Tag Archives: Writing

What I learned this week, October 14, 2011

Posted on by Bill Chance

I’ve been a big fan of Lana Del Rey for a while now. It looks like she might be on her way. This is her first television appearance, on Jools Holland.

25 Insights on Becoming a Better Writer

Creating Fictional Characters—Part 4: Fleshing Out Characters with Tags, Traits, and Relationships

Sometimes the Polls are Right

We Built This City” Named “Worst Song of the 1980s

2. Europe – “The Final Countdown”

3. Chris de Burg – “Lady in Red”

4. Wham! — “Wake Me Up (Before You Go Go)”

5. Men Without Hats — “The Safety Dance”

6. Falco — “Rock Me Amadeus”

7. Bobby McFerrin — “Don’t Worry Be Happy”

8. Toni Basil — “Mickey”

9. Taco — “Puttin’ On the Ritz”

10. Rick Astley — “Never Gonna Give You Up”

I can’t argue with this list… I will say that I loved two of these songs at one time. I won’t tell you which two.

Even if you don’t think it’s the worst song – you have to agree that this is the worst video.

Grace Slick had fallen a long way from the days of  “White Rabbit.”

Things you think work but actually don’t.

  • The Elevator “Close Doors” Button
  • “HD” TV
  • Walk Signal Buttons
  • Butt-Toning Shoes
  • Office Thermostats

Some Scopitones

A modern version of the same song

https://ted.com/talks/view/id/548

Rain

Posted on by Bill Chance

It hadn’t rained here for months. The hot weather and tinderdry vegetation (all the plants I have tended for years along my back fence are dead, my lawn may not make it) felt apocalyptic.

However, one of the nice things about having a journal that goes back well over a decade is that you can look back at other years.

This has happened before.

Friday, September 6, 1996

Summer is ending in Dallas, it’s still plenty hot, but the real heat is past now for another year. Summer is the most uncomfortable season here, but I always like it, I’m going to miss it.

I like the pure brutality of it, heat so bad it’ll kill you. The green, wet spring giving way to the dry brown death of summer. Yellow heat giving way to white heat, the sky white, the blue burned out of it. White hot laser sun, bouncing off the blue Dallas buildings like a lens. The heat beyond shimmering, the air shooting straight up. After work, my car has been sitting alone in the sun, I open the door and the heat bursts out, hits like a hammer. It’ll burn your nostrils, so hot you can’t breathe, so hot your own breath feels cools on the back of your hand.

The heat is so hot, so dry on the black Dallas gumbo clay that the earth itself splits like an overripe tomato. Cracks appear in the ground, big enough to fit your hand in. The slab of my house tilts away from the heat, my deck drops a foot. The plants go dormant, brown, leaves fall, like in a northern winter. Only rich people’s lawns, with men running the sprinklers day and night can keep up with the solar barrage, with the instant evaporation.

If it’s cold, you can always put on more clothes. But you can’t get any cooler than naked. And the burning sun will cook your skin anyway, roast you to death. There are only two ways to get out of it. You can huddle inside, breathing the precious AC. Without AC nobody would live here, we’d all still be up north, back east. You can sit inside, in the cool dark, the rattle and rumble of the AC shakes the house. It’s always dark inside because the sun is so bright, any clouds have been burned away, your eyes can’t get used to the shade. When you come in it’s like night inside, you’re blind, the tungsten can’t compete. If you wait awhile you can see, but the klieg light in the sky is still there, only some brick and sheetrock away.

Or you can find some water, a lake. You can sit in it, sit in the sand, in the freshwater sea-shells, watching the wavelets lap against you, the odd perspective of being right on top of the water, closer than you ever are to the ground. The sound of kids playing, the smell of dead fish, you can survive for a while that way, but you can’t sit in the water all summer.

That’s what Texas summer is to me. I’ve lived in Central America, in the humid Panama jungle, where the air is so laden with water it is more liquid than gas, when I first got off the plane I thought “my God, I can’t breathe this stuff, how can anyone stand this.” But there somehow you can get used to it. Maybe the constant warm refreshing tropical rain. But Texas summers are brutal, vicious, killer. You must take precautions.

I like that, it keeps things in perspective.

Sooner or later, the drought will end. It always does.

