Authenticity Is No Longer an Option

from being into having, from having into appearing

In The Future there are a lot of shots of Miranda July’s character looking at youtube, etc, on her computer screen and having various emotional responses to them. I don’t think I have any particular emotional responses when I stare at things on the internet. Mostly I just stare at things and feel completely empty. Sometimes I have a growing sense of anxiety at the vastness of it all, the internet. The incongruence between the frame and the content.

International pie day

I did some vulturing of my local Borders as it was going under. Got, among other things, a copy of High Tension for like a buck-fifty. For some reason I thought it was a zombie movie. I remember very distinctly a conversation in which my friend Diana, who saw it when it was in theaters, said that it was a French lesbian zombie movie that involved among other things a scene with an animated severed head.

There were 2 severed heads, but no zombies.

It was a pretty good/gut-wrenching movie though. I cared about the main character more than I think I’ve ever cared about a character in a slasher movie before.

And then the movie kind of screwed all that up with a knock-off Fight Club ending.

I’ve been thinking through what kinds of twist endings add to the pleasure of a movie, and what kinds detract from it. High Tension’s ending, unfortunately, belongs to the second category. I would also add in The Usual Suspects, which I think is ultimately marred by its twist ending (even though I seem to be in the minority on that one). In both cases, the twist in some way removes the drama of previous scenes, instead of enhancing or deepening it.

The twist at the end of Fight Club, on the other hand, makes the rest of the movie into a different, but still compelling movie. One focused quite a bit more on the character Marla (who “reads” completely differently before and after knowledge of the twist ending).

In other news, submissions are now open for this.

I don’t know anything about “Fatpaint.” Is Fatpaint good?

I have been considering writing one short essay a week, because I have realized that I get extremely anxious when writing nonfiction/factual essays. I don’t have a problem writing “creative nonfiction,” because I’m pretty sure that just means writing fiction where the main character has my name.

“Emotional truth,” etc.

I am considering a number of other projects.

I like the idea of starting a journal called “Secret Journal,” which would be a limited edition journal that I would then hide around Chicago. Contributors would get a contributor’s copy and a number of additional copies that they would be asked to hide around their town.

This idea is partially based on Mike Kitchell’s Journal of the Impossible and partially based on Michael Martone’s encouraging students to sneak their self-published work into libraries & bookstores.

I have a collaborative manuscript that I would like to start sending out.

I am starting to put together some short films based on recorded versions of pieces from Artifice 4.*

I am thinking about watching the Saw series and writing poems in which I recorded, as precisely as possible, my reactions throughout. I would write one poem during each movie, and only while the movie was on.

Someone pointed out to me, recently, that I have no real aesthetic justification for disliking torture porn. This is probably correct, but I haven’t really figured out what I think about it yet.

*if you are a film artist/filmmaker/work with moving images in some way & are interested in possibly making a short film for Artifice 4, contact editors AT artificemag DOT com for more information.**

**also you can pre-order Artifice 4 here. It is about apocalypse and letters from the dead and also a superhero named Sky Beard.

I am still waiting for the sun to work its magic on my brain

I spent maybe an hour yesterday at Loyola Beach, looking for beach glass. Beach glass is when someone breaks a bottle or something at the beach and then the waves hit the shards over and over again until they are frosted and smooth and look like jewels.

I didn’t have anything that I wanted to do with the beach glass, I don’t have a collection or anything, I was just doing it.

I think I prefer doing things with no extrinsic meaning.

I spent most of today trying to finish an article I was writing, I had been working on it earlier but it was stressing me out and I kept putting off finishing it. I get anxious about writing nonfiction things, for some reason. It’s like the whole time I’m worried that as soon as I’m done somebody is going to come up to me and say, Well, that’s not correct.

There is a man sitting behind me right now listening to gospel music very loud through some headphones. I think I’m going to try to start writing an essay a week, so that maybe I can get over this weird nonfiction anxiety.

We’ve just finished all content decisions for Artifice 4, like, a second ago. Basically a second ago. On twitter and also on facebook I said stuff about how difficult content decisions were this time around, and then I got really self-conscious that maybe people thought we were just trying to blow smoke up people’s asses. I wish there were a better expression for that: blow smoke up people’s asses. I honestly cannot think of another way of saying that. There has to be, though, right? I mean, there has to be at least like a literal way of saying “blow smoke up [someone’s] ass.”

I just don’t like the way it sounds, is basically my problem with it.

You will be able to pre-order Artifice 4 here, probably by early tomorrow, or basically as soon as I get a new Paypal button made.

Today I biked down to Pilsen for breakfast then biked back to Logan Square to drop off some keys for a friend then biked up to Loyola Beach to sit on the beach and then went to watch a movie (Captain America: The First Avenger). Here is an actual conversation that I had with an elderly person on my ride from Pilsen to Logan, while I was stopped at a stoplight:

Me: Wow, it’s really beautiful out today.

Elderly Person: You want to fuck me?

Me: Nope.

Then I rode away. It was weird.

