1) Godwotterous writerly brain syndrome 2) Blaming your tools, looking for magic programs
More writerly occupational hazards
Adopt a new writing program? Sure. Classic avoidance behavior, combined with the “let’s buy a new guitar because the old one doesn’t work” syndrome. Or was Scrivener something my writing project direly needed? Could this be the Rx for godwotterous writerly brain syndrome?
I’ve been thinking about the plasticity of the brain, and the notion that everyone from musicians to London taxi drivers grow relevant volumes of brain—in some cases, I’m going to imagine, positively Schwartzeneggerian neural structures—to cope with what they need to know and do. I’ve also been thinking about the way my speculative trilogy has been going (call it science fiction if you must), and I fear my own brain is evolving in parallel with the novels.
My question: Might my brain be starting to resemble what the Brits describe as an architectural folly? That’s right. Mirroring the trilogy, it could be effectively growing turrets, niches full of neo-classical statuary, ramparts and doodahs on all sides, probably surrounded by a godwotterous garden in which you could lose an army. What kind of writerly Muse would want to live in a joint like that, eh?
I have another question, one perhaps best addressed to a psychiatrist. What happens when—supposing I finish it—this unlikely novelistic epic succeeds? Will the neural scaffolding then remain, a rambling, ramshackle folly standing in a garden full of grottos and gazebos and arbors and obelisks? Not to mention pink flamingoes and gnomes? Christ. What will I be able to do with a brain like that? Except maybe embark on another trilogy. The horror, eh?
Given the number of digital and hard-copy files, and notes and working drafts that have accumulated over the years as I scribbled bits in the interstices between bread-and-butter gigs as a writer/editor, even my freakishly refashioned mind would have to fold at the thought of making sense of it all. (Better, perhaps, I simply burn the lot of it and set out afresh.)
Except that I’ve been given new hope.
I’m now working in a program called Scrivener, which I heartily recommend to writers and researchers everywhere.
I’ve long resisted the idea of having software programmers decide they know better than I do how to proceed. But Scrivener doesn’t work that way. It has itself evolved over the past few years in light of feedback from working wordsmiths, and it’s an entirely unobtrusive, unpresumptuous, endlessly flexible godsend. It works. Magnificently, it works.
Here’s a link to a review that helped swing me.
I’m not even getting a commission.
Some good things to do with an Internet addiction
"The Joy of Quiet," a story by Pico Iyer in the NY Times (29 Dec. 2011) resonates with something I proposed a week ago at a Christmas party.
.
I'd been talking about plans to go away for a few weeks to finish a novel in draft. As usual, when such an idea is broached, people were quick to say things such as, "Hey, I know a great place on the coast down south" or "My uncle has a yacht crewed entirely by world-class lady beach volleyball players winding down between tournaments." That kind of thing is all very well, but what I really need is somewhere barren of interesting people to chat to (including beach volleyball players), at least one room with a blank wall and no view of wonderful scenery and, most important of all, no Internet connection. In fact, I'd been thinking of some grubby little upcountry hotel here in Thailand.
This is not mere eccentricity. Lots of writers feel the same way, I believe. At least one successful writer (whose name escape me just now) goes so far as to say no one can write a book in the vicinity of an Internet connection. That may be no exaggeration.
At this point my Sara, as is her wont, interrupts. "All you need is self-discipline," she says.
Uh-huh. That's right. I don't even have the self-discipline to activate Freedom, a program I installed on my computers that allows you to disable your communications programs for anywhere up to eight hours at a time (see “Addictions, spinal deficiencies and disciplinary infinite regresses”).
But let's get back to my proposal, which will make both me and some obliging investor rich overnight. All I need is enough cash to buy and renovate a smallish hotel, preferably here in Bangkok.
Here's the deal. We subdivide the joint into windowless cells, each of them equipped with comfortable office chair, desk, adjustable lighting, cot, a basic toilet and washroom, coffee machine, and, by default, no Internet connection. Oh, yeah--and a solid door that unlocks only from the outside.