From Tuesday, September 12, 2000

Rain

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

—-John Updike

It’s been something like seventy four days since it’s rained here; that’s some sort of a record – breaking the old gap from the thirties, the dustbowl days. I’ve been fantasizing the first good rain, thinking about running out, face upwards, arms wide, like the guy in “The Shawshank Redemption.”

For some reason I didn’t think it would come at work. Because of Nick’s game last night I missed the weather and didn’t know a possibility of storms was on for today.

As a moneysaving thing, trying to get back on our feet after the car repairs and new heater-air conditioner, I’ve been on a Ramen regimen for lunch. Thirty cents a day. So I sat at my desk eating my humble noodles and began to grind through some more endless government forms I have to fill out. Something made me look out of my office, across the lab to the bank of windows.

It took me awhile to realize what I was looking at – featureless gray background with white angled streaking slashes moving fast across. It was rain. As what I was looking at began to sink in to my awareness the first bright flashes, loud cracks, and rumbling booms started – it was a good late summer thunderstorm.

As an environmental person I have several responsibilities during a rainstorm, especially one when it has been dry for so long. I put on my lab coat and walked the building’s perimeter, looking out each door, making sure everything was in good shape.

The temperature dropped twenty degrees in minutes, and a great howling wind picked up. The rain blew sideways in great clouds, picking up standing water from the ground. Fast flashes of lightning like a strobe light; so close the thunder came on immediately, like giant timbers snapped by a monster hand. A loud clicking started up and I saw pea-sized hail dancing around in the water.

The wind slowed a bit, the hail stopped and it was too much for me to resist. I do need to check the drainage so I strode out quickly into the downpour. I could have picked up a rain suit or even an umbrella but I decided to go ahead and get wet.

It felt wonderful. I had to stop walking and wipe off my safety glasses every now and then, but other than that the rain was comfortable and cool – a great change. The grass out back was soaking the stuff up as fast as it fell – the giant cracks in the clay softening, the dead grass coming loose, the footing flexible and yielding but not yet muddy.

Within an hour or so it was all over. We had almost two inches at work (less than an inch fell at my house). Everything is so desiccated the water was immediately soaked up; by my drive home the streets were dry, the creeks not flowing and we were able to have soccer pictures and baseball practice on schedule. The deluge reduced to only a memory. Inexplicably, there was a small green open rowboat stuck in the dry creek bed behind the school by our house

The odd thing is that not a drop fell at the airport – so officially, according to the government, it never rained and the record drought is still on.

It sure felt like rain to me, though.

This year, for me, it was less dramatic. As a matter of fact, the end of the drought was a pain in the ass. I had plans for Friday night – I was going to hang out at the Sculpture Center for Midnight at the Nasher. A band was going to play and they were going to show “Footloose” on the outdoor screen. But, right at sunset, the skies opened up.

It wasn’t a hard, satisfying rain… more like an ambitious drizzle. It was carefully calibrated to destroy any plans without making it too obvious that all was lost. I stubbornly stuck it out and wandered the garden at the Nasher, pretending that if I ignored it, the rain would go away. After a bit, I gave up and went inside. I must have looked like crap because a museum guard suggested I dry off so, “I don’t catch cold or something.”

Not long after that, I gave up and went home. At least the wet city streets are good for night photography.

It wasn’t until two nights later that we had a real storm. I opened my garage door and stood out in the alley watching the cracked fireworks of lightning split the sky over and over. The dry trickle of a creek behind our house was up in an angry cascade, a powerful torrent tearing down the middle of the block. I looked left and right and saw most of my neighbors doing the same thing, standing in the dark behind their houses looking out at the storm.

It has happened before. It will happen again.

Friday October 1, 1998

Storm Blows Through

Violet serene like none I have seen apart from dreams that escape me. There was no girl as warm as you. How I’ve learned to please, to doubt myself in need, you’ll never, you’ll never know.

–—Natalie Merchant – 10,000 Maniacs

A storm blew through today
while I was talking
on the phone
at lunchtime
here at work.

Nobody warned me,
it wasn’t on the news
things are so bleak, these days
I thought the rain would never come.

I’m so isolated
I didn’t hear it at first
But the thunder shook
and I could feel it
from my feet
on up
my legs
rumbling, shaking.

So I grabbed a look
out a window
and it was falling
sheets
of sweet sweet rain

electric
shaking
rumbling.

It has been so dry
dust parched earth
cracked pain
a desert of dirt
grit and the taste of old salt.

But the rain came
unexpected falling
electric
shaking
rumbling.

