Deadlines and Downtimes

Hmmm. Sometime way back in November I mentioned something about taking a break from blogging in order to focus on some other writing work. But I never took that break, and I'm farther behind in a few projects than I would like to be.

So today I'm announcing that I'm taking a break for serious. I want to have a working final draft of this short novel by the end of the month, which means it must not only take priority over everything else I do in my leisure time, but also dominate my waking thoughts. Any neurons I divert towards blogging will be to the manuscript's detriment. Once I polish off a draft that I won't be afraid to send to literary agent types (oh christ i'm actually going to go through this again fuuuuck), I will resume typing vast textchunks about things that aren't video games (and therefore aren't worth anyone's effort to read).

In the meantime: seeing as it's MLK Day, I would direct you to a transcription and recording of his "Beyond Vietnam" speech, which is much less often cited than "I Have a Dream," but is fundamental message is very probably more relevant in today's America. (True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see than an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.)

I'll also point out the Goodreads link that just appeared in the sidebar. (Goodreads is still a thing, right?) I'll try to keep the page up to date and populate it with books I've already read. If books is something you're into, go ahead and friend me.

Downtime begins now. See you in a few weeks, I'm sure! (I hope.)

Today we are a travel blog.

Air Canada screwed me. I'm stuck in Frankfurt Airport for another six hours until I can fly out to Toronto, and lord only knows how long it will be until another plane can carry me to back Jersey. The worst part of it is that I'm trapped in the Eurozone with a wallet and bank account full of worthless American dollars. I just paid seven dollars for a twelve ounce latte. WiFi runs ten dollars an hour.

Fuuuuucckkk.

Fuck Air Canada. Fuck Canada. Henceforth I shall live as wastefully as possible so as to accelerate the US's inevitable push northward to annex Canada and gobble up its natural resources. YOU FUCKERS DESERVE IT. YOUR FUTURE IS A BOOT STAMPING ON A HUMAN FACE. FOREVER.

Sorry, sorry. I'm not mad at you, I'm just mad at the situation.

aghgofuckyourself

Uh, so I guess I got nothing better to do than talk about Poland, where I spent Christmas with my father. A friend of mine insisted I take pictures, and I got off to a great start by leaving my camera in Jersey. I was able to borrow a camera from my old man, but didn't get much opportunity to take many snappies. But let's have a look at them, since I really don't have anything better to do. The alternative is to buy a giant stein of beer and chain smoke and --

-- actually, that sounds pretty great. You know that they still sell Djarum cigarettes in Poland? I wrote The Zeroes chaining Djarum Vanillas, and I've got a pack of those in my pocket. Fuck Air Canada, fuck my lungs.

Anyway. We're still gonna run through these.

This grainy vision of loveliness is our Christmas tree. I haven't decorated one of these suckers in ages, and I think we did a fine job. Unfortunately, by Polish standards it was a bit "cold," meaning not garish enough. After all those decades of the austere Soviet aesthetic, the pendulum has swung the other way, and gaudy is in.

We didn't have a star, so we used a codpiece instead. Or at least that's what it looks like.

Here is a street in Pruszków, the suburb of Warsaw where my old man has lived since 2009. I arbitrarily snapped it when I realized I still owed Amy photographs of the Polish landscape and had only photographed the damn Christmas tree.

I'm not sure what to say about Pruszków. It's a very lovely, very chill little town. (I use "chill" to mean "laid-back," of course, but it is also very cold.) Speaking with a classmate's Polish girlfriend at my high-school reunion, I was told that Pruszków is known for being a mafia town, but her information was outdated. Now it's known for....

...good question.

Anyway, If I had to object or complain about some aspects of Pruszków, I'd point out a litter problem. There's a lot of trash lying around, even in the (otherwise lovely) public park on the fringe of town. And you know how cleaning up after your dog is standard procedure in the States (or at least in the parts from which I've hailed?) Well -- not so much here. The shit piles up on the frozen ground and gets buried by successive snowfalls. When the temperature rises, as it did on an unseasonably warm day in the middle of the week, the snow melts and disappears, leaving behind several weeks' worth of cryogenically preserved dogshit.

(Recycling bins. There aren't many of those, either. The only one I saw during my whole stay was at the Warsaw airport this morning. I probably threw out more plastic bottles this week than in the previous fifty-one combined.)

Here is a church in Pruszków, snapped for the same reason as the street pictured above. Poland is very Catholic.

Here is your hideous correspondent at the Copernicus Museum in Warsaw. I had my choice of being photographed as Marie Curie, Nicholas Copernicus, or Albert Einstein. You see there wasn't really much of a choice at all.

The Copernicus Museum is one of those interactive science museums in the same vein as Jersey's Liberty Science Center, which means it's great fun and does an admirable job of illustrating scientific concepts through interactive exhibits. The problem is that it brings in too many god damn children, who run around mashing all the buttons and turning all the levers they can without bothering to notice the lessons the pieces were built to convey.

Toys are wasted on kids.

This creature is a robot that uses algorithms to create rhyming poetry. It had a Polish and an English setting, and what it can produce in English is much more limited in range than in Polish.

If an Apollo lives in this rational age, surely He would appear to His faithful in this image. HAIL!

A marvel of Polish engineering. Every hour on the hour this thing activates. The wings flap, the wheels turn, and all the clockwork critters and people on board come to life to the thunderous tune of "Carmina Burana." It's really quite a spectacle and I wish I'd figured out how to manipulate the camera into capturing it on video.

Here's a picture of your asshole correspondent's shoe, captured as he tried to figure out how to enable the camera's video recorder.

Here we go. This is the Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw's tallest building and a representative example of the short-lived Socialist Realism aesthetic. (You can probably read all about it in this Anne Applebaum book. Not that I have, mind you.) As you might have guessed, this concrete behemoth was constructed during the Stalin years as a "gift" to the faithful brothers and sisters in socialism from their Soviet overlords. After the end of the Soviet Empire, the Poles decided to repurpose it rather than knock it over -- hence the movie theater sign at the bottom of the picture.

I found a watercolor print of the beast on sale for a buck at a museum gift shop. How could I not buy it? I think I'm gonna give it to my roommate as a present. ("Merry Chistmas! I saw this picture of the ugliest building in Warsaw and thought of you. Go fuck yourself.")

Most of Warsaw was leveled after the failed uprising in 1944, but a few buildings survived. Lately they've come around to touching them up. The one on the left has already been restored; the one on the right is awaiting treatment.

These are quite beautiful in comparison to the apartments constructing during the Soviet period. Anything constructed between the late 1940s and the late 1990s are basically giant concrete slabs with windows. I'm told that early on, their Soviet architects wouldn't even give them porches or window boxes. ("Loyal workers only home for sleep! For what is home amenities being needed?") As the Soviet grasp on Poland became more tenuous, the newer buildings were constructed with slightly more consideration for their tenants' humanity.

Like my friend James, whenever I have a camera in my hands I feel compelled to capture images of local street art. My old man thinks I'm crazy for it. During my visits to Warsaw (and to a lesser extent Krakow) I've noticed that the Poles have a greater propensity for stencils then their American counterparts.

Interesting. You've got to figure that the average graffiti artist is in his early twenties. That means we're seeing NES iconography approrpriated by people who were too young to have ever owned an NES. Hmmm.

Warsaw again. One cool thing about the city -- and something I didn't notice until my old man pointed it out -- is that the buildings generally don't rise over three or four stories. (There's actually still a law in effect forbidding any structures taller than the Palace of Culture and Science.) The streets feel like streets instead of canyons. It's a city that never suffocates you, and it's rather refreshing (particularly if the city to which you've been most accustomed is New York).

This is a stature of Kronos/Saturn from inside the Warsaw Royal Castle. I don't know why I chose to snap this over any of the other art inside; maybe after reading so much Edith Hamilton, Marcus Aurelius, and Plato on this trip, I've just got Greco-Roman iconography on the brain.