Just a prototype; we'd tart it up somewhat.
Whoa. We’ll have writers queuing up to pay our exorbitant rates for incarceration till they finish their book in draft or else cry uncle (for which we’ll charge them a hefty penalty). The punters can order food which, for modest charges, our staff will slip through a slot of the sort used in solitary confinement in all the best prisons. Writing supplies, computer repairs, etc. will be provided in the same way.
The real money, though—and this, I have to admit, is pure genius—will come from what we'll charge for temporary access to the Internet. Clients who just can't manage the cold-turkey route may submit a formal written request, agreeing to pay ridiculous sums by the minute for the privilege of being allowed online for a stipulated time. (Of course clients will also have to sign an initial agreement that protects us from charges of kidnapping and unlawful detention.)
So we provide a much-needed service for our age, amassing heaps of good karma at the same time we get obscenely rich.
This idea’s time has come. As I read Pico Iyer’s article, I kept feeling he was on the verge of stumbling upon it himself. I await good news from prospective investors.
Any good ideas for what to call this facility, which in my mind is already becoming an international chain? Mistress Muse's No Mercy Mansion isn't quite right, though it is pretty alliterative.
Mayan malarkey, reasons to relax in 2012
So what's new?
Whoop, whoop. The end is nigh, the end is nigh! I'm told the ancient Mayans predicted that massive quantities of bad shit will hit the global fan this year.
Whatever, eh? It looks as though the Horsemen of the Apocalypse got a way early start on things, because it they’ve been galloping through our gardens for quite some time already.
I've experienced a wee taste of this myself. In fact it started around 7am on New Year’s Day last year, when one of the exercise machines downstairs tried to kill me (see “Life is terrifying”). That was pretty auspicious. In fact, given the 12 months’ of troubled times that ensued, the horrors this incident portended for yours truly may have leaked out into the world at large.
But once again, despite all historical evidence to the contrary, I turn a happy face towards the coming year, and wish you a good one. Hey, slower to learn than your average lab rat, I’ll even wish you a very happy morning after the New Year’s celebrations tonight.
Gossip takes awhile to mature
If you keep up with the news, of course, you can find plenty of likely reasons to head for the storm shelter. But I have a friend—a distinguished classics scholar, Egyptologist, linguist, coiner of neologisms extraordinaire, and roll and roll/blues/jazz musician—who once told me that he didn’t really follow the news. In fact, he said, he wasn’t all that interested in anything reported more recently than three centuries ago. What he meant, I believe, was that what we call “current affairs” is mostly gossip, written on the wind. This is probably even truer now that it was all those years ago, when he told me this. Even more than then, we are subjected to an overwhelming barrage of information, among other things “news” as spectacle, the latest foofaraw selected and shaped for its entertainment and hence commercial value. What’s really important, however, typically takes centuries of rumination and discussion before we recognize it as such and dare try to interpret it in the light of truly important themes and issues.
Given the way technological and social/cultural change is accelerating, mind you, we probably don’t have 300 years to let things steep before we see what we’ve really got. We probably don’t have 30 years.
No big deal, though.
Genesis 2.0
Have a look at this short article: “How a mental disorder opened up an invisible world of colour and pattern.” Could it simply be that Louis Wain and God were both doodlers? That would explain a lot about our universe, eh? Maybe the apparent fractal nature of our world is nothing but an especially elaborate doodle. (More than reflecting any essential character of reality, it could merely reflect something inherent in the structure of doodling itself, should you begin a given doodle in a particular way.)
Hey, and in the Beginning, our Lord was subjected to call-waiting on a truly cosmic scale, and in the course of time he was connected. Then he looked down at his (pretty advanced) scratchpad and he said, "Lo and behold. What hath I wrought here? Far out."
Genesis 2.0: In the beginning, God created a doodle, and He saw that it was good. And forever afterwards humankind, which lived in this universe that was a doodle, took many essentially trivial things way too seriously. A happy thought for the new year.