I wanted to go stand outside
let the sheets
of sweet sweet rain
fall down
all over me,

swallow the rain
and take it all in
let the rain swallow me.

The cool
sweet sweet rain
I watch through the glass
press my palm on the pane
feel the thunder
shake my feet

What I learned this week, September 16, 2011

Posted on by Bill Chance

I had forgotten how much I liked Amon Tobin.

I like to sleep with music playing – I used to be able to.Years ago, 1998 or so, I woke up in the middle of the night with the radio on and some random local classical show playing. They had decided to do something a little different and play some music out of their usual set of selections. I heard this thing… it seemed to enter my head in my half-dream state. The only words I remembered the next day were “Sultan Drops.” These were the early days of the internet, but I was able to do a search on “Sultan Drops” and came up with a CD from Amon Tobin. I’ve been a fan ever since.

His website has free samples….

15 Novels to read before the movie comes out (from Paste Magazine)

  1. Paradise Lost
  2. Anna Karenina
  3. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
  4. OZ:  The Great and Powerful
  5. World War Z
  6. Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter
  7. Life of Pi
  8. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
  9. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
  10. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
  11. The Bell Jar
  12. On the Road
  13. The Hobbit
  14. The Great Gatsby
  15. Fahrenheit 451
Lee and Rick

Lee and Rick

I was cleaning up my files and found this picture of my son, Lee (in the blue shirt) and his runnin’ buddy, Rick.

10 Flash Fiction Writing Tips

From Bethestory.com

  1. You only have room for one main character, so choose her well.
  2. You only have room for one scene, so choose it well.
  3. You only have room for a single plot.
  4. You only have room for a single, simple theme.
  5. Get to the main conflict of the scene in the first sentence.
  6. Skip as much of the backstory as you can.
  7. “Show” anything related to the main conflict.
  8. “Tell” the backstory; don’t “show” it.
  9. Save the twist until the end.
  10. Eliminate all but the essential words.

Miru Kim Homepage

Guys, I’m fucking sick of this. I’m almost 20 and haven’t been able to score a better job than a fucking cook at a local fast food joint. What makes it worse is that I live in a small town so business is pretty limited, and where I work is the only place that’ll hire high school graduates. I’d get the hell out of this town if I could actually drive too, but I’ve failed every damn test I’ve ever taken. I’m socially awkward, even my only other co-worker fucking hates my guts. I have repressed lust for one of my best friends too; she’s athletic, smart and a gorgeous southern bell. I love her. You know what it’s like; I’ve been friend zoned real hard. She’s my only real friend, besides this one kid, who I’m pretty sure is only hanging around me because he is mentally challenged. I guess he’s the only one that can tolerate me.

And what makes this all fucking worse is that I live in a fucking pineapple under the sea.

What I learned this week, September, 9, 2011

Posted on by Bill Chance

I have gathered a garland of other men’s flowers, and nothing is mine but the cord that binds them.

—-Montaigne

An economic crisis is nature’s revenge on those who make and those who accept false promises; it is a holocaust of lies when the dross is burned away and only what is real and true remains. Think of cotton candy melting and charring in the flame of a blowtorch; that is what is happening to the secure retirements that “caring” blue politicians and “committed” blue union leaders promised gullible state workers.

—- from Rhode Island Pension System Collapsing – by Walter Russell Mead (read the whole thing)

I seem to be linking to Walter Russell Mead a lot.

How Bikes Could Transform Dallas

Constructing a city for the car alone shackles all to the burdens of car ownership and maintenance costs. In a city with a poverty rate of 23 percent and household transportation costs approaching 25 percent of income, fewer and fewer can afford to participate in the local economy, getting from point A to point B, without a miserable two-hour DART bus commute. Without choice in the transportation network, Sun Belt cities will go the way of the Rust Belt. A monoculture of transportation follows a monoculture of the very industry that produced it into collapse. Nobody thought Detroit would collapse when it was dubbed the Paris of the West. Paris, however, is alive and well. And so is bicycling in that world-class city.

—-From D MagazineBicyclist

The Shortlist for the 2011 Man Booker Prize is out:

The six books, selected from the longlist of 13, are:

Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape – Random House)

Carol Birch Jamrach’s Menagerie (Canongate Books)

Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers (Granta)

Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues (Serpent’s Tail)

Stephen Kelman Pigeon English (Bloomsbury)

A.D. Miller Snowdrops (Atlantic)

I have not read any of these. Have to take a good look (don’t think I can read all of them in time). Any recomendations?