The more one learns about Polish history, one cannot help but be impressed by the Poles' stubbornness and tenacity. The art in the Warsaw Royal Castle is an example. You'll enter a room full of tremendous 18th century landscape paintings and read that they were hung up in 1700-something -- and then some were stolen by Napoleon and the French army, and others by Nicholas and the Russian army, and were then returned so they could get stolen by the Nazis before the palace itself was blown to smithereens during the Uprising. The Poles finished reconstructing the castle -- without any approval or help from their Soviet administrators -- just in time for the paintings to be returned and hung back up in the late 1980s.

The royal scepter of the Polish king Augustus III (I believe). This photograph was taken for the sake of an inside joke with my friend Caroline involving the word "shaft."

This is my old man outside the entrance to the Royal Palace. I figured I might as well get -one- picture of him while I was in town.

My diminuitive friend Yen insisted I tell my father I love him at some point during the trip -- and if you're a male, you'll understand that this is really usually more of a deathbed conversation. But after visiting the Castle, my old man and I went to a little eatery where there are essentially three things on the menu: cod, kielbasa, and vodka. A shot of vodka runs about $1.50. A plate consisting of a sausage, buttered bread, some mustard, and a tomato slice costs the same price. (I'm told places like this were much more common and popular during the Soviet years. I'm mystified as to how anyone could possibly compete with or get tired of them.) At any rate, after six shots of vodka I had a much easier time breaking the news to my father that I loved him. Then we went home and watched Airplane. Now I'm here and fuck Air Canada.

I'm going to go smoke the rest of my Djarums.

Another Pre-Solstice Status Update

(Image appropriated from APOD.)

Oh, right. I'm still alive, and I still have this "web log" that needs to be updated.

Well -- I did say I would be updating the comics page instead of blogging for a while, giving me the time to work on some longer-term writing projects, didn't I?

What this actually means is that I'm spending my after-work time drawing and 'shopping instead to finalize the two-month backlog I wanted. I always, always, always forget how long it takes me to make these fucking things. (This one in particular was like the bloody Shawshank Redemption.)

So the novella and novel that still need to be proofed and edited still await my attention, and here I am drawing comic strips about vomit jokes.

THESE THINGS THAT I DO, ARE THEY THE BEST I COULD DO?

It's hard for me to feel content with anything this time of the year. I don't think I can be blamed for this. Nor do I think I can be blamed for wanting to launch Mariah Carey and every trace of her recording career into the fucking sun.

Oh, at any rate: the last two comic strips are here and here. A new one will be posted on Thursday. These are exciting times!

Juicefest 2012

This week, I and a couple of other folks at the "farm" partook in a three-day juice fast (or juice "cleanse," depending on what literature you're reading).

The basic idea is that you're consuming nothing but certain liquids -- water, tea, fruit, and vegetable juice -- for 72 hours. Since this is usually done an exercise in healthful living or self-denial, it's common practice to eschew sugar, caffeine, animal products, nicotine, THC, asprin, etc. On this front I cheated a little by putting honey (animal product) in my rooibos tea and having one (1) cup of black coffee during the evening.

The health benefits of the juice fast are under scrutiny and debate, and its value as a full-system cleanse are almost certainly overstated. On the other hand, some studies seem to suggest that the human body switches into "repair mode" when it's not receiving fresh input.

But I wished to do it solely for the benefit of experience. I wanted to know how it would feel to willingly go without solid food for three days. (Granted, it wasn't a true fast -- I was still getting a decent, though likely not entirely sufficient, supply of nutrients -- but asceticism is a pool probably best waded into.) Consciousness expansion and alteration is an occasional hobby of mine, and popular lore has it that people think uncommon thoughts on empty bellies. This was one I hadn't tried. My hope was that when faced with an energy shortage, my faculties would ration thoughts more carefully, foregoing the old ad jingles, Simpsons quotes, and sexual fantasies, expending the whole of its limited resources on grand and brilliant ideas.

No less appealing was the test of discipline the fast presented. Anyone who's followed my stuff for any length of time must be aware of my on-again-off-again romance with cigarettes; nicotine is a mistress that doesn't take "no" for an answer very gracefully. Moreover, I've lately grappled with the fear that I'm not productive enough as a writer, and that a lack of gumption is to blame rather than any external circumstances. Forcing myself to go three days without eating -- and proving to myself that it was something I could will myself through -- would, I hoped, generate a focus and momentum I could carry with me in the days afterward.

It wasn't easy. Well, not for me, anyway. One of the three of us had already been on a raw fruits and vegetable diet for a couple of weeks and felt fine (even great) all throughout. I'd tried easing into it three or four days before it began by cutting meat, dairy, sugar, and gluten from my diet (in that order), but not receiving any solid biomass for days on end put a tremendous strain on my system. But I did it. Seventy-two hours (actually, probably closer to  seventy-eight) without any solid food.

THE GOOD: There were times I did feel more focused. Smells and colors seemed to become more vivid. If I had every wished for a shakeup in my weekly routine, this was something like a low-magnitude earthquake. I discovered I can go without coffee in the mornings in the morning and during my workday, and I can't remember a moment that I craved cigarettes. I found myself speaking and acting more deliberately: after all, I was on a tight energy budget. And I'd be lying if I claimed to not feel like a self-satisfied bad ass for seeing a project like this all the way through.

THE BAD: I was hungry. HUNGRY -- caps, bold, italic, underscore. Headaches, body aches. Between the bursts of vitality (usually after blending and consuming juice) were periods of rusty-joint lethargy. I experienced mood swings. My patience for people was drastically reduced. I'd wake up two or three times a night and I couldn't stop pissing from all the tea I poured into my stomach to trick it into suspecting a meal might be happening.

THE UGLY: I understand why some vegans treat omnivores with such condescension. It's a craving for self-assurance. There were times I felt compelled to boot up my snootiest available voice and lecture my peers on the benefits of "liquidity" and the evils of solid foods. What, you think I'm jealous of what you're eating? Curry? No thanks. Do you have any idea how unhealthy solids are for you? And bad for the environment? This thin, faintly potato-flavored broth is delicious, and so much easier to digest than your rich, oily, calorie-filled curry. Frankly, I pity you.

(I hope I don't have to tell anyone I'm joking.)

THE OTHER: When you're hungry, you are more exclusive in your concerns than when you're fed. That was my experience, anyhow. I'd go on Twitter and read all the retweeted trenchant gibberish dispatches from the most popular dada/nihilist Twitterati and think who gives a shit? I'd look at video game blogs and think who gives a shit? Facebook? YouTube? The A.V. Club? Fuck it all, empty static, fuck it all. I'd try playing video games -- Earthworm Jim, Drill Dozer, and Cave Story -- and find myself unwilling to muster enough interest to play for longer than a few minutes. But for some reason, Bolesław Prus fared much better at eliciting my concentration. Marcus Aurelius did better than Prus; William Carlos Williams better than both. In my state of mind they just seemed a more worthwhile effort.


This morning I broke the fast with a bowl of cereal (cornflakes and granola) with rice milk and an apple. It felt strange. Anyone else who has ever stopped smoking for a few months and then picked it back up again will have some understanding of what it was like. Chewing and swallowing wasn't nearly what I hoped or thought it would be. The act itself seemed unseemly and I felt vaguely guilty for it. The second cigarette is always a bit better; so was the peanut butter and banana sandwich I had for lunch. The third cigarette is wonderful, and I suspect the chicken cheesesteak I plan to order in an hour or two will be just so.

 I certainly couldn't do another juice fast right away, but I wouldn't totally rule it out for the foreseeable future. We'll see how I feel after a few more days of solid food, but I may consider making a regular practice of a once-a-week twelve-hour juice and water fast. While any health benefits might well be owed to the placebo effect, the focus and determination brought on by an empty stomach are definitely not.

Of Numbers and Nicfits

So I'm abstaining from cigarettes again; so far, successfully. This has been day five.

Problem: over the last few years my smoking habit has so thoroughly integrated itself with my writing habit that when I stop smoking, I stop writing. I can usually pull myself back together after a week or two, but for the time being sitting down to write just makes me think of cigarettes (AND HOW MUCH I WANT THEM), and so I'm too preoccupied to string cogent thoughts together.

In the interim I'm keeping the muscles in my brain active with math. Between my torrid love/hate relationship with calculus, some of the stuff I've been reading lately, and my ongoing casual fling with astronomy (though our trysts have lately been much less frequent than I'd like), I've got numbers on my nicotine-starved brain.