And, yes, it may well be that the pounding in your head foretells the approach of those Horsemen of the Apocalypse. More likely, though, it's only a hangover.
Chronicle of an urban drowning foretold
Almost exactly a year ago I posted “Submarine garrets for starving writers” (4 November 2010), which foresaw the entire city of Bangkok serving as a recreational dive site. And that piece itself contained a link to an article ("One Born Every Minute") I wrote 25 years ago wherein I interviewed a visiting extraterrestrial who foresaw the submersion of Bangkok within another three decades. The TAT (Tourism Authority of Thailand), I suggested, would hail his proposals for turning this to advantage. 
I’ve also anticipated a submerged Bangkok in MOM, my most recent novel (Amazon, Smashwords), which is set about 50 years in the future. (I should say that the excerpt below isn’t representative of the book’s overall pace or point of view, which includes much more action from several other POVs. Once in a while, though, we get an installment of Leary’s ruminative Chronicle.)
From MOM, a novel.
full of it
(a chronicle of Leary’s second half-century and beyond)
Leary here. It’s Monday again. Seems like it’s Monday half the time, these days. And on Mondays I’ve got nothing to do except scribble these notes, for whatever that’s worth, and putter around my apartment, never mind my apartment can look after itself without any help from me.
I get lonely sometimes. I get lonely a lot, truth be told. For one thing, it looks like I’m the last person in this cell. For all I know, I could be the last one in ESSEA. Which is kind of scary. Maybe I’m being saved for something, though it’s hard to say what that might be. I’m an anomaly. That’s a fine word, and it means out of place. Like the Baiyoke Tower, which is all you can see of Bangkok these days. In fact that’s pretty much all that’s left of the entire Eastern Seaboard, Southeast Asia. ESSEA.
Guess what I’m doing for excitement right now, aside from chewing on a tasteless substitute for beef jerky. I’m looking out my window. Me and Rexy. My robopet. I neutralized the holoport — goodbye Waikiki — and telescoped the view so I can see all the way to the Baiyoke II Tower. Ninety-four stories and up to its butt in seawater. The Baiyoke I is drowned, right up over its ears. I recall when the Baiyoke I was the tallest building in Bangkok. That was way back in the twentieth century when Bangkok was booming, and the local movers and shakers had a bad case of Singapore pecker envy. Not just in Bangkok. Right across Southeast Asia, everybody wanted the tallest skyscraper. Right across the world, come to that. But now there’s nothing standing where New York used to be except the Millennium Mall, what’s left of it. Old Singapore and the mall down there would be nothing but a bunch of highrises poking out of the sea by now, if there’s anything left at all. Of course the government there might have passed a law against the PlagueBot. Maybe busted it for chewing gum or peeing in the elevators. I doubt it, though. Haven’t heard from anybody down there in quite some time. Haven’t heard much from anybody anywhere, lately. Whatever. With no children getting born, it’s natural enough to see us dying off.
Just look over there, on the other side of the Baiyoke. Three cumulo-nimbus cloud towers stand side by side like giant mushrooms. Black and gray and smeared with red, which tells you the sky in the west, back on the other side of the mall, must be like fire. We’ve got these external monitors and, what with the mall perched up here on hundred-and-fifty-meter stilts the way it is, they let me see all the way east to Bangkok, to where Bangkok used to be, so why can’t they give me a look at what’s happening on the other side? I’m no meteorologist, but it’s strange. You’ve got hot, humid air condensing out there over the sea instead of over the mainland, the way it should do. The way it would have done in the old days. Who knows what’s really out there, though; it looks like sea, but who can tell?
Here I sit, dictating these notes to my wallscreen. Nothing better to do.
Be that as it may, writers are extinct. In fact, there aren’t many jobs of any description out there. MOM and her Dolls look after everything anyone needs. Pretty well everybody’s a welfare bum these days, but no one even remembers what a welfare bum is, so we can just go ahead and enjoy it. Though I tend to feel kind of useless. So would most people, if they stopped to think about it. But they don’t. They don’t dare to.