You don’t have to know what it is that you are eating in order to have a delicious meal.

Writing Tips for the Week

Eight Secrets Which Writers Won’t Tell You

by Ali

  • Secret #1: Writing is Hard
  • Secret #2: We All Struggle With Procrastination
  • Secret #3: We Put Ourselves Into Our Work
  • Secret #4: First Drafts are Always Crap
  • Secret #5: Each Piece Exists in a State of Flux – and it’s Never “Finished”
  • Secret #6: We Do it Because We’re Obsessed
  • Secret #7: Money does matter
  • Secret #8: We All Struggle With Self-Doubt

I had forgotten how much I enjoy a good, steep hill.

Even a titan like Starbucks is struggling in this difficult economy.

Yet, the little Vietnamese Coffee Shops in San Jose are thriving.

What could be the difference?

What I learned this week, September 2, 2011

Posted on by Bill Chance

Amy Tan on Creativity

I have been around the block a few times – I have lived long enough to have ridden the economic roller coaster in its up and downs. I’ve been telling folks that the last few years have felt a lot like the Jimmy Carter “malaise” stagflation of 1981.

There are a lot of parallels, and everything fades in memory, especially the worst things, but man, this one is nasty. I keep meeting people, hearing things, and reading more and more about this sort of situation:

“I don’t think anybody realized you had to recreate yourself out of the box,” Wiedemer says, noting that she has a BS in Finance and a dozen years of experience in the financial services industry. “If I had it to do over I wouldn’t climb the ladder in corporate America… Whenever I was unemployed in the past it was never for more than a couple weeks.”

Damn This Recession! – The rise of the unemployees

I added a long TED talk to my blog post on Douglas Adams. If you are a fan of him or of The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, go take a look. Don’t forget your towel.

There have been a lot of theories about the cause(s) of the drastic drop in the crime rate over the last few decades. There is certainly more than one explanation. The popular book, Freakonomics, attributes a lot of the drop in crime to the rising abortion rate. Obviously, our increased prison population and more police on the street had a part.

One idea that I always had is the fact that lead was removed from gasoline at the time. This resulted in a dramatic reduction in lead levels, especially in young people, especially in urban areas. Elevated lead levels are associated with aggressive behavior and other mental problems.

I have been criticised for this view; someone told me, “Only a man would think of something like that,” which I thought was pretty idiotic. My personal response was, “Only a person with access to environmental lead data, who had done blood level testing in elevated lead exposure situations (after the Livingston Train Derailment in 1982), and who had done research into how elevated blood lead levels lead to changes in behavior, would think of something like that.”

Finally, I actually found an article that also mentions this theory:

There may also be a medical reason for the crime decline. For decades, doctors have known that children with lots of lead in their blood are much more likely to be aggressive, violent, and delinquent. In 1974, the Environmental Protection Agency required oil companies to stop putting lead in gasoline. At the same time, lead in paint was banned for any new home (though old buildings still have lead paint, which children can absorb). Tests have shown that the amount of lead in Americans’ blood fell by four-fifths between 1975 and 1991. A 2000 study by economist Rick Nevin suggested that the reduction in gasoline lead produced more than half of the decline in violent crime during the nineties. A later study by Nevin claimed that this also happened in other nations. Another economist, Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, has made the same argument. (One oddity about this fascinating claim has yet to be explained: why the reduction related to lead-free blood included only violent crime, not property offenses.)

—From Crime and the Great Recession by James Q. Wilson, in City Journal

No matter how bad I am, I’ll never be as bad as this:

Writing Tips for the Week

How to Stay Motivated

Condensed from Colombia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

1. Set a daily writing goal.

2. Schedule your writing as early as possible in the day. If you fear or dislike writing, then once it’s done, you experience a tremendous sense of relief that you have the rest of the day to do everything else you must do…without having to think about your writing.

3. Think ahead and plan backwards.

4. Work with deadlines.

5. There is no writing, only re-writing, Lamott (1994) says, “Get it down, so you can clean it up.” Shaw (1993) says, “There is no such thing as good writing. There is only good rewriting.” If it helps to motivate you, you do not need to write a final draft, or even a good draft. You write today what you must so that you can produce good writing when you edit.

