positioned to do better. How, though? I have a suspicion—that's all it is now—that the answer lies in the form's origins. I'm thinking of epistolary novels such as Richardson's Clarissa. That was the revolutionary mode once, when novels broke out of being mere prose "romances" and started to grapple with subjectivity. It's also when they discovered the modern fact that we communicate in stylized bursts and through specific technologies. That's truer than ever now. E-mails, phone calls, Web sites, videos. They're still all letters, basically, and they've come to outnumber old-fashioned conversations. They are the conversation now.

Of course, one way to cope with Net America is to strip it clean of clutter in the way that Cormac McCarthy has done in his new post-apocalyptic novel, The Road: destroying all antennas, fiber-optic cables, Wi-Fi routers, and LCD screens and denuding the land of everything but dusty paths across the desert trod by laconic barefoot Nietzscheans seeking some phantom last gallon of potable water. The trouble is, this can only be done once.

Best,
Walter


--------------------------------------------------

From: Gary Shteyngart
To: Walter Kirn
Subject: Welcome to the Age of the MySpace NovelPosted Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2006, at 12:26 PM ET

Dear Walter,

I'm praying for you and your special lady. Two of my best friends ended their relationships after discovering incriminating text and e-mail messages. It turned out that one friend's mate was getting it on with his yoga teacher (OMG! as the young people say). Another's life partner was doing it with someone in publishing (natch). What one learns from this is that a great deal of breakups are happening electronically. But then so are a lot of romances, yours included. And a great deal of friendships. And probably the vast majority of orgasms in the lower 48 states.

We are approaching a time when the Internet and ancillary services will assume the totality of human communications in the developed world. Even such time-honored practices as getting a love interest trashed at a bar and then coaxing him or her across the parking lot to a warm Volvo have been replaced by a barrage of keystrokes, misspelled two-sentence entreaties, and, by the end of the night, a parade of bent, swollen thumbs. Our imaginations are not immune, either. I've had vivid dreams that consist solely of the words, "We are sorry there has been a temporary error accessing your Yahoo account," floating in black, lifeless space before me. I shouldn't even use the personal pronoun "me," because in those dreams I am not a corporeal creature. There is nothing Gary-like about me. There is only the Yahoo! commandment, apologetic yet all-powerful, and the strange background feeling that even my dream-life has somehow been wasted.

In this fragmented, distracted, levitating new world, no wonder you and I are unsure of our place as writers of fiction. According to a recent poll, 81 percent of Americans think they have a book in them. (Of course, few of these citizens actually feel compelled to read someone else's novel.) And if you put together the daydreams, misrepresentations, regrets, jeremiads, nostalgic reminisces, and so on that an average educated American now types into her computer's Outlook program during the course of a year, you will most certainly get a 250-page volume. And that volume just might be deemed publishable. So many works of fiction I read these days are composed of bits and pieces, of various forays into this and that, of cleverly crafted narratives that function not as descriptive set pieces but as collectors and accumulators of information and desire, potent combinations of Madame Bovary and Wikipedia.

One of the first novels I read that clued me in to the world to come was Bruce Wagner's brilliant I'm Losing You. The year was 1997 and I did not even have an e-mail account. But the parts of Wagner's novel that most intrigued me were the hilariously shallow e-mail exchanges among a bunch of marauding, oversexed Hollywood types. The rest of the book was likewise a mesmerizing torrent of data on everything from overpriced wristwatches to animal exterminators to painfully comic riffs on psychiatry and syphilis, and everything in between. I remember thinking then: Is this how we live now? A half-decade later, that's exactly how we are living.

Wagner's works remain consistently prescient and thoughtfully written. The questions may well be: Who has the patience and inclination to read these (often lengthy) works, when so many Americans are already involved in their own electronic, Wikipedian journeys? And in a society driven by selfishness and the need to stand out on the false bright stage of reality television or on the pulsating Nintendo or MySpace screen, who has the empathy to travel into another person's mind? Who wants to engage in another's misery without the cloying redemption of a talk-show host's conclusive two-minute "It's all gonna get better, child"? Who wants to learn about some distant society's pain when there's no possibility of moving the cursor onto the dancing penguin in the corner and clicking onto a brighter, newer, safer reality? Perhaps the many enthusiastic readers of the new Cormac McCarthy book you mentioned—The Road—found themselves oddly pleased that our entire world gets swept away in his apocalyptic vision, Yahoo failure messages, double-crossing yoga instructors, syphilitic reality shows, and all.