How the hell did this happen?

A couple of years ago I began playing with math again during my initial foray into astronomy following the my arrival at an existential crossroads via Final Fantasy XIII. The Astronomy Today textbook gave me problems to solve; I had to remember how to do algebra and geometry again in order to get the correct answers.

Eventually I hit a point where I realized I'd have to at least acquaint myself with more advanced mathematics if I intended to get any sort of grasp on the physics upon which astronomy is founded; so then I began screwing around with a calculus textbook I inherited. The book is still open and I'm still slogging through the massive chapter on derivatives.

It's hard as hell. I was never much good at math, and it's taken me months to cover what probably would have occupied only a few weeks in a university-level course. But I keep coming back to it. And what's scary is that I think I'm learning to love math for its own sake.

I don't know why. That's the funny thing. There's something about it -- about pure mathematics, the Queen of the Sciences (as Gauss called it) -- that's so elegant and perfect, but I can't pin it down without resorting to the same old platitudes. For instance: as a writer, whose art deals with the subjective, ambiguous, and imperfect, it's an alluringly exotic and satisfying thing to handle material for which is a clear solution, only one correct way. But that's a cliché. And however true it might be, it fails to penetrate the surface of the matter.

There's that notion that mathematics are a kind of cipher for the inarticulate "language" of existence. But here we have another cliché, and one that's too opaque. It could certainly be reduced to more fundamental terms, but I'll be damned if I know how that's done.

It is both frustrating and exquisitely fitting that my efforts to collocate my admiration and astonishment at mathematics' precision are so effectively stymied by the imprecision of my intellectual vocabulary.

When I was a senior in high school, a year or two after deciding that writing was something I wanted to pursue come famine or flood, I was driving down route 24 one afternoon. The person driving the car in front of me stuck his arm out the window and dropped a styrofoam Dunkin' Donuts cup. For about half a second the object seemed to move in slow motion, as through across the pages of a flip book. I decided then that the day I could appropriately call myself a writer would be when I was proficient to describe precisely how that cup bounced, spun, teetered, and rolled on the asphalt in such a way that a reader would know exactly and unambiguously what I saw.

Today I believe that this is impossible to do in any language other than mathematics -- not that I would know how, mind you. And even if I were capable of expressing the cup's motion as a series of functions (would functions even apply??), I imagine it would be far too difficult a read for most audiences. (Of course, this holds true for a lot of excellent writing.)

I feel I need to learn much, much more about mathematics. But as I type this I'm looking at the telescope in the corner and figuring that the astronomy textbook I've been using (and neglecting) is on track to becoming obsolete. And I'm thinking again about why I'm so floored by mathematics and wondering what is mathematics, what precisely is it, and accepting that it's not something I'll be able to answer without poring for months over philosophy texts. GOD DAMN IT THERE'S JUST TOO MUCH I DON'T KNOW.

It's a demoniac fact of human existence that ignorance, ultimately, is as settled a matter and inescapable as death.

Guess you can either learn to accept it or take up smoking.

(Yes, it's a binary choice.)

rusty chain word write

Still alive. Pushed myself a bit hard last week. Got sick. Took a few days off and didn’t write anything, didn’t think about anything, didn’t do anything productive. Didn’t have any thoughts worth blogging about. Still don’t.

Picking up a pen (or sitting at a keyboard) again after a quiescent period is like riding a bike -- a bike whose chain has rusted and fused since you threw it under that tarp out back. It’ll be a few days until I’m ready to roll again.

So what comes next?

One problem with my new digs is that I don’t get wireless in my room. I can’t get online unless I pick myself up, unplug the laptop, and take it downstairs. The drawbacks are obvious: I can’t fall asleep listening to white noise or rain, watch MST3K, or hang out with the Socks crew on turntable.fm. But the inconvenience (like most) has been a blessing in disguise. When I have to deliberately relocate myself and my computer in order to get online, I’m much, much less likely to compulsively check my email and Twitter or spend forty minutes looking at silly things on YouTube just because I can. I’m reading more books. I’m interacting with the local human population more often. I don't hear about the election or pop music anymore, and so I rarely have to think about either.

Simultaneously: I don’t have a personal computer in the library where I spend most of my time. (My bosses transplanted me from my old office into the library office without realizing there’s no Ethernet jack. Whoops!) I can use the public computers, but these are often in use and there are always people coming and going, looking over my shoulder. As a result, I’m taking fewer (and shorter) Internet breaks. When I don’t have much to do (or am feeling lazy or groggy in the morning), I procrastinate by flipping through books instead. Not that I never had fun reloading Twitter on company time, but this is somehow more satisfying.

For most human beings, spending less time soldered to a screen would probably be an unblemished boon. I’m not surfing the web, I’m living my life. I am not a gadget. My Facebook profile is not my identity. I’M A HUMAN BEING, GOD DAMN IT. MY LIFE HAS VALUE. Etc., etc., etc….

For a wannabe writer who understands that uncirculating, inaccessible information is information that does not exist, this change in my habits inspires some concern.

I should be registering accounts on popular message boards, ingratiating myself to the local population so my comic/blog plug will be well-received. I should be adding more books to my Goodreads page. I should join Reddit and actively haunt /writing. I should post chapters of The Zeroes on Wattpad. I should be following and shooting @s to well-established writers on Twitter. I should be sucking up to more literature bloggers.

Promoting your work is just as time-consuming and tiring as producing work.

And I’m still much more interested in writing than networking. This is why my novels will never appear in bookstores. (also, they offend people who review books.) Fuck.

But what am I writing next, I wonder?

In the past couple of months I’ve written a novella and a short story. I probably have another couple of short stories in me. What I should really do is revise and finalize the short novel I finished last April so I can begin the process of trading personalized pitches to literary agents in exchange for impersonal rejection slips. And what I really, really need to do is finish one of the two unfinished novels I have sitting around, but just thinking about it makes me dizzy and weak.

Orwell once said:

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

But it’s gonna have to happen.

Today I smoked one cigarette -- the last one in the pack.

Cigarettes don’t fill the void. Cigarettes create the void. is what I’m telling myself. Let’s see how many days it is before I go out and buy more.

Borrowing a really nice Meade telescope from a co-worker on the condition that I give his daughters an exhibition at some point. Probably going to wait another couple of months so I can show them the Orion Nebula at a reasonable hour. But it resolves the moon's surface very nicely, and magnifies Jupiter enough to render the cloud bands (although just barely). When it gets colder and clearer (as I’m hoping it will), I’m hankering to try hunting down the Crab Nebula and the Triangulum Galaxy -- two Messier objects that have consistently eluded my binoculars.

Rusty chain. Bear with me, please.

Let's Read Pierre: Books XVIII - XXIII

(Melville's writing desk plucked from Weekends in Paradelle.)

Our hero Pierre relocates from his lavish family home in upstate New York to an NYC tenement inhabited by poor young writers, artists, philosophers, and itinerants, where he slaves away at a book that, for any number of tangled reasons, he can't seem to get written.

My, how little things have changed in 160 years.

(I've heard that the Beats were fans of Pierre, which makes sense. Melville, to an equal or perhaps greater extent than Kerouac himself, rigorously applies the "first thought, best thought" maxim in his prose. But now that our hero is an impecunious young poet living in a church-turned-apartment building with scores of bohemian proto-Subterraneans calling themselves The Apostles -- well, the congruities speak for themselves.)

At any rate: I guess I knew it was coming.

Maybe I kept it a secret from myself, but I think one of my reasons for deciding to read Pierre now, of all times, rather than check out the Dickens or Prus novels on my To Read shelf was my understanding that Melville used it as a vessel for his grievances about writing and about Moby Dick's undeservedly poor reception. (Borrowing a turn of phrase from Sedgwick: "[Melville may have] conceived Pierre as a bomb to throw at the critics and the public to which they pandered and so to have done with them forever.")

It's probably no secret to anyone following this modest little blog that I put out a book earlier this year, and I certainly can't call it a success. After that Kirkus Indie debacle, I felt absolutely defeated. There was a week or two where I liberally referred to myself as a "failed writer."

