new posts in all blogs
Viewing Blog: Austin H. Gilkeson, Most Recent at Top
Results 26 - 50 of 144
Statistics for Austin H. Gilkeson
Number of Readers that added this blog to their MyJacketFlap:
We are still trying to come to terms with the mass shooting at the Dark Knight Rises premiere in Colorado. All of us will spend the next few weeks stumbling around trying to find reasons and answers for the tragedy and the senseless loss of life, and none of us will come to any satisfactory conclusions.
My friend Todd on Facebook made the point that neither the fantasies of the right (a well-armed citizenry), nor the left (an unarmed citizenry), will completely stop madmen from killing other people en mass. If guns won’t do the trick, cars, knives, and improvised explosives will.
I met Todd in Alaska last year during our camping tour. Alaska is a stockade. I’ve never seen so many people with guns, and I grew up in the South. Every fisherman on the river has a pistol strapped to his or her chest, and I’ll never forget the image of our horseback riding guide cocking her pistol (“my engagement ring,” she called it) when she saw signs that a grizzly was nearby. That, of course, is why the fishermen are armed, too. The forests of Alaska are fairy tale forests. They are dark and full of monsters. But unless you are an expert marksman, a gun will not stop a grizzly bear. If it wants you dead, you will die. Shooting it will probably just piss it off and hasten your demise.
I see madmen like the Columbine murderers, or the Aurora murder, as something like an angry grizzly. There is not much you can do to stop them if they are determined to kill. There are precautions we can and should take, and we can minimize the danger through smart policing and policy, but we will never be free of these threats. Now, an angry bear probably has its reasons, whereas these shooters are just the world’s worst assholes, who deserve no sympathy or excuses (due process, on the other hand, yes).
I think we all know this. So, why are we all so shaken by this incident? Probably because previous shootings were limited to places most of us do not spend a lot of time: schools, post offices. Horrifying as those shootings were, they weren’t terrifying for most of us, since we don’t spend every day at school. But most of us go to movie theaters. Millions of us were in Dark Knight Rises premiers at the same time (I was not, so no spoilers, please!). It could have been any of us. Even those of us who fantasize that, “if I’d been there and had a gun, I would have stopped it.” Because, no. You would not have. If anything, in a dark, tear gas-filled theater with people running everywhere and screaming and gunshots coming from the screen and an unseen madman, you would have just shot innocent people. Nobody could have stopped what happened. Nobody except, maybe, Batman.
And perhaps that’s another reason why this tragedy hits a nerve more than similar shootings. By taking place during a Batman movie, during a film about the nigh-mythical badass of badasses, it exposed our fragile fantasies. We are all vulnerable. We are not superheroes. We are not badasses. We are not Batman.
We know we are not, but part of us likes to think we are. I do. Our pop culture is full of stories of accidental gods. Ordinary people who discover they are, or accidentally become, powerful. Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, Spider-Man, Superman. These are powerful wish-fulfillment fantasies. And there is nothing wrong with them. The problem comes when we buy into it, when we believe that with the right combination of mysterious parentage and radioactivity, we might become invulnerable and right the wrongs of the world.
Freud theorized that every kid at some point fantasizes that someday they will discover that their boring parents are not their
It’s been a while. The cobwebs have grown thick over this blog. Just opening the page to write this post has sent a cloud of dust into the air, turning the light grainy and sepia. A small family of mice has nested in my dashboard. There is a dead cricket lying in the cracks beneath the Kumiko page. Fittingly.
Where have I been? you ask. Well, I’ve been busy.
April 2012 was the month that tried to murder me. What two years on an isolated island in the East China Sea and one year at a university not-at-all jokingly called “where fun comes to die” could not do, April 2012 nearly did. It nearly gave me a nervous breakdown. It damn near done me in.
I will dispense with the self-pity party in a second, but suffice to say that if in the future you are ever presented with the opportunity to plan a 10-city, Midwest-wide major diplomatic series of events, while also having your normal job hit one of its busiest seasons, while also planning a wedding halfway around the world that involves two languages, do not take it. It’s a bad idea.
In the end, though, all the sturm and stress led to great things. Cherry trees were planted where they were supposed to be planted. More importantly for me, our wedding in Maui went off beautifully. Having our friends and family from all over the world join us on the ocean shore as Ayako and I pledged our love and devotion was wonderful. It was the best day of my life.
Also, I got to see a manta ray. That was cool.
In spite of the craziness stemming from what I like to call my “Super Happy Pink Cherry Blossom Tropical Wedding Death Spiral”, I still managed to get a lot of writing done. Five new Mab stories have been written recently, and the first Mab book is starting to take serious shape.
I did some calculations last night and I’m currently clocking in at around 15,000 words. Middle-grade books usually run from 20K – 40K words, and I’m aiming at around 30K for the first Mab book, which puts me roughly halfway home. The end is a ways to go, but for the first time in my writing life, I feel confident that I’ll get there. That’s a nice feeling.
With the wedding and cherry blossom insanity largely over, I will dig in and write more here.
So, keep your eyes on this space. April 2012 may have tried to kill me, but as the Joker says, what doesn’t kill you just makes you stranger.
