December 3, 2007
Eric: Winter Storms, AntiNanowrimo and Christmas on the Satellite of Love: a stirring from the grave
There's a winter storm outside -- the first solid evidence of Winter in the first week of December for several years. The New Hampshire tourist industry -- by which I mean the ski industry, the snowmobile industry, the ski industry, the ATV industry, the ski industry and did I mention the ski industry -- is breathing a sigh of relief, as it looks like we might actually, y'know, have a ski season before February this year.
(Not that they were taking any chances, mind. I've driven by a bunch of phallic "look at our new snowmaking equipment" billboards since early September. By God they were going to be skiing this year whether we liked it or not! And, of course, I like it fine though I myself haven't gone skiing for at least fifteen years. Probably more like twenty, now that I think about it. Christ, I'm old.)
It is the Christmas season, though very few people seem to care this year. Including me, though I'm well ahead on my Christmas shopping for the first time... well, ever. (I am entirely in favor of fiancees who have well developed Amazon wishlists. I have a well developed Amazon wishlist too, but that's less for my fiancee and more for my family, who love me dearly and haven't a clue what sort of gizmos to buy me. I'd post a link for the curious but it would seem crass, and I like to wait at least four or five posts into a revival after a multiple week hiatus before I appear crass.)
For the most part, all is well. We wait patiently for the government to let Wednesday and I get married. (We could get word any day, or it could easily go into February with no word a'tall. We keep the lines of communication open to the single greatest immigration attorney in the world, and we check the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services website, and we wait and we hope and I get up there whenever I can (she can't come down here until she comes down here to get married. That's just the way the law works.) and we talk every day, and that's what that is right now.
There's a winter storm outside, but the home fires are burning well. Having weathered financial issues aplenty over the Summer (as I'm sure you all remember), everything is fine now. I actually have some money in a savings account. Not a lot, but some, and that builds with every paycheck. There's always more unexpected events on the horizon, but barring the same kind of sudden, rapid smackdown of them that started the summer travails, things should just be okay.
I have it on good authority that the Month of November was, for me, essentially an anti-Nanowrimo. Which isn't to say I've gone negative on Nanowrimo. I've enjoyed it when I did it, and I enjoy seeing it when others do it. But for me, it was a month where I generated... well, essentially nothing, both here and on Banter Latte. Almost certainly I needed that. If you use your brain for writing too many days in a row without a break, it gets hot and eventually the RAM fails.
But it's December now, and it's the Christmas season, and we're heading to close the year out. There's things happening, in the world and on the web. The Russians own LiveJournal, the Primary is a month away in the state I live in, and Chuck Norris has embraced the meme in more ways than one. Halfpixel has become a full on online guild a la Dumbrella, bringing the Blank Label collective down to a tight six In Mystery Science Theater 3000 news. Rifftrax has started doing heavy advertising in targeted media, the Rifftrax crew has also formed "the Film Crew" which is doing the MST shuffle, which means the Mike Nelson/Kevin Murphy/Bill Corbett version of MST3K is fully back in production only minus the muppets and the SciFi network. At the same time, the original MST3K team of Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu, Josh Weinstein, and special bonus not-quite-original-but-still-seminal Frank Conniff have launched Cinematic Titanic, which somehow doesn't make any reference whatsoever to Rifftrax or the Film Crew (and vice versa) even though Mary Jo Pehl has done work now for both groups. And if that wasn't interesting enough, Best Brains, Inc., in the person of Jim Mallon (the original executive producer and the voice of Gypsy) has spun up some truly crap web cartoons 'continuing' the story of the Satellite of Love, alongside some old school folks like Paul Chapman, who we all remember as Pitch. Right?
Okay, the crappy webtoons are clearly just designed to get you buying DVDs, but still! It's... something....
That's right. Three entirely distinct entities of former MST3K folks, all cheerfully suckling at the teat of a show that went off the air in 1999. Three collectives of entertainers, writers, gadabouts town who all have legitimate claim to some of the MST3K legacy. Three separate performing troupes that are not acknowledging the other two's efforts in any way, shape or form, absent a brief mention on the Cinematic Titanic website that Josh Weinstein was the guy who actually hired Mike Nelson in the first place.
Yeah, there's no behind the scenes 'fun' going on there. None at all.
The interesting thing is, for all three of these groups... we're actually seeing models that the webcomics world pioneered in play. The MST3K site, with its free crappy Flash animations (seriously, guys, I know that the art is supposed to be 'stylized' but it looks... um... bad) is drawing eyeballs to sell videos. Rifftrax works off of -- I swear to Christ -- Micropayments, and from all accounts it's been monster successful. That's right. Someone made micropayments work. With, I would add, podcast technology and absolutely no DRM. It looks as though Cinematic Titanic may do the same, though we don't yet know. The Film Crew is straight online distribution -- they don't advertise in traditional places, their production facilities are essentially a minimal set possibly made in someone's garage, and they're clearly selling DVDs briskly.
Everyone still reading these words will recognize the models at play. And clearly everyone involved with MST3K has the advantage of a massive cult phenomenon from the 90's (probably the defining cult phenomenon among geek culture of the 90's, all apologies to Babylon 5 -- Buffy was transitional into the 21st century so nyah) to give them a continuing fanbase. But the simple truth is, it's not costing them much money to make Rifftrax. You or I could do it with scriptwriting time (and talent we might not possess, of course) and our personal computers. Admittedly, Nelson partnered with Legend Films who's shouldering the website costs, but come on.
Put yet another way? Other media besides comics have begun to figure out the whole web thing. Between that and the rise of direct-to-DVD stuff... and the fact that both Amazon.com and fucking Wal-Mart have come out as anti-DRM...
...well, it's an interesting time to be on the web.
But then, winter storms are always fun to watch from the inside.
Posted by Eric Burns at 11:07 AM | Comments (16)
November 14, 2007
Eric: Service Disruption
It's nothing technical, you understand.
Seriously. As near as I can tell, everything's aces. The internet is working, the websites are up, and while I did migrate to Leopard, that was about as seamless an OS upgrade as I've done for a while. And Time Machine just plain works, for the record, which is staggeringly cool.
Well, all right. Upgrading led to some issues with my windows partition and I had to reinstall it, but honestly. It's the first time I've ever had to reinstall Windows in the era of Boot Camp, so how upset could I be?
So it's nothing technical. And yet, there has been an interruption of service.
It may have been my last trip to Ottawa. You can tell when it was -- it was the day my first Superguy post in years went up. And that was really cool, as it was on the heels of Gary posting, and there's been a flood after us so Gary started something. Apparently the collective Superguy writers have been waiting for someone to break the ice. And now they have.
But the day it went up, I drove to Ottawa, and spent a week up there. Up with Wednesday, kept by the government out of the United States until they get through processing the fiancee visa that will let her come down and let the two of us get married and on with our lives. This is the longest visit we've done for a long time, and it also featured a move to brighter surroundings for her. And time spent together. And time spent listening to a radio station with ten minute synopses of Ottawa in general. And time spent being on the weaker side of the dollar divide while in Canada for the first time in my life.
For the record? When they make the same jokes to you you made about them for your entire life? You don't get to be anything but gracious about it. Even when gasoline ends up costing five bucks a gallon after conversion. God damn it.
It may have been the change of time. I love love love love love the day we Fall Back. I am no fan of Daylight Savings Time. I think the system should have been abolished years ago. I am no farmer, and I like the day being an hour later in the morning, thank you kindly. But I am also of an age where the time change screws with me something fierce. It took a few days this year, as the trip back corresponded to it so I was exhausted enough to make it easy, but I'm in the throes of crappy sleep cycles right now.
It may have been work, which has been busier than November normally is, not the least of which was a day we had a power outage and the central core's backup generator didn't kick in. We managed to shut everything down before UPSes failed, but it's like doing work on someone's heart -- when you stop it from beating for a few minutes, it's gonna be a few days before they're feeling up to jogging and you have to do a lot of post-op stuff.
I've had people e-mail me. Just to make sure I wasn't dead. I appreciate that. I'm not dead.
I'm just not writing.
Which is weird.
I have ideas, mind. Tons of them. Banterable ideas. Websnarkish ideas. It's not that. It's not that at all.
But it's not actually going onto paper.
Maybe this notice of service disruption is the jolt I need. Maybe that'll get the big writing stone rolling down the hill.
I sort of plan on writing more Superguy today. I enjoyed that, and it too might spark things.
If it does, it'll go up sometime this week, and then a Myth will follow it, and Justice Wing will follow that.
And maybe somewhere in there I'll talk about the sale of City of Heroes and Issue 11 and dual blades and flashback and stuff. And talk about Zuda and how their interface (and their decision to downsample God damned cursive into it) makes the Baby Jesus cry and no one gives a shit about Zuda as a result.
And, you know. Stuff. Things.
I dunno.
But for now? I'm okay. I am.
We're just having a minor service disruption. Please stand by.
Posted by Eric Burns at 11:31 AM | Comments (6)
July 3, 2007
Eric: Meanwhile, not far away....
So. I've been trying to work out... well, things. As folks know. And the writing is a part of what I've been trying to work out, because....
...well, because. I'm a happier person when I'm writing lots of stuff, and being a happier person is pretty much a good goal in and of itself.
And that brings me to trying to find the best way to actually do more of it, and to fire the writing spirit, and all that. Because... well, because I want to, and because I want momentum, and because that's all a cool thing.
Let me begin by saying that Websnark isn't ending. Not now, not for the foreseeable future. I like this place. I like all of you. I like the outlet. I like the chance to write on any topic or any subject, at any time. It's amazingly cool, and you guys make me happy.
However, it's worth noting that Websnark, in the end, is an outlet for nonfiction. There have been exceptions, here and there, but this is primarily a blog for commentaries and essays. Critiques, or just me talking 'bout stuff. And that's been amazingly cool, but it's also been limiting. In the nearly three years this thing's been a part of my life there's been a couple million words between Wednesday and I, but my fiction output has crashed through the floor. And that has created an imbalance in my humors, increasing bile and phlegm and requiring an infusion of foods higher in fire and air.
Now, I could change Websnark if I wanted. I could add in fiction, poetry, a wet bar -- whatever I felt like, at least as far as Weds would be comfortable -- and Weds is, at heart, desirous of my being content. But that doesn't seem like the right reaction to me. Folks who come here and who have been coming here have been doing so for very specific reasons. They'll indulge the odd Sestina or the occasional bedtime story, but for the most part they'd rather there not be a monumental shift in tone.
And honestly, I don't want to change what Websnark is. I like what Websnark is.
The solution, in the end, is to expand.