Melville is one of my heroes. I wanted to read him writing the things that were on my mind, to see him give expression to the same kind of outrage I was feeling.

He did not disappoint.

But whatever my personal travails as an author, they are incomparable to Melville's. After all: I'm a bachelor with a day job who depends on writing as a means to preserve his sanity rather than his capacity to pay rent. Melville at this point was still a career author. Though he was in it for the love -- or, rather, for a brand of semi-religious devotion -- he wrote Pierre primarily because he needed the money. He had a wife and kids to feed; if he didn't write books, he didn't get paid. Problem was, the sort books he grew passionate about writing weren't the kind of books the public wished to read. ("[T]he world worship[s] Mediocrity and Common-Place...")

Pierre's sufferings as an author are Melville's own. As our author tries to bang out this novel so he can answer his bill collectors, his Hamlet-turned-novelist struggles to write a salable book to support himself and his sister. Unfortunately for both of them, they book they're able to write -- without marring their own integrity, which neither is capable of doing -- aren't the books that will make them bucks.

(Pierre's big hit, "The Tropical Summer," probably alludes to to the lush, South Pacific paradise which is the subject of Typee. Remember once more that Typee was Meville's best selling and most praised work during his lifetime, and is most certainly a lightweight compared to his later work.)

Though it came from left field, Pierre's attempts to support Isabel and Delly with his writing does make some sense. Cut off from the family estate and adrift in the city, our hero needed to seek out the means to sustain himself, but his upbringing as a carefree aristocrat hasn't prepped him for the urban labor force. I can imagine an exasperated Melville deciding that his hero's new occupation in his new life should be the worst, most grinding, degrading labor he could think of -- and so he made Pierre a writer, like himself.

But Jesus, we've really leapt through the funhouse mirror.

When we first met Pierre he was an 19th century American Hamlet; now he's a broke and embittered writer. The blonde, blue-eyed, angelic Lucy was once his sweetheart; now his dark half-sister has replaced her as his best girl. Early on, Pierre vivacity and naivete made him seem like a ten year old in a young adult's body; now he seems nineteen going on forty-five. In his moody raving, Pierre has come, at moments, to resemble Ahab -- a young, powerless, uncommanding Ahab.

Pierre becomes nearly unrecognizable -- and in such a short span of time. "Timonization" is an apt term for this transformation, inasmuch as Timon's turning to a misanthrope occurs almost instantaneously in Shakespeare. Though the news of his mothers' death hardly leaves him unaffected, we don't watch brood on it from every conceivable angle as we might have expected to in the earlier chapters. He goes for a walk and gets back to his book. He's got no time to grieve. That fucking book won't write itself.

It's like an awakening. Pierre dreamed he was a prince, but wakes up and realizes he's a desperate novelist who needs to write a book to feed his family.

Or: the hero of Herman Melville's novel suddenly discovers that he's actually Herman Melville.

(Do we notice that Melville is here a struggling author writing about a struggling author named Pierre who writes about a struggling author named Vivia?)


I've long been curious to know how it felt to be Melville at his writing desk. As it turns out, it kind of sucked:

With cheek rather pale, then, and lips rather blue, Pierre sits down to his plank.

But is Pierre packed in the mail for St. Petersburg this morning? Over his boots are his moccasins; over his ordinary coat is his surtout; and over that, a cloak of Isabel's. Now he is squared to his plank; and at his hint, the affectionate Isabel gently pushes his chair closer to it, for he is so muffled, he can hardly move of himself. Now Delly comes in with bricks hot from the stove; and now Isabel and she with devoted solicitude pack away these comforting stones in the folds of an old blue cloak, a military garment of ,the grandfather of Pierre, and tenderly arrange it both over and under his feet; but putting the warm flagging beneath. Then Delly brings still another hot brick to put under his ink-stand, to prevent the ink from thickening. Then Isabel drags the camp-bedstead nearer to him, on which are the two or three books he may possibly have occasion to refer to that day, with a biscuit or two, and some water, and a clean towel, and a basin. Then she leans against the plank by the elbow of Pierre, a crook-ended stick. Is Pierre a shepherd, or a bishop, or a cripple? No, but he has in effect, reduced himself to the miserable condition of the last. With the crook-ended cane, Pierre -- unable to rise without sadly impairing his manifold intrenchments, and admitting the cold air into their innermost nooks, -- Pierre, if in his solitude, he should chance to need any thing beyond the reach of his arm, then the crook-ended cane drags it to his immediate vicinity.

Pierre glances slowly all round him; every thing seems to be right; he looks up with a grateful, melancholy satisfaction at Isabel; a tear gathers in her eye; but she conceals it from him by coming very close to him, stooping over, and kissing his brow. 'Tis her lips that leave the warm moisture there; not her tears, she says.

"I suppose I must go now, Pierre. Now don't, don't be so long to-day. I will call thee at half-past four. Thou shall not strain thine eyes in the twilight."

"We will see about that," says Pierre, with an unobserved attempt at a very sad pun. "Come, thou must go. Leave me."

And there he is left.

Pierre is young; heaven gave him the divinest, freshest form of a man; put light into his eye, and fire into his blood, and brawn into his arm, and a joyous, jubilant, overflowing, up-bubbling, universal life in him everywhere. Now look around in that most miserable room, and at that most miserable of all the pursuits of a man, and say if here be the place, and this be the trade, that God intended him for. A rickety chair, two hollow barrels, a plank, paper, pens, and infernally black ink, four leprously dingy white walls, no carpet, a cup of water, and a dry biscuit or two. Oh, I hear the leap of the Texan Camanche, as at this moment he goes crashing like a wild deer through the green underbrush; I hear his glorious whoop of savage and untamable health; and then I look in at Pierre. If physical, practical unreason make the savage, which is he? Civilization, Philosophy, Ideal Virtue! behold your victim!

. . . . . .

From eight o'clock in the morning till half-past four in the evening, Pierre sits there in his room; -- eight hours and a half!

From throbbing neck-bands, and swinging belly-bands of gay-hearted horses, the sleigh-bells chimingly jingle; -- but Pierre sits there in his room; Thanksgiving comes, with its glad thanks, and crisp turkeys; -- but Pierre sits there in his room; soft through the snows, on tinted Indian moccasin, Merry Christmas comes stealing; -- but Pierre sits there in his room; it is New Year's, and like a great flagon, the vast city over-brims at all curb-stones, wharves, and piers, with bubbling jubilations; -- but Pierre sits there in his room: -- Nor jingling sleigh-bells at throbbing neck-band, nor swinging belly-band; nor glad thanks, and crisp turkeys of Thanksgiving; nor tinted Indian moccasin of Merry Christmas softly stealing through the snows; nor New Year's curb-stones, wharves, and piers, over-brimming with bubbling jubilations: -- Nor jingling sleigh-bells, nor glad Thanksgiving, nor Merry Christmas, nor jubilating New Year's: -- Nor Bell, Thank, Christ, Year; -- none of these are for Pierre. In the midst of the merriments of the mutations of Time, Pierre hath ringed himself in with the grief of Eternity. Pierre is a peak inflexible in the heart of Time, as the isle-peak, Pico, stands unassaultable in the midst of waves. He will not be called to; he will not be stirred. Sometimes the intent ear of Isabel in the next room, overhears the alternate silence, and then the long lonely scratch of his pen. It is, as if she heard the busy claw of some midnight mole in the ground. Sometimes, she hears a low cough, and sometimes the scrape of his crook-handled cane.

Here surely is a wonderful stillness of eight hours and a half, repeated day after day. In the heart of such silence, surely something is at work. Is it creation, or destruction? Builds Pierre the noble world of a new book? or does the Pale Haggardness unbuild the lungs and the life in him? -- Unutterable, that a man should be thus!

When in the meridian flush of the day, we recall the black apex of night; then night seems impossible; this sun can never go down. Oh that the memory of the uttermost gloom as an already tasted thing to the dregs, should be no security against its return. One may be passibly well one day, but the next, he may sup at black broth with Pluto.

Is there then all this work to one book, which shall be read in a very few hours; and, far more frequently, utterly skipped in one second; and which, in the end, whatever it be, must undoubtedly go to the worms?