6. Reward progress.

7. Motivate (and comfort) yourself with stories of other good writers (and how they suffer, too).

8. Read others’ acknowledgments.

9. And here’s another good motivational strategy: Donate $5 to your favorite U.S. presidential candidate’s opponent for each day you do not write.

Do you ever watch the Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs?

I have had the experience of actually doing a job, at the exact location, that was on the show (it wasn’t a bad job at all – and it certainly wasn’t “dirty”).

Salt Mine – Outside

Yes, I used to work there.

At a quick glance – “Dirty Jobs” is just another cheapy, throwaway, cable pseudo-reality series that gives you a few chuckles and a shock or two – barely enough to keep your hand off of the remote control and certainly not enough to justify wasting that precious sliver of time that it takes to watch the thing.

But maybe there’s something else going on here. Maybe you can learn something.

Take a look at this TED talk (yes, all of it) – the host certainly has learned something

Did you think you would get a lecture from the Dirty Jobs guy on Anagnorisis and Peripeteia? With the added instructional lecture on how to bite off a pair of sheep balls?

Stay tuned my friends, you might learn something.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Posted on by Bill Chance

I have been on a quest for nice writing spots around the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex.

Saturday afternoon, I pounded out some paragraphs at White Rock Coffee on Northwest Highway, one of my favorite locations, but began to suffer from caffeine overdose and hunger, so I headed West.

My destination was the newish Whole Foods at Northwest and Highway 75. This neighborhood is an old stomping ground for me, but it has changed completely in the last few decades. Five years ago, we headed down early one morning to watch them implode a giant glass office building from the parking lot of the NorthPark shopping center across the highway. I have seen some implosions in my day, but the sight of the mirrored glass rippling from the shockwaves in the dawn’s early light before tumbling down in a cloud of dust and glass shards was something to behold.

Implosion

The implosion of North Park Three

And now, like a concrete Phoenix, a massive tony development has risen from the rubble. There are a series of condominium towers surrounding a vast expanse of parking garage. There is retail scattered across the pavement on a couple levels – with the huge Whole Foods grocery store at the center.

I knew they would have wifi and something to eat, so I headed there to get a salad and tea (eleven dollars) and sit out front, enjoy the colors of the crepuscular sky over the sea of parked cars.

But on the way there, I drove behind another one of my favorite old stomping grounds, the big Northwest Highway Half-Price books. I don’t go there as much since I started reading so much on my Kindle – but it is still a great monument to bibliophilia. As I passed behind, I saw a huge section of the parking lot coned off with a large semicircular inflatable something rising up. One side of the thing was pure white and very reflective. It didn’t take much thinking to figure out what it was.

I had read that they were showing free movies in the parking lot this summer, and today must be one of the days. I checked in at Whole Foods and surfed over to the Half-Price website and found that, sure enough, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe would be showing at eight forty-five.

The timing was perfect. I finished my food, finished my writing, and moseyed across Greenville just as the movie was beginning.

I had seen it before and wasn’t a huge fan, but the price was right. Like everyone that has had kids in soccer, I carry a variety of folding chairs in my trunk, so I was prepared. There was a crowd there, not a huge crowd, but more than a few. Looking around I was the only person that actually went to the film alone.

LWW

Oh, the kids were so cute....

It was hot, but not too hot. The city put out a lot of noise, but the organisers had a powerful sound system, so we could hear the movie. Every now and then a headlight would illuminate the screen, but it went away soon enough.

I was able to get into the movie. Always up for some Tilda Swinton.

The Ice Queen

Tilda Swinton wasn't as cool as she was in Orlando, but she was the best thing in the movie.

I had a good time. Unfortunately, this is the last movie of the year on the schedule, but I bet they will do it again next summer. I think I’ll be there.

What I learned this week, August 26, 2011

Posted on by Bill Chance

“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit,” Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”

Out came this girl, dressed in a scarf and a sneeze,
she did a little dance that made me weak in the knees.
she danced just like her back had no bones.
while the band played a tune they called the Main Street Moan.
She smiled a smile the whole world could see.
and then She turned around, and looked staraight at me.
I must’ve jumped at least six feet in the air,
and when I came down, that girl wasn’t there.
Oh Sharon, what do you do to these men?
You know the same rowdy crowd that was here last night is back again.

—- David Bromberg / Oh, Sharon

You can make your own cola,

and ordinary humans have done it and it is good.