The Kid, now, there’s one man still doing a man’s job. I wonder if he knows how lucky that makes him.
*
Seascape by Hiroshi Sugimoto.
Flooded temple from wtaq.com.
Inverse relations and natural law (The Gospel According to Ellie)
Bangkok cinemas, some of them, have taken to offering movies in “4D.” Now the moving images are complemented with smells—certain colorful old cinemas, sadly gone now, were way ahead of them on that front. And you might get rumblings in your seat, though these are often now more in sync with events on the screen that the tremblors from street traffic outside used to be. Other effects include fog and drizzle and stuff they originally built cinemas to shield you from while you watched a movie.
So that’s one excuse for having seen the latest Transformers flick.
And today, on behalf of Leary, I promulgate the original Ellie’s Law:
The quality of a modern movie is inversely related to the quantity of money available to make it.
Two things, here. First, you’ve got the hi-tech toybox of special effects, and the idea that, if they’re there, you’ve got to use them. Then you’ve got the destruction-of-life-and-property and the special-effects indexes, and the pole is constantly being raised. Movies are rated, in Bangkok as elsewhere, by the collective weight of mashed vehicles (robots, spacecraft, whatever) and the splash radius of blood.
The upshot? You have a much better chance of seeing a good movie if the film-maker has nothing to rely on but the quality of the script, the acting and the directing -- as in low-budget films made in Ireland and Canada.
Leary tells me that Ellie, whom he likes to describe as a friggin' genius, has also applied the notion of inverse relations to natural laws of political behavior (notably in the USA and other countries she could mention at this time). Leary says I should feel free to include some of these laws in my draft of The Intelligent Politician’s Practical Handbook, and I present them here.
In so-called democracies—roughly speaking, systems of government incorporating elected representatives of the population—certain invariant laws and corollaries tend to obtain. (Leary says Ellie—did he mention she’s smart as a whip?—can talk this way at the drop of a hat, and often does.)
* The effectiveness of a political message is inversely related to the complexity of its content.
* The simplicity of a political message is inversely related to its connectedness with anything important it has to say about political, social and economic realities.
* In any so-called democracy, a political candidate's chance of success is inversely related to the complexity of his messages to the electorate, and directly related to their simplicity ( whether messages or electorate, you may be thinking).
Visitors may wish to add their own rules to this list.
Ellie is Leary’s second wife, the woman he married in 2029. She was driven to suicide by Brian Finister (a.k.a. Brian the Evil Canadian) circa 2035. Her subsequent resurrection as what was merely supposed to be a hi-rez ebee (electronic being), and Brian’s ultimate sex slave, actually heralded the next stage in evolution and helped to prove that evil genius’s undoing. (See MOM for the whole story.)
Writerly occupational hazards: Emotional opportunism & spiritual callousing
Two years after his death, Michael Jackson is back in the news, with his former doctor defending himself against charges of involuntary manslaughter. I’m not sure what emotions this case is arousing in the general public, but it has caused me to revisit my first reaction to the so-called King of Pop’s untimely passing.
“A long time after painting [his first wife] Camille on her deathbed, Monet confessed to his friend Georges Clemenceau about the pain or shock he felt when he suddenly realized, while painting [Camille Monet sur son lit de mort] that he was studying her pallid face and noting the tiny variations of tone and color brought about by death, as if they were an observable everyday matter! He ended by saying: ‘Ainsi de la bête qui tourne sa meule. Plaignez-moi, mon ami.’ (Like the beast who turns his millstone. Pity me, my friend.)”
John Berger, “The Enveloping Air: Light and moment in Monet” (Harper’s, January 2011).
My own initial reaction to Michael Jackson’s death presented a real parallel to Monet's experience, and makes me question my own compassion.