Which brings me to Banter Latte.
Banter Latte is a new blog, chock full of that new blog smell. It was born in the weekend following my existential writing crisis. It is dedicated to fiction, to poetry, to whimsy -- to all the stuff that Websnark isn't. It has a bunch of new bits of writing, some old writing that's been sitting on my hard drive -- sometimes for years -- and locked posts designed to let me put up chapters of novels I'm working on.
That this will hopefully also force me to, you know, finish and refine those novels is a side benefit.
The protected posts, mind, are still meant to be accessible. See, part of the problem of the publishing world adapting to new electronic distribution is the question of what "previous publication" means. By locking the posts, I can skirt the edge between publishing my novel on the web and providing a place for fans of my work and interested parties to read drafts of the posts without actually releasing it. And keeping it out of search engines at the same time.
So. What is Banter Latte?
Banter Latte is a place for me to write. Just like Websnark. They're meant to compliment each other. Folks who like reading what I write will want to head on over there and see what there is to see. Folks who like my essays but can't imagine enduring my fiction can avoid it. (Though I'll post regular links over here to the stuff going on over there -- mostly because I don't want this place going quiet again.)
Though quiet isn't as likely. As I've said before, when I'm writing regularly, I'm usually writing prolifically. You'll notice I've written more on Websnark in the time since I started beta testing Banter Latte than in the three months before. That's likely to continue.
Why "Banter Latte?" Because as has been mentioned, I have a love of dialogues taking place while my characters are drinking beverages. Nothing more or less. Also, I tend to drink a lot of coffee or tea while writing.
There is a schedule to Banter Latte, in hopes of building an audience and (paradoxically) making things easier on me. Mondays are "The Mythology of the modern world," when I tell whimsical stories about the myths behind everyday life. Post beta period, we have two entries up right now: Introductions and Coffee, and Why Does Starbucks Drip Coffee Taste Like Crotch? These are generally going to be written new for the site, which should keep me doing a few hundred or thousand words in a week, all to keep the pump primed. Wednesdays are "Storytelling" days -- vignettes, scenes, stories, past stuff and new stuff all blended. Some of the more serious stuff will go here, though I don't promise that. Right now, we have a short story set in the greater Gossamer Commons universe -- the first entry of Gossamer Reflections, called Whisperdance.
Fridays are when the protected chapters of novels in progress go up. One of the state goals -- born of a conversation I had with my father -- is that I'm going to write one chapter of a novel each and every week, thus making the completion of said novels far more likely. Right now we are in the semi-hard science fiction novel Theftworld, which is password protected (though right up in the nav bar or also on the sidebar you'll see a link to a form for requesting it -- it's not exactly hard to get access to the password if you want it.) We have two chapters plus a prologue and a bit of preface material up.
Thtree days a week with three types of content. Tuesdays and Thursdays are Random days. Any day I feel like doing something that doesn't fit one of those categories, I'll throw something into a Tuesday or a Thursday. That's where poetry will go, fan-fiction if I've a yen to write it, bits of other stories, or whatever. Or nothing at all. Those aren't officially scheduled days, but right now it looks like there's plenty of stuff for them. We have a couple of related stories in them right now: the first part of Interviewing Leather -- meant to be a Rolling Stoneesque interview of a minor supervillain, and we have On Call, a slice of life story about a doctor who specializes in superhumans, played more for laughs.
Finally, on the weekends we'll have very basic open topic posts, for people to shout out comments or make dook dook noises or do whatever it is you kids do.
And, of course, there's a chance to buy ad space if you want. Right now, it's going for like two cents, so it's a bargain!
In the end, all of this is meant to stimulate my doing what I like to do most outside of spending time with Weds or sleeping: writing. And I'm really excited about it. I hope you guys enjoy it. And I hope this helps keep the writing stream -- in Websnark and out of Websnark -- more regular than it's been.
Thanks all. And enjoy.
Oh -- bear in mind the site is still new. There may be functionality changes, and there almost certainly will be look and feel changes. So, you know. Be warned.
Posted by Eric Burns at 1:46 AM | Comments (10)
February 21, 2007
Eric: And now, literature.
I'm trying to wrap my brain around On the Banks of Lethe. It's not easy. But James Grant does that to my brain.
I think I probably got into Grant's stuff thanks to Randy Milholland. When Grant's original webcomics magnum opus, the Jay Storyline, was in full flower over at FLEM Comics!, Randy did small cameos in Something Positive. Jay was one of the people Davan knew back in Texas. Simple enough. That led me to FLEM, which later on led me to Two Lumps. I loved it.
I loved it because Grant is a sick fuck. Which is really the only way to describe him. Except he's a funny sick fuck. He's a talented sick fuck. He reminds me, in his own way, of George Carlin. When I watched the DVD of The Aristocrats, I was pretty blase through the telling and retelling of the most obscene joke in the universe. I'm a jaded person by nature, when it comes to such things. But while Sarah Silverman's deadpan version was the best and most memorable, George Carlin's is the one that got me within three gags of actually throwing up. And yet, it was still funny.
That's the kind of power Grant has. And it's a power he carries through into his writing.
I read and greatly enjoyed Pedestrian Wolves, Grant's first book. It was vivid and evocative -- a shout down down the throat of New Orleans, written before Katrina and in its own way a testament to a city that doesn't exist in the same way any more. However, I wasn't sure that Pedestrian Wolves was so much a novel as a travelogue -- a taste of the city, of the mores of the place, of the scene, of one man's understanding of the streets he had walked. Grant's second book, the aforementioned On the Banks of Lethe is a solid, full on, hardcore novel. It's the story of Charlie, and it's the story of memory and loss. Which can't possibly be coincidence -- it is absolutely nothing like the short story "Flowers for Algernon," or the novel that it grew into, and yet when you read about Charlie in Lethe, you think of Charley in that original story. You think about pain. You think about loss.
If I were to describe the book, I'd be somewhat at a loss. It's got a little Noir to it -- a little sense of the One Good Man fighting a battle. But at the same time, it's Noir as written by Sean Stewart and soundtracked by the Sisters of Mercy. The One Good Man is always a flawed figure, but this time his flaws are held together with barbed wire and set on fire. It's Portrait of the Artist as Cursed By Non-Euclidean Monstrosities.
And it's fascinating. Fascinating as the stare of a cobra.
There's no comfort in this book. I never got the feeling that Charlie would win. I saw him struggling, and trying -- saw him trying to hold on to the woman he loved and the world, but this is James L. Grant, so I figured there would be a few shotgun blasts to the ego along the way. And the book doesn't disappoint. It reminded me of some other stories -- Vellum, by Hal Duncan. Perfect Circle by the aformentioned Sean Stewart. Even "The Unpleasant Occupation of Jonathan Hoag" by Robert Heinlein (though more if the other side won in that particular work). The imagery is powerful and disturbing, the voice is solid.
In a way, as stated, this really is Grant's first novel, since I don't think we can really call Pedestrian Wolves a novel. And there's some sense of that in the book. He overwrites a bit, here and there. Sometimes phrases like "Daughter of Red" beg to be shrunk down instead of repeated over and over again. But these are comparatively minor -- like brushstrokes on one of Charlie's paintings. The paint may seem thick in places, but it adds texture to the whole.
This is not a comforting book. But man, it was a good ride getting to the end. I'm looking forward to the next time Grant takes a few shots at our collective psyches.
Posted by Eric Burns at 5:01 PM | Comments (15)
January 29, 2007
Eric: The current necropost list, as of the 29th of January
For those who haven't seen my slow but steady efforts to 'make up' posts done after the fact, here's what I so far have. I call these necroposts, because they revive a dead day and give it the horrible false impression of life in the form of a post.
The January 11 Necropost was on Malfunction Junction.
The January 12 Necropost was on culling iTunes.
The January 14 Necropost was on the superhero fiction site Star Harbor Nights. (Which also gets the sweet spot for the first post in the archives after the proposal.)
The January 18 Necropost was a brief, random note about Apple's hold music.
I still owe necroposts for: January 15, January 19-24, and January 27-28. Each day my intent is to do the day's post first, so as not to go farther into post debt, then with luck do at least one other necropost until we're all caught up and happy, shiny people.
I should have made this a necropost for like January 28, thereby cheating and cutting down on the backlog, but that's just not the way I roll.
(For those who've wondered, oh Hell yeah I intend to write about Order of the Stick.)
Posted by Eric Burns at 2:31 PM | Comments (7)
January 25, 2007
Eric: On having a research department, even when they don't know it.
A couple of days ago, I caught a story.
This happens to me. I'll be walking or driving along, and something will occur to me, and I'll decide "huh." And the next thing I know I've got an opening, at least twelve scenes and a denouement in my brain, trying to claw their way out. And, because I was cursed by influenced by Hard Science Fiction, I then need to... oh, you know, do real honest to Christ research on the subject in question.
Now, this is not science fiction. If anything, it's Magical Realism, set in today's world. Something very Sean Stewart, with a soupçon of Hal Duncan for good measure.
What?
Soupçon.
It's a word.
Yes, it's originally from the French, but it's an actual, honest to Christ in-Webster's word now. It means "smidge."
No I couldn't "just say smidge." Jesus.
Anyway.
Lost my train of thought.
Oh, right. The story. It's a very contemporary story, and it's meant to actually be a road trip sort of story. In fact, it's meant to be a shunpiking story. Shunpiking isn't in Webster's but it's a fantastic word which should be. It means "avoiding major highways and interstates and turnpikes in lieu of back roads, secondary roads and the like." It means taking the remnants of old Route 66 instead of the thruway. It means driving through small towns and places instead of bypassing them.
That's what this story needs.
So I want to do it right. So I have a starting point and an ending point. And I have an internet. And if you look at our friend Mapquest, they have an "avoid Highways" feature to them! Score!
Only... said feature only works for trips of 250 miles or less. And even with interstates and highways, it estimates the trip I'm describing as over 2,700 miles.
Now, going step by step, leg by leg in 250 mile jumps is one solution to this problem. But it's not a good solution. See, the only way to effectively do that is to chart your course via interstates and then select waypoints along the way. You can then tell it to give you a shunpiker's route between those waypoints. The problem is, it's entirely possible that if you shunpiked across the country you'd end up far away from where the highways run, through the dead areas between major interstates. By using the highways as your guide, you end up less shunpiking and more tacking around the direct route -- you still end up passing through the major points serviced by those highways. It's just less convenient for you.
I checked the other driving direction services online, and as near as I can tell, those services don't even have a shunpiking function.