Everything in Atlanta looks like it was built like 5 minutes ago, it’s kind of overwhelming

So far, ATL radio > Chicago radio. Sorry, Chicago. I heard Tuneyards and MF DOOM within like 10 minutes of each other, on two different stations. Later on, I heard a man talk about the connections between Mammon and Time (which, he noted, is an illusion, duh), while another man listened to him & went, MMM, MMMM.

It is about to rain outside so hard.

This Sunday I’m going to be reading at the first VouchedATL Presents, with Heather Christle and Bruce Covey and Ben Spivey and Amy McDaniel. I was also there for the inaugural Vouched Presents in Indianapolis (it was the second stop on the Artifice Issue 2 Release Tour, after Chicago), which means that I will have been present for all of the inaugural Vouched Presents readings.

I got two things published in two days, which is kind of exciting. One is from my project with Robert Kloss, the other is just like a thing I wrote. It might be metafiction, maybe, anyway it’s kind of about possibly being metafiction and its also kind of about death.

They are about to have a seminar on Karma in the tea shop where I’m writing. Probably I should go ahead and get out of here.

What was once dormant is now a Creeping Thing

After several months of not friend-requesting Ishmael Reed on facebook, I have now friend-requested Ishmael Reed on facebook. I can see from his public page that several of the people I am friends with in real life in addition to on facebook are facebook friends with Ishmael Reed, including Andy Farkas and Jacob Knabb, along with 30 other people that I am facebook friends with and in some cases real-life friends with.

It is still strange to me that writers that I love in book form are actual people that one can interact with, etc.

This is a strange thing to not-yet-be-over, maybe.

The June PANK is out, including work by Christopher Newgent and Mike Meginnis and Jessica Hollander and several poems by Caroline Crew (who I am not facebook friends with), one of which includes the lines “THE VERB WANTS ME LISTEN / AND STOP CHEWING ON YOUR HIP.” It also includes a story from me about bones and names and machines and I guess fucking. It contains among other things this short monologue:

“Charlie calls me names when we have sex. He started out by calling me bitch, whore, cunt, cocksucker, slave. Then he branched out. For a while it was racial epithets, homophobic slurs, religious blasphemy. There was a period in which he was making up names, whole new words, things that didn’t necessarily have a precise meaning but sounded horrible. Now he’s moved on to other languages. He spends hours in the library looking up new languages to call me names in. Some of the things he’s found are unimaginably bad, concepts of degradation that we don’t have in English.”

UPDATE I have friend-requested Caroline Crew on facebook.

Current Title of the Story That I’ve Been Working On and Just Possibly Finished (UPDATED)

“The Hardy Boys, or One of Them, Confronts Some Unpleasant Truths, or Tries To, Which Is Basically All Any of Us Can Say about Ourselves, in the Confronting-Unpleasant-Truths Department, When You Think about It”

Which is to say that I don’t just give ridiculous titles to blog posts.

Found out today that Zizek is going to be speaking at UIC this coming semester. You know, Zizek. Star of the movie Zizek! That guy.

*UPDATE*

Forgot to include a Zizek Action Shot when I first posted this. Here you go:

Blepharoplasty

Biked to Evanston to sit and work in a coffeeshop at Hinman and Main, kind of in love with the fact that the street I’m facing right now is, in fact, Main Street. I like Main Streets. I don’t think there’s a Main Street in Chicago, there might be, but if so the name’s probably misleading.

Just found out that one of the pieces I wrote (“wrote”?) with Robert Kloss is going to be in a journal with a poem by Sherman Alexie, who though he probably does not know this once convinced me to stop smoking.

Good job, Sherman Alexie.

Another one of those trading-faces-with-Robert pieces is up now at Abjective. Others are forthcoming at Metazen & Prick of the Spindle & Anti- (which is where the Sherman Alexie poem will be, too).

Went to EAR EATER this weekend, which is a reading that takes place in what used to be the apartment directly underneath mine in Pilsen (I’ve since moved), and, speaking of Metazen, saw Frank Hinton read. Though even after the reading I still can’t tell whether Frank Hinton is a real person or some kind of brilliant Turing-tested litbot or what.

Here is some dialogue from a story I am writing right now about the Hardy Boys:

“Say, Frank,” Joe started. “Did you notice anything, well, a little queer about the President? Anything like, seem a little off?”
    “Can’t say that I did, Joe. I’ve never been a fan of the man’s fiscal policy, but there’s nothing new there…”
    “Anything… out of place?”
    “Don’t get what you’re after here, Joe.”
    “Remember when Dad was on the Jimmy Gimais Show a couple months back, playing that Oriental Mystic? Remember how, after a quarter-hour or so, one of Dad’s epicanthic folds started coming a little loose?”

It’s raining now, and probably I will bike back in the rain.

Oh and PS

Just found out that I have a piece forthcoming in RHINO. It’s called “Mice,” although it has an alternate title as well, “HISTORY / NATURAL / UNIFORMITY OF NATURE / HISTORY OF ANIMALS.” It will be coming out in the 2012 issue of RHINO, then, later, in a book called The Map of the System of Human Knowledge.

I am trying to start tracking my life, number of hours spent writing, number of hours reading, number of hours looking at the internet (which in certain cases overlaps with reading), amount of time spent eating, etc.

This is a first step. I would like to be reducible to a formula.