Rick Perry has never lost an election; I’ve never won one. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with the world. On the other hand, I’ve long been friends with Bill Clinton and George W., and Rick Perry and I, though at times bitter adversaries, have remained friends as well. It’s not always easy to maintain friendships with politicians. To paraphrase Charles Lamb, you have to work at it like some men toil after virtue.

I have been quoted as saying that when I die, I am to be cremated, and the ashes are to be thrown in Rick Perry’s hair. Yet, simply put, Rick Perry and I are incapable of resisting each other’s charm.

——————————————

These days, of course, I would support Charlie Sheen over Obama. Obama has done for the economy what pantyhose did for foreplay. Obama has been perpetually behind the curve. If the issue of the day is jobs and the economy, Rick Perry is certainly the nuts-and-bolts kind of guy you want in there. Even though my pal and fellow Texan Paul Begala has pointed out that no self-respecting Mexican would sneak across the border for one of Rick Perry’s low-level jobs, the stats don’t entirely lie. Compared with the rest of the country, Texas is kicking major ass in terms of jobs and the economy, and Rick should get credit for that, just as Obama should get credit for saying “No comment” to the young people of the Iranian revolution.

——————————————

God talks to televangelists, football coaches, and people in mental hospitals. Why shouldn’t he talk to Rick Perry? In the spirit of Joseph Heller, I have a covenant with God. I leave him alone and he leaves me alone. If, however, I have a big problem, I ask God for the answer. He tells Rick Perry. And Rick tells me.

So would I support Rick Perry for president? Hell, yes! As the last nail that hasn’t been hammered down in this country, I agree with Rick that there are already too damn many laws, taxes, regulations, panels, committees, and bureaucrats. While Obama is busy putting the hyphen between “anal” and “retentive” Rick will be rolling up his sleeves and getting to work.

A still, small voice within keeps telling me that Rick Perry’s best day may yet be ahead of him, and so too, hopefully, will be America’s.

Kinky Friedman – Kinky for Perry

When I was younger, I used to enjoy riding roller coasters – but I can barely watch this, let alone ride the thing. It’s interesting how they have worked to increase the terror factor – the part at 2:00 where they are hanging and then drop….. That spot boasts the world’s steepest drop, 121 degrees – well beyond vertical.

Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.

—- Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1973)

Always had a soft spot for optical illusions… this is a doozy.

“Warning: If you are reading this then this warning is for you. Every word you read of this useless fine print is another second off your life. Don’t you have other things to do? Is your life so empty that you honestly can’t think of a better way to spend these moments? Or are you so impressed with authority that you give respect and credence to all that claim it? Do you read everything you’re supposed to read? Do you think every thing you’re supposed to think? Buy what you’re told to want? Get out of your apartment. Meet a member of the opposite sex. Stop the excessive shopping and masturbation. Quit your job. Start a fight. Prove you’re alive. If you don’t claim your humanity you will become a statistic. You have been warned.”

— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

Cloud Atlas

Posted on by Bill Chance

Where are you right now?
In my hut in my back garden in West Cork.

 Where do you write?
Here, at my desk; in my notebook, in an armchair; on planes.

How do you write?
By recording in words the scenes that are workshopped and staged in my imagination.

What keeps you writing?
My addiction to it.

Who do you write for?
Me, and the rest of the world. Nobody else.

—- David Mitchell, in Untitledbooks

Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas

What is my favorite book? What is the best book I’ve read? —These are unanswerable questions. There are so many and my opinions at the very top shift over time like sands in the wind or shadows in my memory.

Still there is an upper stratum. This is occupied by fossilized memories of hours, days, sometime years spent poring over pages of labyrinthine structure, subtle metaphor, and deep, thick, and complex prose. This is the land of Pynchon, the landscape of Mason & Dixon, V, and, most of all Gravity’s Rainbow. That book took me twenty five years to read… and it was worth every second.

It is the land of Moby Dick, of Infinite Jest, of House of Leaves.

It is the land of Cloud Atlas.

If you catch me at the right time, I’ll tell you that Cloud Atlas is the best book I’ve read. Other times I’ll tell you it’s my favorite book. Rarely does a single entity spend time in both positions – as far as I’m concerned, that’s great praise.

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is a complex book and one with a unique structure – but it’s not hard to read. The structure is very carefully planned out, logical, and executed with panache – not like the shambling monstrous recursive story of Gravity’s Rainbow.