So, I've spent the last several days wrestling with this -- in my brain. I've been trying to either find a new service or find software that might do it without being unreasonably expensive for what, in the end, is going to be a single use or... I don't know. Something. Because I really, really want to do this right, and I don't see any good way to do it electronically.
This morning, the solution hit me. It had the triple advantage of not costing me anything (at least anything additional), giving me the route I specifically want, and providing me monumental amounts of research on the side, thus saving me time elsewhere in this process.
See, I'm a Triple-A member. I have been... well, practically forever. And once upon a time, before GPSes and the Internet, they were my route planners. If you're a member, you can call them up any time and order a triptik -- a printed series of flip maps with your route highlighted in orange highlighter, that someone has painstakingly mapped out for you.
I haven't used them for this in years. Between things like Mapquest and GPSes, I have lots more convenient ways to find routes to where I'm going. I'm sure they've had a sharp decline in these services over the years.
But now I had a project my GPS and Internet couldn't help me with.
So I called my member service number (not the roadside assistance number), and talked to a travel agent. And she cheerfully took the information I wanted down. I told her about the shunpiking, and she told me she could arrange all secondary and back roads with no problem at all -- where possible, anyway. And she offered to send along state maps and tour guide books with tons of additional information. All, of course, at no charge. I am a member, after all.
It is worth occasionally remembering that as wonderful as our Internet is, there are times the good old fashioned way is vastly better.
Things have been nuts. Catching up begins now. Rock on, dudes.
Posted by Eric Burns at 10:34 AM | Comments (23)
January 14, 2007
Eric: The necropost for January 14: Star Harbor Nights
A brief post to make up for the missed day on January 14 (penned all the way on January 29), in praise of Star Harbor Nights, a superhero fiction site run by the action squad of Alexandria Erin (who is a sometimes commenter over here at Websnark), Quinn Isley and Sonya Kenderdragon (which might -- might be a pseudonym. Though, given I used to write superhero fiction under the name Eric, Lord Sabre, I'm not about to rag on someone for a sobriquet.)
I know from Superhero writing -- especially the building of a shared universe completely separate from those that came before. As I've mentioned many, many times my first heavy internet activities were based around the Superguy mailing list -- which while more satirical than Star Harbor Nights certainly shared some of the frenetic joy in the form that Erin, Isley and Kenderdragon have brought to their stuff.
It reminds me, really, of how much I miss writing Superguy, and things like that. Last November, I made a serious effort to do a superheroic mosaic novel. Sadly, said novel was a failure -- it just fell apart almost immediately. I might be able to write several novels about the intertwined stories I was mosaicing, but I couldn't create enough of a thread to make the mosaic work.
So, if you like superheroes for themselves (as opposed to liking "the X-Men" or other character specific stuff), you might want to give Star Harbor Nights a look see. It's free, so it sure can't hurt, and they seem to be having a lot of fun, and in the end that's the sense I would want in a site like this one.
Posted by Eric Burns at 1:57 PM | Comments (5)
December 19, 2006
Eric: Download this book! Right now! Before it stops being free!
I am not in the habit of repeating things I see on boing boing. It's not because I have anything against boing boing. I don't. I enjoy pop culture tidbits, Cory Doctorow losing his shit about copyright, and Xeni Jardin writing about sex as the next person. However, typically I figure I don't need to repeat it. Most of you will have seen it anyway.
Well, I'm not taking it this time. For a limited time, John Hodgman's brilliant book, The Areas of My Expertise, is available on iTunes as an audiobook for free.
For free.
Guys, I paid for this audiobook on Audible.com, and it was worth every penny. It's one of the audiobooks I've listened to as I drive from New England to Ottawa and back, as I do every couple of weeks now that Weds lives up there. To see that it's free now is to say to me "Eric, you must tell the people of this glorious thing."
For those who don't know John Hodgman, shut up. Yes you do. He's the PC on the "Hi, I'm a Mac" ads. He's on the Daily Show. He's brilliant and funny and the audiobook is wonderful. But it doesn't have to be wonderful right now because it's God damn fucking free so download it already.
Whew.
In other news, read today's Something Positive, because holy Fuck.
Posted by Eric Burns at 9:36 PM | Comments (42)
December 17, 2006
Eric: Script Format is kind of fun.
I'm not entirely sure what this post is.
It was born out of a couple of Aaron Sorkin parodies I'd seen, like Mad TV's Studio 69 on Van Nuys Boulevard or Kevin Levine's brilliant If Aaron Sorkin wrote a show about baseball. I was laughing about it with Weds, and said "I should write a script where Aaron Sorkin was writing about a webcomics collective."
And, since this has been a week where I've needed a diversion or two, I did.
Only I'm not sure what it is, in the end.
It's not a parody of Studio 60. If anything, it's a Sorkin satire. Only I caught myself trying to really catch his cadences. I caught myself trying to invoke what I really like about Sorkin.
Because despite everything, I do like Aaron Sorkin. On a recent episode, he had a subplot featuring two freshmen writers and the staggeringly brilliant Mark McKinney, and whenever they were on the screen, it was electric. It gave me hope. (There was also this subplot where we learn Harriet Hayes might be the most brilliant comedienne ever according to the show, but despite the fact that she does their Weekend Update pastiche -- an entire sequence where she does nothing but joke setup-punchline -- she is incapable of actually telling even the simplest knock knock joke in the world. It was a subplot meant to make Harriet endearing and instead makes us think she's got neurological damage and would never in a million years be hired for a comedy show, but I digress).
So... I'm not sure what the resulting three scene script is.
And as a result, I'm going to post it here. Behind a cut, as it's... well, huge.
Please enjoy Aaron Sorkin's Comicsense.com.
(Oh, and yeah -- I'm fully aware no actual webcomics collective would be organized like this. Cut me some slack. Sorkin writes about workplaces.)
AARON SORKIN'S
COMICSENSE.COM
[SCENE ONE: The metropolitan offices of Comicsense.com -- a webcomics collective fighting its way up the pack. The offices are full of desks and piles of clutter, made all the more chaotic by the lack of cubicles, walls or offices for the most part. There are several winding paths around the desks, drawing tables and production equipment. As we fade into the scene we see DANNY WALSH, Executive Producer in charge of web content. He is looking over a messy pile of printouts. Near him, two Administrative Assistants, CAROL and SHELLY, are waiting on his words.]
DANNY
Eight months Bobby's been drawing this thing and Hell if I understand what this strip is about.
CAROL
It's about a robot pirate captain.
SHELLY
I thought it was about the talking dog.
CAROL
The talking dog is comic relief.
SHELLY
The talking dog is comic relief?
CAROL
The talking dog is comic relief.
SHELLY
But he did that whole plotline where the talking dog met his parents.
CAROL
Did you notice the parents were talking dogs too?
SHELLY
Well, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
CAROL
I'm just saying -- they make such a big deal over the talking dog--
SHELLY
Well, it's not like you see them every day.
CAROL
But when his parents show up, everyone just accepts that they're also talking dogs.
SHELLY
What kind of parents would you expect a talking dog to have?
CAROL
My point is--
SHELLY
I mean, is it that they talk or they're dogs that has you in a tizzy.
CAROL
I'm not in a 'tizzy.'
SHELLY
You seem a little tizzed out.
CAROL
I just think that if they're surprised at one talking dog, they should be three times as surprised when they meet three.
SHELLY
Is the surprise cumulative?
CAROL
It seems like it should be.
SHELLY
Because after the first talking dog, I'd think you'd get jaded.
CAROL
I think I'd always be pretty impressed by dogs that talk.
SHELLY
The talking dog really isn't the main character?
CAROL
He's the comic relief.
DANNY
You two keep talking and talking but I still don't have any idea what this strip is about.
CAROL
A robot pirate captain.
SHELLY
With a talking dog.
DANNY
See, this is how wars break out.
[Danny hands the paper pile to Carol and begins to WALK TOWARDS CAMERA on a Steadicam shot. He is joined almost immediately by JAKE PARSONS, Editorial Director and writer of the hit Comicsense.com webcomic COFFEE SHOPPE. They WALK AND TALK as they weave between the desks.]
JAKE
I've lost it.
DANNY
You've lost it.
JAKE
I've lost it.
DANNY
You had it?
JAKE
Oh, I had it.
DANNY
But now?
JAKE
Not so much.
DANNY
What's the problem?
JAKE
I can't find the funny.
DANNY
You can't find the funny?
JAKE
I can't find the funny.
DANNY
How's the plot coming?
JAKE
I'm not doing plot today.
DANNY
You're taking a break from the plot?
JAKE
It's been plot heavy. I need a couple days.
DANNY
Away from the plot.
JAKE
I'm giving the readers a break.
DANNY
Easing back on the heavy.
JAKE
My audience likes to laugh.
DANNY
Everyone likes a few yuks at the end of the day.
JAKE
It's what makes me at the top of my game.
DANNY
Fifty thousand readers.
JAKE
Fifty thousand unique IPs.
DANNY
People from around the world.
JAKE
I get hits from Dubai.
DANNY
I've seen the webalizer stats.
JAKE
Presidential suite of the Burj al-Arab, they're trolling the archives.
DANNY
Sunnis like to laugh.
JAKE
That's a problem, though.
DANNY
'Cause you can't find the funny.
JAKE
I can't find the funny.
[The pair are joined by systems administrator SIMON FISHER, a somewhat geeky but oddly compelling figure. He is played by Joshua Malina.]
SIMON
I'm hearing an interesting buzz around the building.
DANNY
Yeah, that's the lights. We're having maintenance look at it.
SIMON
You're so funny! I have a hard time believing United Press Syndicate let you go.
DANNY
Well, you know. No one likes to laugh while wearing ties.
SIMON
The buzz is we're courting Pennyfarthing.
DANNY (snorts)
Yeah, and while we're wishing I'd like that Baron Karza I asked for when I was seven.
JAKE
I was more a Force Commander kind of guy.
DANNY
Force Commander was lame. He had handles on his cheeks.
JAKE
Those were air hoses. He had to breath in that helmet, you know.
SIMON
This is fascinating but let's get back to the subject at hand, shall we?
DANNY
Pennyfarthing.
SIMON
You know how many readers they have?
DANNY
Seven and a half million.
SIMON
Seven and a half million readers, Danny.
DANNY
Jokes about Super Mario Brothers never go out of style, do they?
SIMON
If you seriously court these guys, I gotta know about it, Danny.
DANNY
It's not gonna happen, Simon.
SIMON
Seriously. I have to know.
DANNY
Seriously, it's not gonna happen, Simon.
SIMON
I don't care how much of an ad buyer's dream they are. They're an IT nightmare waiting to happen.
DANNY
It won't happen in a million years, Simon.