Not so; that which now absorbs the time and the life of Pierre, is not the book, but the primitive elementalizing of the strange stuff, which in the act of attempting that book, has upheaved and upgushed in his soul. Two books are being writ; of which the world shall only see one, and that the bungled one. The larger book, and the infinitely better, is for Pierre's own private shelf. That it is, whose unfathomable cravings drink his blood; the other only demands his ink. But circumstances have so decreed, that the one can not be composed on the paper, but only as the other is writ down in his soul. And the one of the soul is elephantinely sluggish, and will not budge at a breath. Thus Pierre is fastened on by two leeches; -- how then can the life of Pierre last? Lo! he is fitting himself for the highest life, by thinning his blood and collapsing his heart. He is learning how to live, by rehearsing the part of death.

Who shall tell all the thoughts and feelings of Pierre in that desolate and shivering room, when at last the idea obtruded, that the wiser and the profounder he should grow, the more and the more he lessened the chances for bread; that could he now hurl his deep book out of the window, and fall to on some shallow nothing of a novel, composable in a month at the longest, then could he reasonably hope for both appreciation and cash. But the devouring profundities, now opened up in him, consume all his vigor; would he, he could not now be entertainingly and profitably shallow in some pellucid and merry romance. Now he sees, that with every accession of the personal divine to him, some great land-slide of the general surrounding divineness slips from him, and falls crashing away. Said I not that the gods, as well as mankind, had unhanded themselves from this Pierre? So now in him you behold the baby toddler I spoke of; forced now to stand and toddle alone.

Now and then he turns to the camp-bed, and wetting his towel in the basin, presses it against his brow. Now he leans back in his chair, as if to give up; but again bends over and plods.

Twilight draws on, the summons of Isabel is heard from the door; the poor, frozen, blue-lipped, soul-shivering traveler for St. Petersburg is unpacked; and for a moment stands toddling on the floor. Then his hat, and his cane, and out he sallies for fresh air. A most comfortless staggering of a stroll! People gaze at him passing, as at some imprudent sick man, willfully burst from his bed. If an acquaintance is met, and would say a pleasant newsmonger's word in his ear, that acquaintance turns from him, affronted at his hard aspect of icy discourtesy. "Badhearted," mutters the man, and goes on.

He comes back to his chambers, and sits down at the neat table of Delly; and Isabel soothingly eyes him, and presses him to eat and be strong. But his is the famishing which loathes all food. He cannot eat but by force. He has assassinated the natural day; how then can he eat with an appetite? If he lays him down, he can not sleep; he has waked the infinite wakefulness in him; then how can he slumber? Still his book, like a vast lumbering planet, revolves in his aching head. He can not command the thing out of its orbit; fain would he behead himself, to gain one night's repose. At last the heavy hours move on; and sheer exhaustion overtakes him, and he lies still -- not asleep as children and day-laborers sleep -- but he lies still from his throbbings, and for that interval holdingly sheathes the beak of the vulture in his hand, and lets it not enter his heart.

Morning comes; again the dropped sash, the icy water, the flesh-brush, the breakfast, the hot bricks, the ink, the pen, the from-eight-o'clock-to-half-past-four, and the whole general inclusive hell of the same departed day.

Ah! shivering thus day after day in his wrappers and cloaks, is this the warm lad that once sung to the world of the Tropical Summer?

I'm really enjoying these chapters, perhaps more than the the rest of the book. Melville's astounding intellect suffuses throughout, but not until now has he splayed his guts out onto the page. I can't imagine how the edited "Kraken" version could be at all complete without the awkward "Pierre is a writer" twist.

But it's also these chapters that throw the whole novel out of alignment. It's as though Melville began writing one book, and then glued on the ending to a completely different book at the end. It's impossible for me not to read it as the author imploding on himself 2/3 into the thing and composing much of the remainder as a sort of meta self-documentary of his collapse.

I see in Pierre fragmented glimpses of the same grand and terrible phantom conjured in Moby Dick, but Melville fails to establish a cohesion among them; the rendering is incomplete. We could guess this fact is as much a contributory impetus for Melville's retconning Pierre as a result of it.


A novel beginning as an allegory or a case study cannot properly end by becoming superlatively personal. Not like this, anyway.

(Sedgwick, once again too good not to quote: "Melville transfixed his own heart on the point of his tragic vision.")

Pierre's imperfections make it so extraordinarily interesting, but they're also what keep it from vaulting to the same heights as Moby Dick. One wonders what a masterpiece it would have been if Melville had managed to transcribe more of the larger, infinitely better book into the bungled version.


Well, we wrap this up next week. Thanks for reading along if you're been keeping up with your own copy of the book, and thanks for bearing with me if you haven't. And if you started reading along and dropped out midstream, my apologies -- I promise that if I do something like this again, I'll choose a much more accessible novel.

Words typed into Notepad at two in the morning when I couldn't sleep

I moved into a new room in a different building two days ago.

Tonight while walking back from her place, I noticed Jupiter in the sky, north of Aldebaran. Two months ago, Jupiter was a morning star. Now it's a midnight star in a sky where the autumn stars rise earlier every night.

I felt guilty that I was too distracted by my writing -- this short story is taking too long, I need to revise and finalize the new (short) novel, I really should get around to drawing more comics, this would all be so much easier if I could just quit my day job -- to be very good company.

But in another year -- for certain this time -- I won't have the day job. I won't be here, and I won't be able to see her anymore. Not like this, anyway.

Three days ago -- no, now four -- I stood at the curb outside a Philadelphia hotel and said goodbye to a girl I met in May, beneath Arcturus. Her work is taking her to Tanzania and I may very well never see her again.

Vega was almost directly overhead -- maybe inclined slightly toward the west -- when we sat on the patio above the street sipping cocktails, and she mentioned my book. There was a lot about it she liked, but she offered several points of criticism; but overall she honestly liked it and thought that it was an impressive first effort and those reviews she'd read weren't fair.

I first noticed Aldebaran and the autumn stars -- REALLY noticed them -- one September night in 2009. We'd all taken acid out in the Poconos and I kept a campfire going while everyone else was away. That very night I made up my mind to learn more about the constellations. And I resolved to finally finish the manuscript for a novel called The Zeroes, of which only the last three chapters remained to be written.

The day job would be piling the hours on next week. I wished I could quit it.

I may very well never see her again. And it's likely the last September I'll be living here, where my day job is. And I really like my day job, which I can say for the first time in two years. But the short story isn't writing itself, and I'm still worrying about a novel I wrote three years ago.

My birthday is now in less than two weeks.

It's staggering. The conceit that these moments are my only moments. That it's always my last chance.

Tonight I spent half an hour looking at the Milky Way through the binoculars when I could have been writing. It was astonishing. It always is. And there is a nonzero probability I'll never do it again.

It's what happens during the intervals between our assessments and plans for it. However deliberately we try to live it, life happens indeliberately, and largely unobserved until


"Well. I'm really not at liberty to say."

Chapter Wherein the Author Copes with Negative Reviews

Recapping the story thus far...

In 2009 I wrote a story called The Zeroes.

In 2010 I pitched the manuscript to literary agents and small publishers. I honestly lost track of how many. About 10% responded with polite form letters that began "Dear Author." The other 90% didn't respond at all. I have no reason to believe that any of the people I pitched ever actually read the book. (Which is understandable, but nevertheless discouraging.)

In 2011 I resigned myself to getting the damn thing off my hands and bearing the stigma of being a self-published author.

Earlier this year (2012), the manuscript became a novel. In February it was published as an ebook. In April it was released in paperback form.

Since then I've devoted less energy to finalizing the draft of a new short novel (written between September and May) than trying to make people interested in reading (and ideally purchasing) The Zeroes.

Once again, this is why you want to have a publisher to begin with. They take care of all that crucial but excruciatingly bothersome business for you. They put your book in stores, see that it gets reviewed by the right reviewers, and design Facebook ads on your behalf so you can work on writing more books and making them more money.

A failing to which I will freely confess is that I have no business acumen. I don't know how to design snappy ads or pitches. Relentless self-promotion puts a bad taste in my mouth. I don't have an outgoing personality and I'm not very good at disingenuous glad-handing. Frankly, I'd rather write than tell people about what I've already written.