The book is a collection of six different story threads. The first half of the book the stories are half-told, in chronological order. It starts in the South Pacific, in 1850, in a sort of Melvilish, three-stooges version of a whaleless Moby Dick. The story then jumps to 1931 where a bankrupt musician tries to scam himself back into a state where he can feed himself and love again. Then it leaps to California in the 70’s with a thriller set at a nuclear plant.

At this point the stories move into the future, starting with a publisher trapped in a nursing home. We then switch to a dystopian future where the clones begin to rebel. Finally, we arrive in the unknown distant future where mankind has thrown off or lost its technological skin and is back to telling tales around the campfire.

Here, the book turns and goes back, working its way through the same stories again for their second half denouement, in reverse order, until we are left back in the 19th century South Pacific.

What is the connection between these diverse threads? You will have to read the book to find out.

Does this scare you? Will you avoid this tome in favor of the newest vampire mystery? Shame on you. Or not. Whatever. It is definitely the kind of thing you will like, though, if you like that kind of thing.

Waterspouts

Waterspouts

Why am I bringing up this odd and complicated book now? No matter how interesting?

I used to read a lot of movie reviews. I always tried to keep up on what was happening in the world of cinema. This was ruining my viewing enjoyment, however. I wanted to get back to that world of simple pleasure when I sat in front of the silver screen (or cathode ray tube [or light emitting diode (or liquid crystal semiconductor [ or tiny cloud of plasma-induced noble gas])]) unknowing about what was going to happen next. So I stopped reading movie reviews until after I had seen a film. I stopped following the pages outlining what was coming out next from what director.

Still, I stumble across bits of information now and then. That Interweb-thing is good for that, isn’t it?

This week I discovered that they are making a big-time, big-budget movie of Cloud Atlas.

It is one of the books that, when I was reading it, I thought, “This thing would be unfilmable.” Apparantly, someone disagrees with my assessment.

It seems it will have two directors – The guy that directed “Lola Rennt” will do the story threads that are set in the past and the Matrix director(s) will do the stuff in the future.

Big time actors too, Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Susan Sarandon, Jim Broadbent… It appears the actors will be playing more than one character spread across time (have to get your money’s worth out of Tom Hanks).

Well, I’m not sure how this will all play out – the book is unfilmable, really – but it will be interesting. I do hope it gets made. If it is good, it might be great. If it fails, it will be a glorious failure.

Storm

Storm

(whet your appetite) Short works online by David Mitchell

New Pack

Posted on by Bill Chance

I have always had this odd fixation on daypacks and bags. I like the illusion of freedom and mobility – I like feeling of being able to flit about the city with my office on my back, able to write, draw, or take photographs as the opportunities present themselves. I like to think I’m self-sufficient, carrying my own water and food. I like to think of grabbing transport as it may come, walking, riding my bike, or hopping the train, and being good to go whenever and wherever.

All a load of crap, of course. I’m more likely to be sitting on the couch eating a ham sandwich and watching reruns of Intervention as I am to be scribbling in my Moleskine in a funky coffeeshop with my bicycle chained up out front… but I can dream, can’t I?

I have a nice, sturdy daypack – a MountainSmith that I bought on clearance at REI well over a decade ago and it is still serving me well. I have an LA Fitness gym bag and a blue nylon shoulder bag (this I take to the library) that I bought at Goodwill a long time ago. These serve their purposes too.

Table

You can see my blue shoulder bag at my favorite table at the Richardson Library.

The bag I carry the most is my Not-A-Purse. It’s a Canvas Map Case Military Shoulder bag that I bought on Amazon a few years back. It’s a nice writing bag – It will hold my Kindle, some Moleskines, notebooks, a handful of fountain pens, and sometimes my Alphasmart Neo. It has a nice hard back (it was designed as a map case) that can function as a writing surface in a pinch. It goes with me pretty much everywhere – sometimes I stuff it inside the larger daypacks.

Map Bag

My Not-A-Purse. What is strange is that I found this image floating around on the internet - I don't know where it originally came from. But if you look, there is an Alphasmart Neo sticking up in the bag. I can't believe other people out there have Neos in their bags, exactly like mine.

When it arrived from Amazon, Candy looked at it and said, “Oh, you bought a purse.”

“No it is not,” I said, “it’s a Canvas Map Case Military Shoulder Bag.”