SIMON
They update spot on at 11:27 in the morning three days a week.
JAKE
You can set your watch by them.
SIMON
By noon they've had millions of hits. They make servers sob like schoolchildren just by showing up on time.
DANNY
We're not getting them, Simon.
SIMON
They link to a website and it crashes, guys.
JAKE
Wait, what do they call that? They have a name for it--
DANNY
Sporking.
JAKE
Right! Because they did all those strips early on--
DANNY
The ones with the sporks, right.
SIMON
I'm serious, guys. We get these people they're gonna need a dedicated server. They might need dedicated bandwidth. We try to put them on our existing servers and our whole three-day lineup's going to hemmorage.
DANNY
Simon, listen to the words I'm saying. We're not going to get the Pennyfarthing guys. It's not gonna happen. There is no way in Hell Pennyfarthing is coming to Comicsense.com.
SIMON
I need a heads up if they're coming.
DANNY
They're not.
JAKE
I lost it, Simon.
SIMON
You lost it?
DANNY
Jake has just four hours to get a script to Dale or Dale won't have time to draw it and then half the United Arab Emirates won't have their morning Funny.
SIMON
Yeah, they're big comic strip fans over there.
[SIMON splits off from the pair as they continue WALKING AND TALKING.]
JAKE
We're getting Pennyfarthing, aren't we?
DANNY
I need to talk to Jubal about it.
[The pair are joined by MIRANDA CLAUSS, reporter for The Comics Informant.]
MIRANDA
You've been ducking me, Walsh.
DANNY
I wouldn't call it ducking you, Miranda.
MIRANDA
What would you call it?
DANNY
More of a sidestep, really.
MIRANDA
Joke all you want. The word on the street is--
JAKE
Wait, they're talking about us on the street?
DANNY
Actually, I think they actually draw the words on the street. Like, with chalk.
MIRANDA
You had seven cartoonists walk.
DANNY
It's the most exercise they've had in months.
MIRANDA
Laugh all you want, Danny. You lost Hinterlands, Sirocco, Furbridge Heights--
DANNY
Yeah, we "lost" Furbridge Heights.
MIRANDA
It's got a solid readership, Danny.
DANNY
And that fact scares me more and more every day.
MIRANDA
The furry community thinks you guys hate anthro comics.
DANNY
We... have that talking dog in Bobby's strip.
JAKE
Doesn't he just play second banana to the Robot Pirate Captain?
DANNY
There's some debate.
MIRANDA
Danny--
DANNY
His main character is a skunk/beaver crossbreed stripper, Miranda. This wasn't The Class Menagerie or Kevin and Kell. The only reason Furbridge Heights wasn't porn is because we told him we'd lose our Paypal rights if he crossed the line.
MIRANDA
And if you had The Class Menagerie or Kevin and Kell, Furries wouldn't care, but you don't. So they just know that you had a solidly read Furry comic, and he walked. Along with six other people.
DANNY
It happens. We have churn.
MIRANDA
You're not upset?
DANNY
Why should I be upset?
MIRANDA
The Alexa stats on Hinterlands alone--
DANNY
Oh, don't tell me you buy into Alexa rankings.
MIRANDA
It's an independent website that gives you a solid indicator of--
DANNY
It's a sham, Miranda. Pure and simple. It's not a representative sample of anything. It doesn't use statistical modeling or selection criteria or anything else. It only includes those people who actually download the Alexa toolbar. It doesn't include Mac users or Linux users because it's for Windows only. It doesn't even include Firefox users. If you want to measure impact on the web, use Google PageRank. Or Technorati. Hell, check Bloglines but don't shove an artificial "ranking" down my throat because it sounds good.
MIRANDA
So. You're saying Hinterlands wasn't a popular webcomic?
DANNY
...it was popular enough.
MIRANDA
So. You're not upset that seven popular comics left, regardless of whether or not you liked them.
DANNY
Jesus and Mary Chain, Miranda -- of course we're upset. Of course we want those strips. Of course we want their audiences looking at our ads and going to our online store. But they felt they could do better on their own, and I'm not going to trash them in your magazine just because of that. I hope they do better on their own.
MIRANDA
Commendable.
DANNY
We try.
MIRANDA
Will you be that philosophical if Debbie takes Fishtails to the Houghton/Wilkes Syndicate?
[JAKE stops walking, prompting the other two to follow suit.]
JAKE
Debbie's doing what?
DANNY
Oh, Hell.
JAKE
Debbie's considering a newspaper jump?
DANNY
Thank you, Miranda. Like Jake wasn't heading to a nervous breakdown to begin with.
[JAKE crosses OFF stage left]
JAKE
Excuse me.
DANNY (shouted after Jake)
Don't lose focus! Fifty thousand expatriate Iranians need their Funny!
JAKE (shouted from off camera)
Whatever!
MIRANDA
I thought those two broke up.
DANNY
You'd actually have to start dating before you could break up.
MIRANDA
Are you guys getting Pennyfarthing?
DANNY (crossing off)
Oh, leave me alone.
[SCENE 2: One of several art studios in the building. This is DEBBIE DAWSON'S space. The area is cluttered with art supplies of all varieties -- pencils and pens and easels, of course, but also brushes and paints and watercolors. A powerful Apple computer sits on the desk, silently earning us product placement money. DEBBIE DAWSON is there -- a twenty-eight something perky artist with cascading blond hair and a cheerful attitude. As she sits and painstakingly draws a line, her door is slammed open and JAKE storms in, causing her pencil to skid.]
JAKE
Are you out of your mind?
DEBBIE
That was two hours of work, Jake!
JAKE
Are you out of your mind?!
DEBBIE
Two hours I can't get back! I have deadlines too, you know.
JAKE
When were you going to tell me about this?
DEBBIE
Some of us actually draw our own strips, you know? We don't spend all day frittering away--
JAKE
When were you going to tell me about this?!
[DEBBIE turns away, uncomfortable]
DEBBIE
...I don't know what you're talking about.
JAKE
Houghton/Wilkes, Debbie?
DEBBIE
Jake--
JAKE
Houghton/Wilkes, Debbie?!
DEBBIE
Yes, Jake. Houghton/Wilkes. The Houghton/Wilkes Newspaper Syndicate. I'm having discussions--
JAKE
You're doing a newspaper jump.
DEBBIE
I'm having discussions with their editorial board.
JAKE
You're not going to do this.
DEBBIE
I think that's my decision to make, Jake.
[JAKE stares at DEBBIE a long moment, then walks to one side, looking at a framed strip on the wall.]
DEBBIE
You know, some of us didn't start all this out of some dream of redefining the world of online distribution, Jake. Some of us fell in love with comic strips in the newspaper. We read Bloom County and Calvin and Hobbes and fell in love with the form. And we dreamed about the day when we could open the newspaper and see our strip there.
JAKE
Sandwiched at 40 LPI between Beetle Bailey and Hagar the Horrible.
DEBBIE
Not all newspaper comics are Beetle Bailey or Hagar the Horrible.
JAKE
And none of Houghton/Wilkes's strips are Bloom County or Calvin and Hobbes.
DEBBIE
Jake--
JAKE
We have a responsibility, Debbie. In fact, more than we, you have a responsibility--
DEBBIE
A responsibility to who, Jake? Fishtails is a good strip. I want people reading it. Houghton/Wilkes is going to put it in a hundred papers to begin with. They're talking about print collections. Collections sold in Barnes and Noble, not just on the Comicsense.com website.
JAKE
Where they can sit between fourteen Garfield collections and seven Foxtrot collections.
DEBBIE
Alphabetically they would come before Foxtrot.
JAKE
Trust me. Bill Amend trumps the alphabet.
DEBBIE
Jake--
JAKE
You have a responsibility to those who came before us, Debbie. To Al Capp and Walt Kelly. To Charles Schulz and Chester Gould.
[JAKE turns to face DEBBIE, slowly advancing as he speaks.]
JAKE
Comic strips used to be epic, Debbie. They used to be the playground of Windsor McKay and Segar and Hal Foster. Flash Gordon wasn't a movie or a movie serial, Debbie -- it was a comic strip. This is the form of Terry and the Pirates. Look at Blondie in the thirties and then look at it last week, and you tell me you want to be in the newspaper.
[The pair lean close, suggesting a kiss.]
JAKE
You're a foot more talented than any of us, Debbie. Fishtails is the real deal. Of course Houghton/Wilkes wants it. But they don't really want it, Debbie. They don't want your grand stories or your edge. They want a family friendly version of it. They want the version that would come after their editorial board gets done with it. Your gay characters would lose their teeth. Your wit would be blunted. You'd be just another flash in the pan strip that they'd announce and trumpet and then would vanish. You'd appear in a hundred newspapers and then you'd be in fifteen papers after people complained that Luann got cut to make room.
DEBBIE
For Better or For Worse has edge. The Boondocks has edge.
JAKE
They're not Houghton/Wilkes either.
[DEBBIE looks away, at the wall of cartoons.]
DEBBIE
Bloom County was in a thousand newspapers, Jake.
JAKE
Opus is in two hundred, and you're not Berke Breathed.
[DEBBIE turns back to face JAKE.]
DEBBIE
So I spin my wheels here?
JAKE
You're not spinning your wheels.
DEBBIE
Jake--
JAKE
You're not spinning your wheels. You have three hundred and fifty thousand people show up to read you every day. You quit your day job to do this. You have a rabid fanbase. You have awards. And you're going places. You're going to break through. There's going to be animated specials. There's going to be collections in Barnes and Noble. Collections where you get the lion's share of the royalties -- not a syndicate and not even ComicSense. And one day you will be in newspapers, but you'll hold onto your web rights and your merchandising rights and your control over your own property. You're going to do it. Don't grab a third rate newspaper syndicate with a fourth rate deal. Don't give up your merchandise and your freedom. Not for these guys.
[The two look at each other for a long moment.]
DEBBIE
I hate you.
JAKE
I'm comfortable with that.
DEBBIE
I have a deadline.
JAKE
Me too. People in Dubai are yearning for my wit.
DEBBIE
Someone would have to be.
[JAKE turns and walks out. DEBBIE watches him go, then slowly smiles, very slightly.]
[SCENE THREE: Musical cue: "Take a walk on the wild side." The office of JUBAL GREEN, elder statesman of comics and the principal investor and chairman of ComicSense.com. He is gruff, but speaks with wisdom. DANNY enters through the door, knocking on the frame.]
DANNY
Are you aware that they're reading Coffee Shoppe in Dubai?
JUBAL
I suppose that explains all the burka related fan mail Jake and Dale get.