In a 21st century market, this is a crippling deficiency. I'm well aware.

One of my primary motivations for maintaining a blog, updating a webcomic, and doing these video game reviews is to give myself a platform from which I can promote my book. Yes, I do enjoy working on all this stuff for its own sake -- but between my fiction and my video game criticism, the fiction is much more important to me. And between the two, I'd rather people were reading my fiction.

But a book is an imposition. A free article about a familiar video game in a web browser is much less of an investment than a 300-page novel by an author who's not respectable enough to be adopted by an imprint but still has the nerve to ask for your time and money. I'm finding that if, for instance, a hundred people read my EarthBound writeup, it doesn't necessarily mean even one of them will click on the link to my Amazon page and shell out $15 (or even $3) for a copy of The Zeroes, even if I cajole them.

This is where the reviews come in.

Ideal scenario: you convince a blogger to review your book. They tell everyone in their sphere that your book is worthwhile, and some of these people actually purchase and read it. And if the reviewer has some clout, other people with clout might be more willing to give you and your book a chance.

One thing I've learned over the past few months is that it's almost as hard to get a book review as it is to get a book deal.

There's absolutely no shortage of book review blogs focusing on "indie" books. But there's even less a scarcity of self-published nobody authors incessantly pleading and screaming REVIEW MY BOOK NEXT. And so for days and weeks you toss custom-written pitches toward these bloggers (who, for all you know, only receive traffic from other self-published authors desperately searching for reviewers) and hear nothing back from any of them, not even a "no thanks," because their inboxes are already inundated with a hundred other solicitations from a hundred other lousy authors begging them to review a hundred other books nobody wanted to publish.

The only blog that agreed to check out and review The Zeroes was the Unbound Underground. Go on, read the review.

It's not very flattering. Statements like "seems to lack any depth or understanding of depression" and "incredibly condescending and insulting" rather negate any of the scant bits of praise that buoy the rating up to a 3.

Shortly after it was posted, a reader hopped on my Formspring an asked me about my reaction to it. I let it all out and felt pretty good about myself.

Not long afterwards, somebody (perhaps the person who submitted the question to begin with) sent me a few words of advice. The gist of it was that while people who'd already read and appreciated my book might agree and sympathize, but to the much more sizable Everyone Else, the rant would make me look like some bitchy diva with a wounded ego -- especially since the Unbound Underground was actually doing me a favor by reading and reviewing the book to begin with.

He was absolutely correct. If some other blogger were considering The Zeroes for his next post and doing some research on its author, a Formspring page containing a tirade against the last person to review his book would almost definitely change his mind. So I thanked him for his clarity of judgement and axed the question and my response to it.

I started pitching other bloggers, hoping to offset this one negative review with a few positive ones from readers who might better understand the book.

A prewritten form letter won't work. Especially not when you're asking somebody to take on a project on their own time and offering them no renumeration. And especially not when you're pitching them a book that is, by your own admission, as deliberately mundane as possible, and for which you can't effectively compose a snappy plot summary because there (deliberately) isn't much of a plot. Your task becomes finding a suitable blog, reading enough of it to get an idea who you're dealing with, and then composing a personalized pitch that adheres to their unique submission guidelines.

It's a grinding process -- scouring the web for somebody who might be hip to what you're offering, skimming the last two or three months of their blog, and then writing them an unctuous personalized message that will give them the impression that you're excited to show them your book because you're an avid reader who's really into what they're doing, and certainly not some exhausted, red-eyed creep who sincerely could not give a shit what they're reading or talking about unless it's your fucking book.

(If any bloggers I may have solicited are reading this, please be assured I consider you exceptional. Would I lie to you?!)

One, two hours per pitch. One, two hours that you could be doing any number of other things, like going outside, visiting friends, napping, gardening, reading, playing video games, dancing, fucking, or working on your next book. And you do this one, two, five, a dozen and more times. And none of them write back. And none of them ask you to send them your book.

But we already understand that we can't blame them for this. Pitches pile up in their inboxes like spambot messages appear in yours.

This would be the advantage of paid reviews. (The legitimate kind, I mean -- not the perfidious phony type that makes life harder for everyone.) You throw a respectable book review publication some cash and they agree to give your book a read and a review. You're not guaranteed a good review, but your check buys you the assurance that somebody will read your book and write about it.

Kirkus Indie is a service offered by publishing industry authority pillar Kirkus. The short of it: you pay them $500 and they review your self-published novel, regardless of how obscure you might be.

A few nights ago I received Kirkus Indie's review of The Zeroes in my inbox.

Basically, I paid $500 for two paragraphs about how The Zeroes is a dreadful book about awful people and why nobody should read it.

The only upside is that my receipt reserved me the option to request that the review never see the light of day. I have already made that request. And I deleted the review.

It's a good thing I had the next day off from work. I was practically catatonic for about sixteen hours.

The question becomes: how do I read and respond to this feedback?

None of the criticisms offered by either review are especially helpful or constructive. One complains that the book is extremely depressing. Great; it's meant to be. The other lambasts the characters for being pathetic, self-absorbed, and drinking too much. Sure; that was rather the point. Both reviews bring up the word "entitlement." Well, yeah -- I thought that was a fairly obvious component of the subtext.

It's clear that the reviewers just didn't get it.

They Didn't Get It. The chorus of the failed artist. Repeated so many times by so many people that it can't possibly be true anymore. They'd get it if you were as good as you thought you were. Why should the writer have to explain himself?

So now I think about that new manuscript I've got sitting around. About polishing and finalizing it. About how I'll have to spend another few months pitching it to the agents and small presses again. About how I'll very probably have to resort to self-publishing again. About how I'll have write dozens of letters to dozens of bloggers pleading for reviews again. About how I'll watch the sales counter freeze again and sit around trying to figure out what to do next again.

But that's just how it goes. Art is a bitch and nobody cares. Nobody wants to hear about it, and you truly have no right to complain and don't deserve any sympathy. (Some asshole wrote a book about this once.)

This brings us to an alternative reading of the tea leaves: why not take the hint and call it quits?

You're never going to make any money off this. That much is certain. Given how the written word -- and especially the novel -- are trundling into irrelevance, that spicule-thin probability of being vindicated much later down the road will get closer and closer to zero as time passes. And since you seem to agonize over writing like you do, wouldn't it be better to just tear the monkey off your shoulders and find some happier and more rewarding activity to occupy your time?

Czeslaw Milosz refers to his choice to write as the deformation of his own life. Somewhat less poetically, I'd call it a kind of behavioral disorder. Unless it's paying your bills, it just doesn't make sense. It's a lot of trouble and it's really not worth it.

Fuck -- if I quit writing, I could go out and try to find a real job. I mean, one of the reasons I've been so reluctant to dive into a capital-c Career is my fear that it wouldn't leave me enough time or energy to dedicate to what I've always felt is my real work. If I stopped writing, I would almost definitely stop smoking. I'd have no excuse not spend more time with my friends, read more books, work in the garden more often, play more Street Fighter, or go to bed at a decent hour. I could go out and get laid more often. I might find myself readier to get into a sustainable loving and working relationship with a human being who actually exists outside of my own head. I'd never have to write another fucking pitch to a literary agent or blogger for the rest of my life. I could actually relax on my weekends and days off.

Quitting makes a very convincing case for itself.

About sixteen hours after reading a paid professional opinion that my writing is garbage, I finally got out of bed, had lunch, and sat down to make some progress on a new short story I've been tinkering with. I'll worry about the backdraft of rejection slips from literary magazines later on.

Ultimately, I'm still just too stupid to quit.

And it must be terminal, because I'm totally cool with it.

On a Sunday in August

August. Less than fifty days until the autumn equinox. The summer stars (Vega, Deneb, Altair) blink overheard at sunset, and the autumn stars begin wheeling up and around after midnight. The cicadas chutter by day and the katydids rakakat by night. And I'm returning from my self-imposed exile from blogging. Such summer days as these....