Of course Jackson’s passing was sad—his whole life was sad, by many accounts. And what was my immediate response upon hearing the news? What a pity, I thought. I’d looked forward to seeing where his continuing reinvention of himself would eventually lead. But now I could no longer enjoy imagining the range of potential 80-year-old Jackson personae.
Does that strike you as callous?
Maybe. But, beyond his curiosity value, Jackon, effectively, was a leading exponent of a novel evolutionary development. Cultural evolution has long since superceded biological evolution. And now, what with advances in plastic surgery, bioengineering, and cyborg-type replacement parts and augmentations, human beings are increasingly taking a deliberate hand in their own design (and all this to much applause from the Transhumanists).
Which leads me to the following proposition. Jackson’s real contribution to posterity might have been this: He was our canary in what is becoming an ever deeper and more mysterious pit of our own devising, filled with perils we cannot yet see.
And now our canary is dead.
RIP MJ. I offer commemorative haikus (which, as I’ve said before, are much easier than writing books).
Michael Jackson, our
Tranhumanistic
Canary in a soul mine.
Michael Jackson, our
Commoditized
Ingenue in a gold mine.
Psychopharmacologic
Infelicity.
Michael Jackson, dead.
Psychopharmacologic
Alternative life-
Stylish Jackson death.
An eighty-year-old
New Michael Jackson
We’ll never know.
It occurs to me to ask: Will I be able to view myself with the same writerly dispassion, as I morph away over the years remaining to me? I’ve already had my eyes lasiked; not long ago I had a bathmat installed in my thorax (patching a ventral hernia, or containing the alien? ); there’s every chance that, should I live long enough, I’ll wind up the proud owner of artificial knees… Hell, they’ll probably be implanting info & communications chips right into our heads even before I get around to retiring my already antique, nearly four-year-old iPhone 2G.
Click on the first photo for a progressive portrait of Jackson over his life. (It has occurred to me that visitors often don't realize that many of the illustrations in these posts are linked to URLs.)
Hope in dark times
Just when things couldn't get any worse, they did. But it turned out they didn't really, and Sara's right, I worry too much.
I've just come back into my office, and I heard this horrible rasping from the left wing of my iMac. My mind is going, "It's the fan, right? It can't be the hard drive, it can't be the hard drive, aiyeeeee."
Careful investigation has revealed the real problem. I had an online jazz station playing, way down low, and what I heard was the drummer's hi-hat going tska-tska-tska and scaring the shit out of me.
Good News 'R Us, eh?
Earlier case of falling-sky syndrome.
Worrywart (alt. worry wart) from eymonline.com: 1956, from comic strip "Out Our Way" by U.S. cartoonist J.R. Williams (1888-1957). According to those familiar with the strip, Worry Wart was the name of a character who caused others to worry, ... the inverse of the current colloquial meaning. The Word Detective has more.
English language needs *iktsuarpok*
Iktsuarpok: an Inuit word more useful to us citizens of the digital universe than umpteen expressions for varieties of snow.
Here’s how the blogsite Mental Floss characterizes the expression:
“You know that feeling of anticipation when you’re waiting for someone to show up at your house and you keep going outside to see if they’re there yet? This is the word for it.”
And it occurs to me that iktsuarpok might enrich modern English, where it could just as easily refer to obsessive checking of e-mail and Facebook to see whether anyone’s contacted you in the past 30 seconds. Even the traditional Inuit did it, eh? Social networking and our obsessive-compulsive dipping for dopamine rools.
Thanks to Rick @ RickStory for permission to use his great drawings. 
Thanks to Bill the Mathematician for sending me to Mental Floss, which cites Adam Jacot de Boinod’s book The Meaning of Tingo and Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World.
Nirvana, freedom, etc.
I'm reposting this item (originally put up by Jack Shackaway 22 April 2010), in light of the fact that Bill Page's Nirvana Experiments are now available in e-book form. Well worth reading.
July 2011 update: The Nirvana Experiments are now available in e-book form on DCO Books, Amazon, and Smashwords.