DANNY
Seriously. The webalizer stats--
JUBAL
Webalizer tracks location based on domain name. The domain name for the United Arab Emirates is dot ae. What happened is someone, probably in America, came up with a domain name that dot ae suits, and they registered with whoever owns the rights to dot ae. Some firm in Qatar gets twenty bucks, some guy on the web owns the rights to 'titan.ae,' and Jake--
DANNY
--has readers in Dubai.
JUBAL
That's right.
DANNY
Only not really.
JUBAL
That's right.
DANNY
Okay.
JUBAL
You didn't come into my office to talk about Jake's stats.
DANNY
No.
JUBAL
Mind telling me why you did come into my office?
[DANNY looks off to the side.]
DANNY
Pennyfarthing.
JUBAL
I've been hearing rumors.
DANNY
You and everyone else.
JUBAL
You made them an offer?
DANNY
They made us an offer.
JUBAL
They made us an offer.
DANNY
Yeah.
JUBAL
Pennyfarthing made us an offer.
DANNY
Pennyfarthing made us an offer.
JUBAL
I'm listening.
DANNY
They're sick of bandwidth bills, their sysadmin is in the extended process of flaking on them... they want to get out of the business of running a comics website and into the business of exploiting their brand.
JUBAL
What's the deal on the table?
DANNY
Eighty percent of ad buys, reduced Comicsense.com branding on the site -- though we can do the linkbox -- merchandise in our store but book collections through their guy. And they would comp us nine designed banner ads, so we could get their look and feel in targeted advertising.
JUBAL
Have you talked with Simon about this?
DANNY
He caught me in the hall. We'd need a dedicated server. Probably manage the bandwidth. He says it's an IT nightmare but you know Simon. He kind of lives for IT nightmares.
JUBAL
So what needs to be done?
DANNY
Nothing.
JUBAL
Nothing?
DANNY
Nothing.
JUBAL
Everything's been done?
DANNY
Nothing's been done. I'm passing on the deal.
[JUBAL leans back. He doesn't look surprised. DANNY is slightly nervous, not looking directly at JUBAL.]
JUBAL
The most popular webcomic in the history of webcomics offers to come over to our website, and you're passing on the deal.
DANNY
Yeah.
JUBAL
And that's why you came to my office.
DANNY
No, I came to your office so you could fire me.
JUBAL
For passing on Pennyfarthing.
DANNY
Yeah.
JUBAL
Why?
DANNY
'Cause Pennyfarthing is a slam dunk. We get them, we shoot past Keenspot and Modern Tales. We reverse the trend away from online syndicates and towards online guilds. We wipe the bad press for losing seven creators in the last week, and we replace a contentious furry fanbase for Furbridge Heights with seven and a half million gamers. Of course you need to fire me for saying no.
JUBAL
No. I mean why did you pass on Pennyfarthing?
DANNY
For the same reason Debbie needs to pass on Houghton/Wilkes. It's a dream deal but it's not a good deal.
JUBAL
I'm listening.
DANNY
We bring in Pennyfarthing, and they become the eight hundred pound gorilla. We have to rededicate a majority of our press and advertising to them. Getting the message that they're part of Comicsense.com. Their deal would be better than what we give anyone else, which would breed discontent in the creator pool. Discontent that would only be increased by the staggering degree to which Pennyfarthing would overshadow everyone else on the site.
JUBAL
We could manage that.
DANNY
Maybe, but that's not the whole of it. Editorially, they're just not a good fit.
[DANNY turns to face JUBAL, walking towards the desk.]
Pennyfarthing reaches gamers. It's a niche we barely scratch, and on one level getting them would be good. We'd get some percentage of them reading our comics. But on another level, most of them wouldn't be interested in Coffee Shoppe or Hybrid Deal. Pennyfarthing just isn't like our lineup, and we can't expect a huge crossover appeal from their readers.
JUBAL
We would get some of them. And some of seven and a half million--
DANNY
Sure, but there's a downside to that. We'd also get buried under an avalanche of trolls and dicks. Fractions of men who hide behind an internet login and spew over everything they see.
JUBAL
Danny, I don't care what their rep is. The vast majority of Pennyfarthing readers are perfectly nice and responsible internet citizens.
DANNY
Yeah, but a certain percentage of all internet fandoms are mouth breathers who think this whole thing is a video game and that winning comes through slash and burn. Apply that percentage to Pennyfarthing's readership and you get a number close to Comicsense.com's whole current readership. All people who take delight in hitting forums and messageboards for webcomics they hate and turning them into steaming piles of crap. And they'd hate most of our comics.
JUBAL
And you figure all this means I should fire you?
DANNY
Seems like it.
JUBAL
Is that why United Press Syndicate canned your ass?
DANNY
It... might have something to do with it, yeah.
JUBAL
And you don't credit me with being smarter than United Press Syndicate? Danny -- what was the most significant comic strip to come out of the thirties and forties?
DANNY
Li'l Abner.
JUBAL
What about the fifties?
DANNY
Peanuts.
JUBAL
The sixties?
DANNY
Pogo.
JUBAL
The seventies?
DANNY
Doonesbury.
JUBAL
The eighties?
DANNY
Lemme jump ahead here. The eighties was Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County and The Far Side, in kind of a three way race. And the nineties was Dilbert. Why?
JUBAL
Just this. What's the most significant newspaper comic strip of the past six years, Danny?
DANNY
I... don't really know. I'm not sure it's been figured out, yet.
JUBAL
We're six years into the decade, and you're an expert in comic strips, and you don't know which comic strip is the most significant of the decade?
DANNY
Well... yeah. I mean, the Boondocks got a deal at Adult Swim, but--
JUBAL
But nothing. The newspapers are dying, Danny. It'll take decades, but they're going the way of eighteenth century pamphlets. For a while, the only reason half the newspapers in this country were being sold was the comics page. Now, that's not a compelling reason any more. We're in the wild times now, Danny. It's chaos. And if comic strips cling to newspapers, the form will die with them.
DANNY
Comic strips aren't dying, Jubal. There's... like a billion of them right now.
JUBAL
That's right. On the web. Where we are. It's a crazy time. An exciting time. An explosive time. But it's fragmented, right now. No one webcomic -- not Pennyfarthing, not PvP, not Something Positive or anything else has taken the cultural place of a Li'l Abner in America, because no one knows where to go. No one knows where the really good webcomics are. The independents thrive on word of mouth. The first generation of online syndicates grabbed every strip with an audience they could get. Or they went the other way, and went so idiosyncratic only the intellectuals or the gamers wanted to read them. The one way an online syndicate can really thrive and flourish is through editorial standards, Danny. If they grab strips with the broadest appeal, that fit together into a cohesive comics page, representing the spectrum of comics while remaining consistent in quality, the word will get out. People will begin to gravitate to that syndicate. The publishing world will see them as professionals. The reading public will ee them as a gateway to good comics.
[JUBAL leans forward.]
JUBAL
That's where we're headed, Danny. I don't know if Comicsense.com will become that portal. I do know that the only chance we have is if we make hard decisions. Professional decisions. We need to say 'this is a good strip, but it doesn't fit our site, and we pass.' That's why I hired you, Danny. I need someone who can look the single most popular webcomic's creators in the eye and say "I'm sorry. You don't fit."
[DANNY looks away, smiling a hint.]
JUBAL
What's the PR fallout look like?
DANNY
The rumors are out there. I'm saying there's no chance Pennyfarthing would come to our site.
JUBAL
What are the Pennyfarthing guys going to do?
DANNY
They're going to have to address the rumors, and keep their street cred. I expect they're gonna make fun of us.
JUBAL
Sooner rather than later?
DANNY
I'd bank on it.
JUBAL
And they'll link to us in the bargain?
DANNY
Seems like they generally do.
JUBAL (smiling)
Then you might want to let Simon know that at 11:27 tomorrow, we're going to be having a few hundred thousand guests show up.
DANNY
Seems likely.
JUBAL
Now get the Hell out of my office. Some of us have work to do.
[The camera pulls back. The music swells up, taking center stage, in time for Lou Reed to sing: Jackie is just speeding away/Thought she was James Dean for a day/Then I guess she had to crash/Valium would have helped that bash/Said, Hey babe,Take a walk on the wild side.]
[Fade to black and EXEC. CREDITS, as the song continues: I said, Hey honey/Take a walk on the wild side/and the coloured girls say/doo do doo do doo do do doo....]
Posted by Eric Burns at 6:22 PM | Comments (61)
August 30, 2006
Eric: Stuff.
It was a busy day. I actually have a long essay written, but it's held back right now for editorial reasons.
Hey, it can happen.
I would like to point out, however, that I would really like to learn to play the Theramin. This is because of that meme about the mixing of the Simpsons theme with Star Trek? Any musical instrument played via stabbing gestures into the air is a worthy one.
God help me, the song I most want to play on a Theramin is "Don't You Want Me Baby" by the Human League.
Posted by Eric Burns at 11:27 PM | Comments (20)
August 29, 2006
Eric: Omnipedia: Meta'd
I did this a while ago, as part of a background for a role playing thing I was doing. Hand in hand with it was some noodling with old Superguy concepts, and the odd notes for background materials for some potential fiction I wanted to write.
Why I did it in the style of a faux Wikipedia article I can't say.
Anyhow, it interests me, and I figured it might interest some of you, too. So enjoy.
(Taken from 2025 Omnipedia article on Meta'd, under a Creative Uncommons License.)
OMNIPEDIA "One Tome to Rule Them All, One Tome to Find Them. One Tome to Bring them all and in the Darkness Define Them."
Category: Culture: Modern Street Gangs
META'D
The Meta'd (pronounced 'metaed') are a loose network of related 'sets' or street gangs in major metropolitan centers of the United States. Originally centered in the Midwest, particularly Chicago and Detroit, the Meta'd now have significant concentrations in Los Angeles, New York, Miami and the Pacific Northwest. Unlike most street gangs, the Meta'd typically organize around paranormals (thus the word 'meta'd,' which is derived from the slang term 'meta,' which means superhuman or paranormal human), and so often individual sets of Meta'd can rival much larger non-superpowered (or "norm") gangs in power and influence. Meta'd are typically identified by wearing blaze orange (the color typically worn by hunters), with different sets using different applications to denote their individual set allegiances. Some sets of Meta'd have rivalries as intense as any the Meta'd have with external street gangs. Meta'd are often associated with the more militant side of neo-punk music.