The bad news is that I won't be getting that several-month vacation I've been sorta hoping for and could really use. The good news is that I'm still gonna have a job after the end of the month. The better news is that I've switched positions and will now be working in the library at this place. "This place" meaning, of course, the Quaker study/retreat center at which I've been living and working since last October.

When I pause and think about it, it still feels downright bizarre that I'm living and working in religious community. I've become so acclimated to worship-, god-, and Jesus-related discourse that I barely notice it anymore -- but then I'll end up in a conversation where somebody is asking or telling me about god and have to obtusely change the subject or otherwise just smile and give a noncommittal nod.

A sure indication that this place is having an effect on me: as I type this, my inclination is to capital-G the word "god." It doesn't make a difference to me, but working within the editorial and procedural guidelines of your employers is usually a sound policy.

I'm still an atheist -- there's no doubt about that at all. As far as organized religion is concerned, I'm a lost cause. Once you've stopped superimposing a human face on the cosmos, I'm not sure you can ever find it again without willfully deluding yourself.

However, my feelings toward the social value of faith and religion may have undergone a shift.

I've met some remarkable people at this place. Balls-to-the-wall environmentalists. Money-where-their-mouths-are activists. People who do volunteer work, visit prison inmates, and acting as AA sponsors. Grounded, motivated people who read frequently, take care of their bodies, and live with conviction. People for whom kindness and equity are a way of life rather than arbitrary prescriptions.

I can't help but notice that most of these people are religious. And I can't help noticing that I've found such small concentrations of such people elsewhere in secular or commercial settings.

To the point: even if religion is founded on a fallacy, does faith build better human beings?

Even Plato concedes that his perfect city must be founded on a lie.

It's worth considering what behavioral differences may exist between a person living and acting under the assumption that some extradimensional, omniscient, omnipotent intelligence observes all of humanity's affairs and favors moral conduct and the people who practice it; and a person who understands (accurately) that human action and human existence are inconsequential flickers in the mindless, voiceless void and that the universe doesn't care one way or another what happens to us or what we do.

We needn't place the deity in the role of a boogeyman Santa Claus, either. How do behavioral patterns differ between a person who lives and acts in the belief that humanity is not alone, that there are higher laws than human values, and that everything isn't all for nothing; and a person living and acting under the (almost definitely correct) assumption that existence exists independently of any reason for its being and that whatever he does probably doesn't make much of a difference in any kind of long run?

"We should do X because it is in humanity's best interest for reasons Y and Z" doesn't set a fire in the guts like "we must do X because God wills it." The same distance lies between "I should behave morally for the purposes of social cohesion" and "I must behave morally, no questions asked;" "I should take care of my body and environment for my own health and happiness" and "I should take care of my body and environment because God made my body and the world and God wants me to take care of them, God is glorious, etc;" "I should make art because I find creative behavior rewarding in spite of the frustration it causes me;" and "I must make art because it is my calling."

The world we've built is fucked up. Acting towards getting humanity's shit in order with full earnestness necessitates a kind of loony, irrational optimism. Not the kind of optimism you're likely to have if you're seeing the situation clearly.

Is the god delusion a beneficial human adaptation, I wonder?

Of course, my thinking maybe I should give religion the benefit of the doubt persists only as long as I can go without seeing news stories about the political supporters of Chic-Fil-A or suicide bombings. But I nevertheless wish secularism could step up its game and produce a compelling, accessible, alternative to religion that could galvanize people's best instincts and potential. Mass consumption, rational self-interest, and statism haven't been cutting it so far.

Definite Hiatus

I'm taking the rest of July off.

When I started this blog and was writing more substantial posts more frequently, I wasn't working as many hours or juggling as many different projects as I've been lately. For the sake of my health and sanity -- to say nothing of the quality of my work -- I'm going to slow down for a few minutes.

With any luck, I'll be laid off after August and have plenty of time on my hands.

But between now and then I'll still be updating my comics page. Why not hang out there in the meantime?

More Busy, More Bullets

• As the weather grows sunnier, so becomes my general mood. Seems some of my anxious subterranean sludge started creeping up to the surface last week. OH GOD WHAT HAPPENS AFTER AUGUST WHERE WILL I WORK WHERE WILL I LIVE and OH GOD HOW DO I GET PEOPLE TO GIVE A SHIT ABOUT MY BOOK remain persistent questions and stress sources, but I think I'm coping with them somewhat more gracefully than last week.

• Speaking of the book: Mistah K of Hardcore Gaming 101 (and architect of the Castlevania Dungeon), your favorite DIY archive of video game oddities and forgotten classics, recently posted an exceptionally thorough review of The Zeroes on Amazon. I'm pointing it out primarily because I wish I'd gotten him to write the damn product description. I could never figure out how to describe it without going on and on and on and bogging it in details or otherwise not saying enough. (As you can see I erred toward the latter.) In my defense, when your mindset during the whole process of writing the book is BE AS MUNDANE AS POSSIBLE, it becomes very hard to compose enticing dust jacket copy. (It's a book about nothing! You'll love it!)

• The Zeroes also appeared on NotRock Records' blog a couple weeks ago. Full disclosure: NotRock Records is headed by filmmaker, drummer, and Jedi master John Fisher, whose name appears on the book's dedication page. (Fortunately, John is a lot better off and a much better fellow than most of the people who appear in the book.) You'll also read that his one of the bands in which he's been involved (Insouciant) is on an indefinite hiatus, which is bullshit. (Sorry, John.)

• The spring star Arcturus is setting; the summer star Vega is rising. I'm pretty sure we've looked at the Summer/Northern Triangle in an earlier post, but why not glance at it once more?

• Speaking of: the summer solstice is only a few days away! From here on out we're only bound for winter. To help stave off the preemptive seasonal depression, Comics Over Easy will begin a series of regular updates the day after the solstice. (I hope.)

• Have you ever watched a primrose blossom at sunset? I'd have said me neither two days ago, but...

7:40 p.m.

8:53 p.m.

8:55 p.m.

8:56 p.m.

9:01 p.m.

(Sorry for the poor photo quality; my camera isn't the greatest, I have no idea how to change the settings, and it was low on battery power.)
 
That flower remained in bloom the next day, and then wilted and fell off that evening. Two more mature buds blossomed the day after.

I'd never seen a flower pop open before. The gentleman who takes care of the grounds at this place tells me that later on in the summer we can expect several buds popping open every night. Cool.

Busy, so Bullets

• I don't know why I draw comics; it's such an inefficient use of my time. Oh, a gag! I'll think. I should make a comic about it! This will occur in the span of about five minutes: inspiration, idea, formulation. The process of writing, boarding, penciling, scanning, shopping, assembling, and polishing a comic page can take ten to twenty hours, and by then the joke never seems as funny as it did. Then a dozen people spend a minute looking at it, punch a new URL into their browser, and forget about it after four or five clicks.
  
  I am a masochist.
  
  I'm gonna be updating the comics page on a regular basis for a few months, and wanted to kick things off with something special. The next time I decide to do anything special, somebody needs to deliver a mild corrective shock to my genitals. This has become way more involved than it needs or deserves to be, and I'll be relieved if I can wrap it up by this time next week.
  
  
  
• Source of anxiety: the looming possibility that budget cuts will cost me my position and my room at this place. I'm blanching at the prospect of throwing myself at the mercy of the job and housing markets all at once, but it might be unavoidable. Philadelphia isn't that expensive a place to live -- but finding a job that can pay for rent/utilities/food without exhausting me and destroying my will to write/draw/live likely won't be easy.
  
  Just for kicks, I opened up Craigslist Philadelphia and browsed their Writing/Editing section. It's always laugh: 30% or so full-time copywriting/editing gigs at pharmaceutical companies (requirements: three years' full-time experience in a copywriting/editing gig at a pharmaceutical company) and 70% hey write blog posts for my web startup for free, please.
  
  What a lousy time to be a writer. Today you're simply expected to be cool with just giving your work away in exchange for "experience" and "exposure" --  airy pseudo-currencies which might maybe perhaps possibly someday help keep a roof over your head, but until then remain worthless. And evidently a lot of writers think this is a fair trade. After all, if there was a shortage of people willing to sell their labor for nothing, you might see people raising their asking price.
  