So where do we go from here? I'm not "Rapture-ready," as the kids in Texas say. I want to live, and I want our art form to continue. If this whole thing doesn't close up in the next 15 years as Phillip Roth and others have predicted, what innovations, adaptations, last-minute stabs at relevancy do you think are in store for the American novelist? You've written an entire novel on the Web, so you're in a different league entirely. If you can't make me feel better about things, no one can. And if you do, I'll buy you a drink. And text you afterward.

GaryRelated in Slate


Click here to read Walter Kirn's online novel, The Unbinding. In 2003, Gary Shteyngart sent a series of dispatches from wintertime Montreal; and, in 1996, Walter Kirn kept a weeklong diary for Slate. Click here to read more from Slate's Fall Book Blitz.

Walter Kirn's most recent novels are The Unbinding, Mission to America and Up in the Air. He lives in Montana and can be reached at walternkirn@gmail.com.

Gary Shteyngart is the author of the novels Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante's Handbook. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Travel & Leisure, Granta, and many other publications.


Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

i like living inside.


drugged sleeping awaits


that's part of who i am--the writer, locked up in my room...

embedded in that ability to spend long hours singularly focussed is the desire to be alone.

(alone but not lonely, with loved ones just down the way)

i reread the post i wrote this year on the anniversary. it was the expression of a simple wish, a desire to shut down and stop after a day of work and running around the city. it was so beautiful out, as it is today, as it was for those string of days after 9/11.

so beautiful but some how too much

The city was its usual magnificent self—a flowing, churning, glistening machine made up of people and shiny metal parts, chrome skyscraper art deco facades and bright bricks in the sunlight and the steam that rises and the rushing water going down millions of drains.

the city is a lover and a friend and a teacher

One is filled with a desire for it all—everything at once. All the sounds and smells and buildings bending upwards with jet planes criss crossing high above them.

The insatiable longing of forever being on the edge of it all—in NYC, as in heaven, the circumference is the center and the center is the circumference.

the flames pour out of open windows in our hearts

GOT BITCHES

clo


Words are the pasteboard placeholders between our gaze and the pendulum swing:

(the sound and the explosion)

(the thought and the notion)

(the boom and the bip)

(yr broken teeth and yr busted lip)

FUCK YEAH.

the words are like tetris blocks. they come at me and i struggle to make them fit together...

I dont own them and neither do u.

That doesn't change the fact that they are worth everything in the world to me.

My real name is "Dancey Pants".

mywerdsRyrwerds&yrwerdsRmywerds

this one goes out to all the peeps out there who cut and paste my words onto their own sites.

this one goes out to the biters and the poseur-dickhead dum-dums, the teeny wheezers and green-faced pukers, the fat kids with leaky guts and trucker butts, the nerdy nose-pickers and masturbators, the porn lovers and human haters, the squares with acne in the shape of big "L"s on their foreheads...

this one goes out to everyone who thinks they'd be better off dead

(who knows u might be right)

to everyone who doesnt know where they're goin or where they've been or what they said

(last nite when u were wasted)

this one goes out to everyone who eats my words and likes how they tasted...

it's cool. take them and use them as yr own.

myspaceyrspace&yrspacemyspace.

i'll be dreaming of u when i go outside for my weekly bagel wearing my rawkstar shades and my black on black yankees cap. it feels like im wearing a helmet, like im a secret member of the voltron team.

i'll be dreaming of u inside my dark, private world where there are no last names and no copyrights

i'll be dreaming of u and the love and the happiness and the immense kindness that humans are capable of.

overwrought (you and me in time)

i love that part on antiques roadshow when the person finds out how much their artefact is worth: any number over zero will make them genuinely estatic, their faces light up like those of children at a fair as the happy accident of their existence crossing paths with the existence of this object is made over and made real thru the validation of expert appraisal and an estimated dollar amount.

you are worth as much as the token you carry.

that's what real life is all about

(or so they tell me).