“If it looks like a purse, it is a purse.”

“No, it’s not a purse.”

This discussion/argument has been going on for years. I hold my ground stubbornly. It is not-a-purse.

The other day some of Nick and Lee’s friends were over. My Canvas Map Case Military Shoulder Bag was sitting on the coffee table in the living room. One of the girls saw it and said, “Oh, Mrs. Chance, that is new, that is such a nice purse. Where did you get it?”

Teenagers today don’t know anything.

We took a load of old crap, three big black plastic trash bags full, to the Goodwill today and I decided to take a look at what bargains I couldn’t live without. Despite the cheapness of the used and donated goods and the poverty and desperation of most of the customers the Goodwill tries to be as organized and attractive as possible. They had big crude displays set up with back-to-school supplies. At the front were donated binders and organizers, and in the center aisle were huge cardboard totes full of bookbags and backpacks.

I dug around and found a nice Kelty Boomerang daypack. It looked unused. It was a nice size, not too big, and had good quality padded hip and shoulder straps, plus the rugged Kelty zippers and heavy fabric. The Boomerang is a discontinued model, but Kelty daypacks start at around sixty dollars – and this wasn’t one of the cheapest models. It did have a (small) logo for a dogfood company stitched into the fabric – so it must have been a giveaway at a convention or something (that’s why it looked unused).

I don’t need another pack, but I liked it. At first I wondered how much it was, but as I was looking at the thing, I found a three dollar sticker in a pocket.

I can live with three dollars. At the front counter we found that all back-to-school items were 50 percent off so the bag actually cost a dollar fifty.

The thing is, stuff from Goodwill, the downside… isn’t the cost in money. It’s the cost in space… in increased clutter. I don’t want to be the guy on Hoarders with a house full of daypacks. So, I buy a new one, I get rid of two old ones. So a couple of smaller bags go into the plastic trash bags for the next trip to Goodwill. The eternal cycle of life.

What’s nice about the bag is that it has a pocket for a hydration bladder in it. I’ve been riding my bike with my hydration pack, but it doesn’t have any pockets for other stuff. I can move the bladder from that pack into the Kelty and have a nice urban explorer kit – with water, food, writing equipment… everything I need.

Kelty Bag

My new Kelty bag and the hydration bladder that fits in it.

Yeah, if I can only get off of this couch.

What I learned this week, August 12, 2011

Posted on by Bill Chance

Life is full of ridiculous obstacles to ordinary pleasures.

Here’s another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.'” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

——  David Foster Wallace

This is the comencement address he gave to the graduates of Kenyon College in 2005. Please, Read the Whole Thing. Just for me.

I learned
_ I wanted to buy one of these when I was a kid. I couldn’t afford it.

Ten Ways to Create a Plot Twist

Then and Now

Then

Barak Obama, 2008– Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.

Now

Jay Carney, White House Spokesman, 2011–  He is working very closely with his senior economic advisors to come up with new proposals to help advance growth and job creation. He is working with members of Congress to help advance growth and job creation. And he will continue to do that. There are things that Congress can do now to create jobs, and they should; there are things that Congress will be able to do when they return from recess to help create jobs and spur growth, and they should. And he looks forward to working with Congress to do that.

There is no silver bullet and I have not heard one proposed by anyone in Washington or beyond that there is a silver bullet to help our economy grow faster or create jobs.”

They say that cabbage first sprang from the sweat of Jupiter, some drops of which fell on the earth. That bit of Rabelaisian trivia is not helping me enjoy my coleslaw at all.

TED talk – Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight

Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one. An astonishing story.

Working for a rise, better my station
Take my baby to sophistication
She’s seen the ads, she thinks it’s nice
Better work hard – I seen the price
Never mind that it’s time for the bus
We got to work – an’ you’re one of us
Clocks go slow in a place of work
Minutes drag and the hours jerk
“When can I tell ’em wot I do?
In a second, maaan…oright Chuck!”
Wave bub-bub-bub-bye to the boss
It’s our profit, it’s his loss
But anyway lunch bells ring
Take one hour and do your thanng!
Cheeesboiger!
What do we have for entertainment?
Cops kickin’ Gypsies on the pavement
Now the news – snap to attention!
The lunar landing of the dentist convention
Italian mobster shoots a lobster

…

News Flash: Vacuum Cleaner Sucks Up Budgie

—-The Clash, Magnificent Seven