History
The Meta'd first appeared in Chicago, when Ted "Slash" Condit and Roberto "Burn" Gabriel struck up a friendship, though they were members of rival norm street gangs. The pair realized they had more in common than they had with their gang members, and both knew other paranormals (generally with limited powersets) who found themselves marginalized even within their own gangs or separate from themselves. Forswearing their old allegiances, they founded the L-Train Loop Meta'd in 2014.
The Meta'd grew in Chicago and the ideas began to spread to other cities almost immediately. To a certain degree, this caught authorities by surprise, since there was little indication that paranormality had become quite this common. (The conventional wisdom to that point had the rate of American paranormality -- which was believed to be a higher concentration than the rest of the world -- was approximately 1 in 1.1 million. By that standard, statistically there should have only been two or three paranormals in all of metropolitan Chicago. Instead, the Meta'd of Chicago had grown to 50 members in various loosely affiliated sets by 2015. While some no doubt came from other cities, there was clearly a much higher native paranormal population than was previously expected. Some sociologists believe that due to discomfort with their abilities (and the differences perceived between themselves and normals) a high percentage of metahumans with limited powersets never reveal themselves as paranormal -- with the appearance of the Meta'd, these paranormals -- particularly those from disenfranchised, disadvantaged or economically depressed or otherwise dysfunctional conditions -- found the idea of a safe haven very appealing.
Over the next several years, the different sets of Meta'd have grown and flourished in and around other gang cultures. As Neo-punk began to gain traction in urban areas, many Neo-punk artists have developed strong ties to the Meta'd community, with groups such as the Cheshire Kittens and Death of Superguy using Meta'd as security for their venues. (The Cheshire Kittens typically wear blaze orange on stage, identifying themselves with the Meta'd directly, though it's not not know what if any set they were ever actually part of.)
The Meta'd Today
The Meta'd have known sets in Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, New York City, Miami, Baltimore and Boston. The sets are at best loosely affiliated, and rival sets have been known to emerge in the same city. At the same time, Meta'd typically stick together when threatened by norm gangs, so many norm gangs simply leave the Meta'd alone.
Gang income comes from the usual sources -- protection/extortion money from their neighborhoods, crime, petty theft, being hired out by bodyguards (particularly among neo-punk artists and the neo-punk community), and in some situations controlling drugs and/or prostitution in their areas. Most sets -- even those who run drugs to norms -- eschew drug use themselves for safety reasons and to set them apart from norms. Some sets specialize in the so-called Power drugs that grant some measure of paranormality to normals for brief periods of time as part of their effect (or side effect). There are rumors that some cut these drugs (or make them unusually pure), either in an attempt to injure norms or to drive the creation of new permanent metahumans. Gang representatives dismiss such claims as propaganda.
One interesting division between sets are their attitudes towards sympathetic norm gangs. Some sets of Meta'd form alliances with norm gang sets as part of a mutual protection pact (these are called the "Live" Meta'd, for "live and let live."). Others eschew all such alliances as a violation of what the Meta'd stand for (these are known as the "Pure" Meta'd). One of the best known of these schisms is in the Seattle Meta'd community. The Aurora Street Meta'd are a set of Live Meta'd directly tied to a norm street gang that calls themselves the Aurora Street Metabees (for "Meta-wannabe"). The Metabees wear bright shocking green bandanas on their left upper arms. The Aurora Street Meta'd wear their orange bandanas on their left upper arms and a darker green bandana underneath it. In contrast, the Broadway 2-Told Meta'd, from the Broadway neighborhood, are a strictly Pure Meta'd set who guard their territory from any encroaching norm gang activity, and wear their blaze orange on their right arms. (And naturally wear no green colors at all.)
Politics and Sociology
One common trait between Live Meta'd and Pure Meta'd is in the political arena. Many Meta'd actively campaign for broader acceptance of metahumans in society. The restriction of paranormals from such lucrative careers as professional sports (often seen as a route off of the streets for athletic norms, but denied to metahumans as unfair to human competitors) and various legislation designed to maintain public order and enforce fair business practices are seen as blatantly discriminatory against the metahuman community by a significant percentage of the Meta'd.
More radical elements within the Meta'd hold forth that the superior abilities the Meta'd possess should yield superior privilege -- that if metas were given unrestricted access to the opportunities the norms enjoy, then metas would swiftly displace norms at the top of the social order. They call for immediate abolition of all legislation restricting paranormality and its expression in legitimate business, holding forth that given equal opportunity, metahumans will swiftly outcompete normals. They also hold that this truth is self-evident to the point that normals actively conspire to oppress metahumans, in order to preserve norm prerogatives. Finally, some sets of Meta'd believe themselves wholly above norm law, since the laws are written to benefit norms over metas.
One prevailing theory among cultural anthropologists and sociologists is that with the decline in the past two decades of so-called "Supervillain activity" (in particular the grandiose schemes of potential world-conquerers, many of whom employed low level or otherwise less potent metahumans), the paranormal elements of law enforcement are seen less as protectors and more as oppressors by the underclass. Absent a more ritualized "supervillainous" outlet, they find themselves collecting and developing into ganglike structures. Certainly, a key component of the Meta'd philosophy is that "super heroes" are traitors to their race, acting to protect norms instead of exalt metas. Meta'd have similar responses to the concept of secret identities -- finding such 'passing' behavior to be the social equivalent of closeted homosexuals, who feel they will have their rights infringed upon and become social outcasts should their secret be revealed. The act of concealing one's paranormalities so that they can appear 'normal' is referred to in Meta'd circles as "bluesuiting," from a speech given by Meta'd activist Helen "Cold-T" Taylor:
"You know what I'm talking about. The god lands on Earth, and conceals his spandex suit and bright red cape. He puts on a blue suit and tie that makes him look stiff and awkward, and combs his hair to look unexceptional. His eyes are much better than human eyes, but he puts on glasses so he looks weak, and frail. He clothes himself not only in mundanity but in depectitude, and acts the part of the awkward fool, so no one suspects he is not a man, but a god. The Meta'd reject these blue suits. They reject these glasses if we do not need them to see. We reject the idea that we must not just conform but present as inferior to the normals around us. We stand before you proud, distinctive, and dare I say it superior. We embrace our godhood."
Another catchphrase of Meta'd philosophy is the principle of "Just Clever Enough," which is held up as a key component of norm oppression of metahumanity. This too comes from a Meta'd activist's speech -- in this case, Charles Foster White ("I.Q. Nu") of San Francisco's Wharfside Meta'ds:
"We threaten norms because we outdo them in every way. The golden trait of humanity over all other species has always been intelligence. They think, they rationalize, they use language, and they conceptualize, and so they can master lions and tigers that are stronger and faster and more physically robust. And now there are metas. And one of the four most common metahuman expressions is enhanced intellect. Metas think better than norms. Metas rationalize with greater facility and sophistication than norms. Metas can develop languages and concepts norms cannot begin to keep up with. If intelligence is the great advantage of humanity, then humanity is doomed.
"However, the norms have figured something crucial out. While they stand at the top of the heap, they do not need to be smarter than metas. They do not need to be more clever than metas. They do not need to be better than metas. They simply have to be just clever enough. They have to be just clever enough to pass laws that say we cannot use our powers in the course of human affairs. They have to be just clever enough to lift some of our most powerful up, and convince them to act on behalf of norms over metas, to negate our advantages. They have to be just clever enough to consistently act in their own best interest instead of in the interests of a greater justice. They have to be just clever enough to know that if they keep us minimized and disorganized we cannot pose a threat to them no matter how powerful or clever we are.
"And so I say we must not strive to outthink them. We must not strive to use brute intelligence or strength against them. Instead, we must come together. We must recognize their tactics. We must understand that if we act as one, with organization and with cunning, we can defeat the impediments they put in our path. We do not need to collectively be more clever than all of them -- we need to be just clever enough to act in our own best interest, in a way that counters them. Once we do that, our natural superiorities will let us outstrip them, and we will assume our rightful place without any need for violence or pain."
This sense of inevitable superiority over norm society is a common trait among Meta'd. Some sets of Meta'd (particularly Live Meta'd sets) feel that as metahuman expression becomes permitted in norm society, the natural advantages paranormals possess will elevate them to prominence. Others -- particularly among the Pure Meta'd -- believe that being "just clever enough" involves knowing when to actually strike back. The debate is typified by Evolution versus Revolution -- the former believing that Metahuman superiority is inevitable and will come in due course, the latter believing that only by shattering the old world order can a new world order take place. Neither camp, however, is particularly concerned with what happens to norms as society changes. "Norms don't care about me," Cheshire Kittens guitarist Tabitha "G-Listening" Strong once said. "So why should I care about them? I'll look after my own kind. There's a lot of norms out there. If they got off their fat asses and did for themselves instead of letting Uncle Tom metas protect them, they'd be able to take care of themselves, right?"
The use of paranormals as 'super heroes' and other forms of law enforcement -- which some might say is the traditional use of paranormals in American society -- is seen as direct evidence of a cornerstone of the Meta'd philosophy: the oppression of the paranormal on behalf of the normal. The recognizable tropes of Superhumanity -- the distinctive (often sexually exploitive) costuming, the adoption of codenames so as to make them archetypes instead of identifiable people, the use of "secret identities" to allow super heroes to assimilate into norm society when they aren't acting to protect that society, and even the use of 'signals' and other dramatic devices for norm police to summon paranormals at their whim to fight (generally metahuman) opposition are seen as clear signs of the devaluation of superhuman identity hand in hand with the exaltation of superhuman acts on behalf of norm society. "Good" superhumans strike down antisocial metahumans on behalf of norms, then change into their blue suits, put on their glasses, pretend to be norms themselves, and don't even ask for thank yous in return. Meta'd activists claim that these acts marginalize and devalue metahumanity on both sides of the equation -- "uppity" metahumans get struck down by docile "superheroes," thus preventing norms from having to do anything about paranormal rights.
Paranormal poet, writer and philosopher Dr. Harold T. McGinnis (himself a public Meta'd sympathizer), wrote about the issue this way in The New Yorker:
"My heritage is African, my birthplace is America. And, like many African Americans of my generation, I have reaped the benefits of the Civil Rights struggle that began previous to the Civil War in this nation and culminated in the Civil Rights Movement of the sixties. And while we have not yet achieved all our goals, we are vastly closer than our grandfathers were. And so I have studied the Civil Rights Movement and the attendant movements that surrounded it, and I have been struck at how differently the Metahuman Rights Movement actually is.
"Blacks used to extol 'Black Power,' but more telling was the Black Panther's exhortations of 'all power to the people!' All people, not just black people, and not just white people, should share in the power. This was the key to our struggle in those days -- we were not asking to be made masters in the house where once we were slaves. We were demanding that our former masters look us in the eye and shake our hands, both sides free and equal in all things.