  When you sell yourself short, it's not only your own value that depreciates.
  
  (No, The Zeroes isn't selling enough copies to pay my bills. Thanks for asking. Also, stop fucking asking. It's not funny.)

• Greater source of anxiety: what happens when I slow down?
  
  When will I slow down?
  
  Am I slowing down?

Permaculture, proselytizing, power problems

So I just completed a short-term intensive course on permaculture, which I got to do for free as a perk of this retreat gig. My moitvation for enrolling was a desire to stir up my own intellectual beehive, but getting a certificate and résumé padding out of it was a pretty sweet bonus.

I went into the thing expecting an exclusive focus on agriculture, but permaculture's scope is more expansive than that. In a way, it's like systems theory for beginners with an emphasis on ecology. Taken broadly, it might be a lifestyle blueprint, a movement that began as the brainchild of a couple of Australian horticulturists/engineers/environmentalists (David Holmgren and Bill Mollison) who advocated dropping off the grid, moving out into the country, and living in self-sufficient homesteads. Taken more narrowly, permaculture is the methodology devised for designing and arranging the components of this homestead -- or farmland, garden, residence, etc., or any devices they might employ. (My project involved a chicken tractor and movable chicken enclosures specifically designed for the elevated beds at this place's biointensive garden. If chickens relentlessly eat greens and leave dung everywhere, why not put them to work in the fallow beds, managing the weed population and fertilizing the soil?)

Most of the books about permaculture tools and philosophy enjoying high circulation today were penned by Holmgren, including the one used in this course: Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainable Design. I can't say it's a bad read -- it's informative, well-argued, and very thorough -- but it often gets on my nerves for the same reason cited by the Amazon reviewer who gave it its only one-star rating: Yes, Mr. Holmgren, you can be a male Western scientific materialist and still want to create a sustainable environment and society for your children. Unless you're already fond of literature with a pompous New Age reactionist tone, you're gonna get rankled. And as you'd presume from a book whose back cover blurb reads "do mainstream concepts of sustainability dodge the critical issue of global energy peak?" there's a lot of fire and brimstone.

But it's to be expected: composing such a comprehensive and persuasive guide to a set of intellectual principles and methods requires that one not only be an adherent, but a hardliner. When Holmgren writes about the necessity of readjusting the global lifestyle with concern for sustainability and ecological neutrality, he doesn't play tee-ball. Do you drive a car on a daily basis? Pat yourself on the back, jackass -- you're part of the biggest problem facing humanity. Do you eat red meat? You stupid, selfish pig. Are you the type of person who throws out plastic cups without a second thought? Fuck. You.

Well, Holmgren doesn't actually castigate his audience like that -- but it may certainly seem so if you're the kind of person who's always driven a car, eaten beef, and thrown plastic cups in the trash, and doesn't see any urgent need to change his life in order to live up to a set of standard imposed by some pedantic Australian hippie he's never met.

I mean, yeah -- trust me, it irritates me as much as you. It hits that same grating, holier-than-thou pitch as the people who whine at me about my smoking. If you're a smoker, you know exactly what kind of person I'm talking about: that preachy fuck with the nasal voice squawking "oh smoking is so stupid, why would you ever start to begin with? and it's such an expensive habit!" like you're not aware of how much a pack of cigarettes costs and how much more easily you're running out of breath than before. But what the hell business is it of theirs? Why should you have to explain yourself to them? And when you try to explain to them that you're aware of the risks but enjoy it too much to quit, they either look at you're scum or otherwise start pitying you: "oh it's really so sad to to see someone so young and bright and nice do something so awful to themselves for no good reason." But you have reasons! You have lots of reasons! Is there one single thing that smoking doesn't enhance? When hasn't it made your day to life easier and more delicious? How would you ever get through your day without its help as a stress reliever? What's the point of coffee and beer without cigarettes? If you've got the same predilections as me, you wonder how the hell you'd get any work done without cigarettes -- writing while smoking causes the most brilliant and fitting words to jump out of the pen and onto the page without you even asking them to. Think of how much your working habits would suffer if you quit, and how long the disruption would last! And when you finally admit that yeah, you're planning on quitting eventually, the implacable fucker still isn't shutting his noise hole. "Why not now? Quit while you're young! Smoking ages you, you know that?" Blah blah blah bitch bitch blah. Like they're on some kind of mission. Like his own happiness depends on his successfully persuading you to give up something you enjoy.

But yeah, these assholes are absolutely right. Smoking is a toxic habit.

Those environmentalist douches who announce "I DON'T OWN A CAR I RIDE A BIKE" at any conversational mention of automobile ownership and take every chance to ruin your mood with all their gloomy doomy peak oil talk? They've got a point, too.

Impertinent fuckers. All of them. Doesn't make them any less correct, though.

Need we belabor this analogy with more words about how smoking cigarettes as harmful a habit to maintain as the proliferation of the affluent, oil-dependent "western" lifestyle" is dangerous to the long-term tenability of global civilization? Or could you have just inferred that's where we were headed?

Before I go looking for sources to cite, would it be pressing your patience to mention how the smoker's tobacco habit is really only deadly to himself, and then point you toward some statistics about the average United States citizen's carbon footprint, the correlation between global (over)population and oil consumption, the concurrent rises of India and China's GDPs, consumer cultures, and emissions rates, and the effects of atypical regional temperatures on agricultural output?

Alright. Sorry, sorry...I'll stop. Just sayin', though.

Of course -- as someone who still drives his car two miles to the convenience store and still smokes, who am I to prescribe your business?

For the record, though, I've had three cigarettes in the last fourteen days. Three months ago that number would have probably been somewhere between 100 and 140.

Shit. I'm still doing it, aren't I?



On a totally unrelated note, my on-and-off battle with calculus seems as much as a losing fight as ever. If anyone can give me step-by-step instructions for solving the following problem, you will have my profound gratitude. I'll even mail you a drawing of a chicken, if you'd like.

(All I think about anymore are chickens.)

And the beat goes on. . . .

Busy -- which means this will once again be something of a status report and an effort to sort out for myself all the nonsense I've got going on. In addition to everything else I got myself talked into taking an intensive course in permaculture that occupied 26 hours of my time last week is demanding 30 hours of my time this week. The whole thing culminates with some sort of design project, and I seem to have elected to draw up (and maybe build) a chicken tractor.

Education is tiring.

So, what's on my plate for the next few weeks?

1.) Book. You see that little panel off to the right? The one that says "check out my book?" Right now my primary focus is figuring out how to get more people to do that. I'm sending out emails. I'm trying to find some events I can attend where I can place it in the hands of willing readers. At this point I'll give anything a shot.

If you've already read and enjoyed The Zeroes, why not tell your friends about it? Or better yet, why not leave a review on its Amazon page? Think about it: would you be willing to pick up a book you've never really heard of by an author with whom you have little to no familiarity unless other people had good things to say about him? A few more reviews would really help me out.

2.) I've written a short story designed to worm its way into one of those literary magazines you keep seeing in your English professors' offices. Guess I'll need to send that one out sooner that later. Pitch letters are a pain in the ass to write.

3.) Comics. I know I keep saying this, but Comics over Easy is going to start getting updated soon, and I've hopefully got enough backlogged material to keep it going for a few months. It's kicking off with a couple of strips starring a certain delusional redheaded eccentric, and it'll have the usual "cube" strips you've come to expect. And I'll also be debuting a new comic I've drawn on and off since last summer, but never really posted anywhere. It's apparently good enough that it already has a few fans, and one of them actually made a little felt pin representing one of the main characters:

What a cutie! The little fang was an especially nice touch, if you ask me. (Thanks, Michelle!)

4.) Short novel. Rough draft is at about 85%. This is gonna be a weird one. It's either going to be really effective and really unnerving...or just weird. I guess I can't fault myself for not trying anything different, though.

5.) Wait. Wasn't I supposed to write something about EarthBound?

I suppose it's time to look up chicken tractor designs. Or find people who should be sent advance copies of The Zeroes. Or compose pitch letters for the short story. Or move towards wrapping up the short novel draft. Or sort through my EarthBound screenies and try to remember what I had to say about them.

Or, hell -- maybe I should just get some sleep.