Goodbye writer’s garret in town and hello moobaan at the edge of the universe, ostensibly in suburban Bangkok. Bill Page, Bangkok old-timer and columnist of note under various names, has recently bought a townhouse and set up shop with his companion, her daughter and two demented imps from Hell passing themselves off as dogs. He’s been thinking of ways to lure old cronies to join him, probably seeking confirmation that he himself has done the right thing. This is from his latest pitch: “You would love to see some of the stuff they've got lounging around the swimming pool. Woooo-eeee! I think you can still get a 100,000-baht discount on a townhouse if you hurry. We'll put in a good word for you in case they're afraid of downgrading the neighborhood.”
Yeah, but.
First—as my own companion du jour expresses it, aptly if not so happily—I’m afraid home-owning would infringe on my freedoms. (We won’t even talk about my bank account, here.) And if I did want to buy a house, I can’t think of many places I’d more rather not live in than the outskirts of Bangkok. Besides which fact, Bill has been misled, from what I hear. What he calls a swimming pool is really an ornamental fish pond, and those babes he refers to aren’t lounging; they’re fishing for carp. Given his profile, furthermore, if he should hear the cry "Thar she blows!" while he’s floating in this pond, he’d best watch out for incoming harpoons.
Yeah, well, those who live in glass houses, right? But rest assured that any houses I live in, glass or otherwise, will be rented.
William Page’s collection of stories of spiritual quests from around Asia, The Nirvana Experiments, (formerly published by White Lotus [Bangkok], which no longer handles fiction), deserves a new home.
Digital technologies: The great levelers
Lonely Planet has long made everyone an adventurer, IMHO, thereby sapping much travel of any real adventure. The Discovery Channel and National Geographic, from what I hear in the street, have made nearly any experience you can imagine accessible from the comfort of your own armchair.
"So you went walking in Antarctica? (Yawn.) Whatever. I saw Antarctica on TV last week. Yeah, it was awesome. All those fuckin' penguins, eh?"
Etc.
And now Google Goggles will make anyone with the price of a smartphone a polymath, a know-it-all.
"Yo, what's that?"
"Just a sec'. Okay, yeah. Seems it's a three-dimensional shadow of a tesseract... With a ribbon on it.
“A tesseract? What the hell is a tesseract?”
“Just a sec'…"
“Whoa! Forget about tesseracts. Lookit that babe at the bar."
"Awesome."
Penguins and babes are equally awesome, as it just about anything else that impinges on one's phenomenal field, unless it's "fuckin' awesome," in which case it might be mildly interesting.
He holds his phone up so he can let Google Goggles check it out. "Uh-oh."
"What?"
"See the way the muscles between her eyes push up when she's smiling?"
"Yeah?"
"She's gaming us, my boy. A sincere smile, the muscles would be pulling down."
"Yeah?" says the other, pointing his own phone at the cutie-patootie,* snapping her photo and then consulting Google Goggles. "Check this out. Here's her Facebook page, and look here at what she says her interests are. I don't care if she's sincere or not; I want me some of that."
His friend, who is really no friend at all as you can tell by his smile, neglects to mention the medical report that's just popped up on his own phone.
Digital technology is making everyone a writer, robbing real writers of any respect for their calling or their craft. Digital technology is leaving us with fewer and fewer genuine readers; issues of relative literary quality are being drained of any force. Digital technology, together with TV, mass tourism and mass tourism guides, has trivialized travel and adventure. Digital technology, now, is giving us all the power to learn anything there is to know about everything and everyone, but we still won’t know what to do with all this information. Information is not wisdom, I am a reactionary old crock, Kindles are better reading devices than iPads, etc.
What else can I say to cheer you up this fine afternoon?
*Note. I used ‘IMHO’ earlier, which cancels ‘cutie-patootie’ in terms of my with-itness creds.
Man for an age
Recent Posts
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- Some good things to do with an Internet addiction
- Mayan malarkey, reasons to relax in 2012
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- Chronicle of an urban drowning foretold
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