"This is not something metahumans can say, with a clear conscience. We cannot claim a desire to be equal in all things with our normal brethren, because we cannot be equal to them. Our powers and abilities make us demonstrably, obviously superior in too many ways for us to claim 'equality.' If all barriers were stripped away tomorrow -- if metas could compete with norms in all arenas, then the next day would see the sun setting on norm dominance. They simply cannot compete.
"The Zooside Meta'd of New York once challenged the New York Knicks -- that year's World Champions -- to a pickup game. The Knicks declined, which was probably smart on their part. The Zoosiders have four different metas with enhanced dexterity, speed, agility and accuracy in different ways, not to mention a character whose arms stretch far enough to let him 'dunk' free throws and another who could leap for a dunk from center court. However, the idea that these tall men of basketball are "world champions" is ridiculous on the face of it. I say, let them play a team of Meta'd. In 2019 the NBA Salary Cap was made $142 million per team. All right. Do a best out of seven series between the Knicks and a given local Meta'd gang. If the Meta'd win the best of seven series, give them the next year's one hundred and forty-two million and let the Knicks try to make ends meet. Do you think the Knicks will take me up on that offer?
"Put metas of intellect into 'publish or perish' positions in direct competition with norms, and they outperform the norms four to one in research and publication. This has been shown time and again, to the point that private laboratories typically have clauses in their contracts that restrict meta researchers from claiming full patent rights or exercising stock options in the same way, lest they overwhelm their less gifted colleagues and end up running the company de facto if not de jure. American business learned the lessons of Awesome Amalgamated and Harxxon Energy well, and norm executives have moved to secure their industries and their positions against the encroachment of the next Andy Awesome or Chalandra Harkness.
"Give metas a chance to use their paranormalities to make a living, and they will always -- always -- exceed norms in that same position. I don't care if we're discussing steelworkers who can withstand the heat of blast furnaces or nanotechnicians who can shrink to atomic size or even ditch diggers who never get tired and can dig a ditch in fifteen seconds instead of fifteen minutes. When give absolutely equal opportunity alongside norms, with all preference or prejudice taken out of the equation, the metas win every time.
"That means that we cannot demand equality and expect to be heard. It cannot be done. And we cannot even blame the norms for their perceived prejudice or short sightedness. The norms are not short sighted -- they can see all too clearly the inevitable result of metahuman equality, and they don't like the looks of it one bit.
"And yet, metahuman equality -- the reduction and elimination of all barriers to metahumans in society -- is inevitable. It is inevitable because it is the only fair thing to do, and it is inevitable because if America doesn't open its society to metahumans, some other society will -- and that society will overrun America in the long run. Darwin is alive and well, and the most fit will take over the right niche, like it or not. The question is, will American norms figure out that their long term best interest is in embracing their future quickly, letting themselves take a subordinate role to their gifted and superior children, and letting our Nation be the leader in the changes to come... or will they hold onto their power and suppress the smartest, fastest, strongest and most capable members of their society, marginalizing them and calling them "villains," until one day they discover that the Europeans are colonizing Titan and curing cancer and running their flying cars without gasoline, and no one will even trade with us because of our backwards ways?"
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Posted by Eric Burns at 1:26 AM | Comments (45)
May 17, 2006
Eric: Dude.
Here's the thing. I'm a writer. I write.
I do it because I love writing. I do it because I'm not happy when I'm not writing. I do it because... well because it's what I do.
Sometimes, I get paid for it. And that rocks.
Getting my copies of books with my name on the cover rocks too. Smelling the paper, smelling the ink.
People reading what I write rocks. You all rock.
And I have had any number of moments. Thresholds. Moments that are seminal. Moments where my world rocks a little, but in a very good way.
I had one of those tonight.
I've been honored and privileged to write a few introductions and forewards for comic and cartoon collections. It always humbles me to have someone whose work I respect ask me to contribute something to one of their collected works -- I mean, this is one of the high points of their lives we're discussing. To be asked to be a part of that is an honor and a privilege. It is, in the end, fun.
And it's a blast to see them offered online. And those rare moments I go to a comic book store and see them there, it is amazingly cool. It is just as cool as it is to walk to the RPG section of those stores and see one of my books over there as well. I like RPG stores. They're good for my ego.
Well. Ever since I've sold stuff professionally, I've haunted Barnes and Noble, Borders and all of their ilk. Because while I've known that the likelihood that Sidewinder: Wild West Adventures or something from In Nomine would be sitting on a Barnes and Noble shelf was small, it wasn't zero. (I thought I'd have that moment with Star Trek: Worlds. And then it went PDF only. Sometimes, the Gods enjoy laughing at us.) I still do it to this day.
And I look through the graphic novel section. But not for anything of mine. I look there to see if folks from the webcomics world have made the jump. It happens on occasion, and I think that's really cool.
Well. So, tonight, I was looking over the graphic novels, and my heart stopped. Because the Image Comics collections of Scott Kurtz's PvP were there. And well they should be.
More to the point, volume 3 is there.
I should have expected it. PvP is big enough to make the jump to bookstores -- more than big enough. And Scott Kurtz has worked hard, and Image ain't small potatoes. Of course the Image PvP collections are there.
So I picked up Volume 3. And I opened the cover. And I read the opening words of the foreward.
I get a certain amount of e-mail about webcomics these days. A good number of those e-mails center on webcomics the writer loves. They extol the virtues of their favorite webcomics. They talk about the art, the writing, the characterization and the jokes. They are enthusiastic about webcomics and they want to share their enthusiasm with others.
I'm not going to write about those letters in this introduction.
I skipped ahead, to the very end.
Specifically, to the part that said "Eric Alfred Burns, New Hampshire" and had a picture of the Ursula Vernon 'Snarky' you see in the corner of the web site's pages.
And I knew, right then, that it was highly unlikely that a Barnes and Noble in New Hampshire was atypical in its ordering. It's better than even odds that the other Barnes and Nobles in the region carry similar selections.
And pretty darn likely the same is true throughout this half of the country. Or maybe even the full country.
And that the same is probably true of Powell's. Or Borders. Or the Elliot Bay Bookstore. Or Tattered Cover.
For the first time in my life, I can walk into any given large chain bookstore in the country and there's at least even odds I can put a hand on my book that has my fucking words in it.
I'm astoundingly grateful to Scott Kurtz for the opportunity. And I'm just blown away. This is one of those moments that just throws me. I literally have to adjust my world view to fit this fact.
I'm a writer.
I write.
The proof can likely be found at your friendly local bookstore.
Dude.
Posted by Eric Burns at 10:08 PM | Comments (24)
January 31, 2006
Eric: Momenteum
Writer's block is only rarely a block for me.
It's happened, mind. I've had days where I feel physically incapable of writing.
But most of the time, I don't go through writer's block. I go through writer's fatigue. Writer's fatigue is that point where you cannot imagine having the energy to actually produce something worth reading. It's a cousin to inertia, really. You're at rest, creatively. You want to stay at rest, creatively.
That's where a blog like this one comes in handy. It's a pump-primer. It forces the words to start coming out, and once words one, two, three, four and five come out, it's far easier to get to words five-hundred-and-ninty-two, five-hundred-and-ninty-three, and so on.
This is also why so many writer's guides/handbooks/what have you's open with the injunction to write every day. For many people, this is because it's easier to write on Thursday if you already wrote on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
For whatever reason, my momentum has been stalled out, and every new attempt to regain it pushes the whole inertia going. And I have a lot of writing to do.
So. You're seeing this post over here. Trying to build up speed. Trying to get some traction. So that somewhere in all this I can write the 8,000 words I really need to.
Posted by Eric Burns at 10:04 AM | Comments (22)
January 27, 2006
Eric: Reprint of my 2006 Livejournal Down The Rabbit Hole Meme Thing. Stuff. Thing.
I'm not precisely sure when my desk was moved outside. Or perhaps it's that the insides of things are now outside, and the outsides of things are now inside. I do know that I've been watching students wander into an enclosed building to "get some fresh air," while the offices and the like now rest inside of snowdrifts and parking lots.
I can't see that it's made much difference. Though I worry about the racks of servers should we get snow.
The lake gleamed with snow and ice, newly refrozen and resnowed-upon after last week's complete melting and rainstorm, and I sat at my desk, still covered with junk, though of course as it was outside the piles of paper kept blowing off. The sunlamp I have -- a present for all of us without windows, normally -- seems to have been replaced with a fluorescent model that does nothing but buzz annoyingly and make me more pallid.
Otherwise, the network is wireless so my daily work is unimpeded. I am glad Wednesday bought me a USB coffee warmer pad, though. It plugs into my USB hub and provides a warm spot to put my coffee mug down. Other folks are drinking their coffee hurriedly, lest it be chilled down within minutes.
Twenty-seven degrees. With a wind.
"Hey, Eric," one of the faculty members says. He's cheerful -- tall, almost lanky. One of the perkier history teachers. He sits across from me, the office chair he sits in crunching down into the snow crust. He's in full parka. "Looks like we're finally getting some winter, huh?"
"Looks like," I said, trying to figure how to end the conversation. And how to keep typing with gloves on. I'm glad I finally bought gloves, I thought.
He leaned closer, conspiratorially. Wind blew across his face, causing ice crystals to form in his mustache. "I wouldn't want to be outside on a day like today."
I looked nonplussed. "Outside?" I asked.
"Oh yeah," he said, pointing to the Quonset hut the kids had piled into.
"You realize that's a building."
"Oh yes."
I shook my head. I'd read Douglas Adams too. "So that's the inside of the asylum?"
He blinked, looking blank. "Asylum?"
"Never mind. The inside of that building--"
"No no no. The outside of that building."
"The outside of that building is contained within its corrugated steel?"
"I'm not sure it's steel. But yes."
I took a deep breath. "All right. Why?"
He grinned, triumphantly. "Climate control!"
I stared.
He continued grinning.
I stared some more.
He continued grinning.
"Climate control?"
"Well, yes. Right now, there are days that are too hot to do anything fun in the summer, and too cold to do anything in the winter. Or there's rain or sleet or wind or what have you. That's terribly inefficient."
"Inefficient?"
"Oh yes. Now, here's the thing. We're a school. We have a very specific schedule we have to follow. If we have ski team practice, we can't have it suddenly rain and melt all the snow, can we? The ski team has to practice."
"So... you have a building you send them into--"
"Out to."
"--out to, instead?"
"Of course! Now, everything is precisely regulated. We know exactly what kind of outdoor weather to expect. We can plan accordingly."
"So... why do we have to sit outside--"
"Inside!"
"--inside in the snow and wind?"
He chuckled, rather like he was talking to a moron. "Look, we can't very well contain outside without there being a state change from 'inside.' It's absolutely necessary that in order to have an outside, there has to be a boundary that's crossed. That's essential."
"So... in order to contain outside, you have to release inside into the wild?"
"Of course."
I rubbed the bridge of my nose, and sipped my coffee. The USB warming plate had kept it tepid, though the wind had picked up so there was just so much it could do. "But don't we lose efficiency? I mean, if it starts to rain or snow--"
He looked puzzled. "It can't rain or snow inside. That's silly."
I blinked. "What do you call this stuff we're sitting in?"
"Chairs?"
"Under the chairs?"
"Oh. Well, the A/C is on a bit high at the moment."
"And if... oh, water starts falling from the sky?"
"Pipe leak, clearly."
"Clearly," I said, dryly.
Suddenly, there were shrieks of buzzers and bells, mounted on light poles and the like throughout campus. People in their outdoor cubicles and arranged classroom desks got up, shivering still, and began filing towards the 'Outside' hut.
"What the--"
"Fire drill. Come on. We need to go outside."
I sighed, and took a few moments to pack my laptop out. I wouldn't want to leave it inside. It looks like the pipes might burst a little later.
Posted by Eric Burns at 12:36 PM | Comments (12)
January 26, 2006
Wednesday: Lesson Zero
It really started with Sylvia.
You know that I collect trainwrecks. Among them, I keep a small stack of confessional autobiographies, diaries, essays, and collected correspondence by batshit insane twentieth-century writers. Theoretically, I keep them around as insight into process. They're more useful than writing guides. In many cases, though, they're also more fascinating than whatever the writers are actually known for.
They're also, all too often, case studies in What Not To Do, or Why Not To Take Yourself So God Damned Seriously. They're cautionary tales. Warnings. From the sophomoric Spiral Galaxies and New Words of Mary Daly's Outercourse to the addiction-as-failed-career-salvage of Elizabeth Wurtzel's More Now Again, the stack tracks where experimental phases just shouldn't turn into ongoing lifestyle choices. Or, for that matter, creative ones.
(And some are just hilariously bad, like Wurtzel's stuff. But I digress.)
This started when I was thirteen. I'd just finished reading four suicide prevention books in a row, all of which which devoted chapters to Sylvia Plath's purpoted thrall over depressed teenagers, particularly the girls. This fascinated me. No one had told me there was a thrall-holder! My life as a depressed teenaged girl clearly lacked the mandated literature. I obviously wasn't doing this properly.
(Also, I was sick of seeing that one passage of Anne Sexton's "Wanting to Die" quoted over and over. Perfectly good shamanic cannibalism imagery there, and we keep getting the special language?! Even when the logical progression from suicidal ideation to self-execution typically stems from "why build"? God. But I digress.)
Unfortunately, when I ransacked the local library for such as Ariel and The Bell Jar, all I could find was Plath's Letters Home. I don't know whether this was down to demand or the lack thereof. Later, in America, I'd find the expurgated journals in all of their nosepicking glory. I'd even find the poetry and prose, which was now utterly secondary.
But, for two years, all that I had was a bunch of self-censored letters from Plath to (mostly) her mother. Many of them were redolent with the turgid ghost of future publication's potential, as I'd later find with her unabridged early adult diaries. Further, Plath maintained some sense of autonomy from her mother by maintaining the pretense of happiness in spite of whatever. As an overview of Plath's life, the letters weren't particularly useful on their own, and left a weak first impression: this woman holds sway over legions of depressed young girls?
The overview of her childhood and adolescence, now, that was the gold. There were the underpinnings of a particularly vain self-definition as writer. If I'd had half a brain growing up, I would have gleaned lesson zero from them:
Just because someone tells you you have potential doesn't mean that you're any good yet. Have a sense of perspective.
Selections from juvenile diaries and poetry demonstrated that she plainly wasn't There yet, whatever There meant. Young Plath's progression indicated the presence of a gift, but not of skill -- nor, for that matter, was the gift particularly well demonstrated. For example, she was still mistaking personal experience for the universally resonant:
"And so there comes a time in your senior year at high school when, because you love the ocean and the wind and sand, someone drins and drives you down to the sea; and because you like poetry, someone gives you a poetry anthology for graduation; and because that someone is collegiate and quite lovely, you invite him to your senior prom and write to him every day for a whole summer long fat letters with little coloured pictures in the margins. And no matter how you change in your life, there was a time when someone was really important."
She was also blowing things out of proportion. Of her first tragic poem, her English teacher observed, "Incredible that one so young could have experienced anything so devastating." And, in fact, Plath had lost her father to post-surgical embolism and a bout with severe diabetes some years prior. So you could assume that "I Thought That I Could Not Be Hurt" stemmed from those issues:
[...]Then, suddenly my world turned gray,
and darkness wiped aside my joy.
A dull and aching void was left
where careless hands had reached out to
destroy
my silver web of happiness.
The hands then stopped in wonderment,
for, loving me, they wept to see
the tattered ruins of my firmament
(How frail the human heart must be-
a mirrored pool of thought. So deep
and tremulous an instrument
of glass that it can either sing,
or weep).
Fourteen-year-old's lament. Unfortunately, it was written shortly after Plath's grandmother accidentally smudged one of Sylvia's pastel drawings with an apron.
Out of context, one might read the English teacher's praise as sarcasm. However, it wasn't. Plath went home and squeed to her diary about the praise lavished upon her in class, the "lyric gift above the ordinary" attributed to her. (Mind, the whole world was likely not meant to have read that particular bit of her journals, but it didn't help first impressions.)
Worse, at some point in 1948, she'd fallen into the trap of Writing Poetry About Writing:
You ask me why I spend my life writing?
Do I find entertainment?
Is it worthwhile?
Above all, does it pay?
If not, then, is there a reason? . . .
I write only because
There is a voice within me
That will not be still.
("Wow," I thought. "I'm not going to even touch that subject until such time as I'm confident that I can put it better than that."
I didn't always succeed. Not having learned lesson zero, I wrote piles of dreck for years and thought it shone. Some of it was probably about writing, and much of it revolved around insight I'd convinced myself was genuine. I had a bad case of Dead Poets Society syndrome in places.
I also hadn't figured out one of lesson zero's corollaries: there's little external value to making pronouncements about your creative drive if you can't then whittle your statement down to something prosaic and functional. You can pose for effect all you want, but all the bollockry you care to pull out about voices or muses or Really Living Life or whatever is meaningless if you can't -- or won't -- convey the drive without dazzle, yet or ever. If your goal is less to communicate the compulsion and more to impress others with your depth and profundity, I tell you, you've likely already received your reward.
So, by backing away from the subject until I could handle it more eloquently, I was somewhat missing the point: I needed to be able to do this in a way which wasn't at all about the chrome.
Ergo, the mere act of writing this demonstrates an ongoing failure to grasp lesson zero.)
Much of her juvenile work is just flawed in the ways that much starting work is flawed. And she never asked -- probably quite the opposite -- for her mother to run her adolescence through the Sunny Optimist filter for public consumption; her work for the teen girls' magazines would take care of that for her a little later on.
Still, I was thirteen, and a bit short on context. I had a book of letters displaying Sylvia Plath as a bright, chatty, generally happy sort of person. The suicide attempt and prior events which informed The Bell Jar were rendered as a learning experience, in a "but I'm all better now!" tone. It didn't tell me much about what the suicide prevention books were asserting. That said, the early material, including letters from when Plath felt more comfortable discussing her process in correspondence, did lay the groundwork for understanding a dysfunctional relationship with writer's compulsion. (Arguably, it also gave instructions for creating one of my own, but that's another show.)
Plath's self-absorption and warped worldview remained in stunning force throughout her life. Her skill at chroming the purpose increases, and she does become more aware of her mechanisms, but the chrome remains essential. All throughout the journals, she often writes in private as if for the public ("as if an eye were upon me"), or with the conviction that her experience bears disproportionate weight of truth. ("[Y]ou have seen a lot, felt deeply & your problems are universal enough to be made meaningful -- WRITE --"; "How much of life I have known: love, disillusion, madness, hatred, murderous passions[...] I will write mad stories. But honest. I know the horror of primal feelings, obsessions"). She had trained herself not only to respond to the writer's compulsion, but to seek affirmation through publication and acclaim.
Over time, it became clearer to me what was going on. When she built herself up, it was to tell herself that her personal experience was unusually valuable. The next round of positive attention was the only one that mattered, because it was the only one that could confirm her ongoing personal worth, or that her depth and conveyance of insight was as she claimed. Without getting into the reasons (beyond the scope of this essay, and better handled in numerous biographies), so much seems to spring from the basic premise, "I am a good writer. I am a gifted writer." The qualifiers are essential components of her identity; specialness is as much a factor as art or craft.
Later, she was good. She may have believed this too soon.
When the first crushing disappointments came -- rejection from a prestigious short story class, among others -- she learned to retroactively loathe her published work. Coupled with exhaustion from her stint at Mademoiselle, she developed a block which precipitated her first self-mutilation and suicide attempts. This would revisit her in several forms over her life: I am not really a good writer. I therefore have no purpose. Thus, when she asserts that the root of herself is the compulsion, the unstilled voice, that rings false. The compulsion doesn't define her; it's a means to an end. Rejection, invisibility, and unpublished work are challenges to the self-concept.
Lesson zero never really takes, and that informs her practice.
So, there's a danger in poorly balanced praise, and accepting saidsame out of turn. There's a danger in establishing internal purpose and definition too early, and/or from a point of weakness.
It's yellow lights like these which leave me more interested in exploring trainwrecks than not, to some extent. It's not that I see myself as authoritative in any way; I don't. I do find it preferable to work from the ground up when sorting something out for myself, and writing is one way to accomplish that.
I need to know, and understand, what doesn't work, in order to better grasp what does.
I need to know, and understand, what not to do.
Posted by Wednesday White at 1:00 AM
November 30, 2005
Eric: To my father, the Doctor, on the seventieth anniversary of his birth.
This is a poem, and it's quite long, so I put it behind a cut.
If you like it... I'm glad.
The Doctor, I believe, will like it.
In any case, I love him very much. This is for him.
To my father, the Doctor, on the seventieth anniversary of his birth.
He climbs down the stairs of the Pleasant Street house,
quiet as you can be on stairs designed to squeak
exactly when you don't want them to, when people sleep.
and he, the man, husband and father creeps
down before dawn on a cold Fort Kent morning.
Winter is ice and snow and bitter wind up there -- it tears
across the house