0 Comments on Super Happy Pink Cherry Blossom Tropical Wedding Death Spiral as of 1/1/1900
Saturday night, as if attempting to destroy my fragile efforts at keeping my life together while my wife is off infiltrating the secret volcano layer of a clan of space ninjas, HBO ran a marathon of the first season of Game of Thrones. Like a 15 year old metal head in 1989 staring at album covers in the record store in the part of town that likes to think of itself as the bad part of town, I was immediately transfixed by the dragons and boobs before me. I watched four episodes before pathetically going to bed, just as Daylight Savings Time kicked in and, like a dark wizard, stole an hour of time from a sleeping world.
Even though I’ve read all five of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books, and seen most of the first season of the show already, I watched again. The show is transfixing, absorbing, just like the novels, in part because the fantasy world in which it’s set is so well realized. Martin’s world is an easy world to step into and get lost in; except, unlike Tolkien’s Middle-earth and Rowling’s Hogwarts, it’s a world you don’t ever really want to visit.
If I suddenly woke up in a bed in the Shire or Gryffindor Tower, I’d be ecstatic. Wizards! Elves! Magic! But if I woke up in a bed in a grimy brothel in King’s Landing (grimy brothels seem to constitute something like 67% of the buildings in Westeros), I’d probably start screaming and begging any sorcerer or deity I could find to send me back to the real world before getting knifed for my boots. Martin’s Westeros, you see, isn’t just a fantasy world with a bad part of town. It’s a fantasy world that is the bad part of town.
I’ve only encountered one other fantasy world I’d never, ever want to spend any time in, and that’s China Mieville’s New Crobuzon, specifically as written in Perdido Street Station. An ancient, decaying steampunk police state, New Crobuzon is a fantastically realized nightmare world. To give you an example: in New Crobuzon, there are giant, omnipotent, insane spider gods called Weavers that exist in multiple levels of reality at once and will sometimes randomly eviscerate passersby for the aesthetics of it. And they are among the more benign residents of Mieville’s dystopian nightmare metropolis.
If I woke up in New Crobuzon, I’d just start weeping softly and wait for one of the many unimaginably horrific trans-dimensional monsters in the city to come and lobotomize my soul with its slime-dripping mandibles.
Martin’s world and Mieville’s world come from very different fantasy lit genres (epic fantasy vs. weird horror), but I can easily imagine New Crobuzon sprouting up in the Victorian future of Martin’s medieval Westeros. It’s not just because both worlds are realized and described in such breathtaking and disturbing detail as to make them seem as real as the worst parts of Detroit. It’s not just because their authors have names comically appropriate for fantasy (how could a man named George R.R. Martin NOT end up being an epic fantasy writer? And how is “China Mieville” NOT already the name of a character in a China Mieville novel?)
It’s because both Westeros and New Crobuzon are infused with a deep suspicion of, and even antipathy towards magic.
This is sort of startling when you think about it. Martin and Mieville are fantasy writers and magic is the very foundation of fantasy literature. It&rsquo
photo courtesy of Ayako Miki
Ayako’s flight for Seoul left at 7:00 a.m. this morning. This is a reasonable departure time, but with air travel the way it is these days, a reasonable departure time usually translates into a completely insane waking time. In this case, 3:30 a.m.
Now, for a long time in my life, waking up at 3:30 a.m. was morally unacceptable. Being awake at 3:30 a.m. was fine, but only if I was ragingly intoxicated and sitting in the booth of a 24-hour taqueria telling everyone who would listen (and many who wouldn’t) why Emily Bronte was totally the sexiest Bronte and the stupid people say it was Anne are just moronic morons who eat garbage for their food because they like garbage.
As I’ve gotten older, though, I’ve come to appreciate both the subtle eroticism of Agnes Grey and the quieter watches of the night. There is something deeply calming and content about being awake before the rest of the world, driving through empty, darkened streets that feel both abandoned and private; this secret, silent city left only for you to witness and explore.
After Ayako went through security to catch her flight, I drove home, the sky still dark but for a full, shining moon and the electric starlight of distant skyscrapers. When I got home, I thought about going back to bed, but decided to stay up instead. I fixed a pot of coffee and sat in the living room, watching as the sun rose, the city struggled to life, and the day unfurled itself brilliant and bright as a butterfly’s wing.
Ayako is going out of town for two weeks. She has a new job and for that new job, she is doing a lot of international travel. South Korea and Singapore this month. Japan and the Netherlands next month. Ayako is a CPA and I have two English degrees, so to be perfectly honest, I have no idea what she does for a living except that it involves math.
Also, to be totally honest, I’m not completely sure I believe Ayako when she claims to be an accountant, because I’m not sure why an accountant would need to travel to such exotic locales so frequently for work. The only other person I know who does that for work is James Bond, so it’s entirely possible we’re in some sort of True Lies/Mr. and Mrs. Smith plot here, and I am the hapless, bumbling husband, totally unaware that my wife is an international super-spy until the day I get gunned down by The Russians. I am confident enough in our love, though, to feel sure that Ayako would avenge me with brutal and unrelenting violence, so there’s that.
Whatever her reasons, Ayako will be out of town for two weeks. In the end, it doesn’t really matter if she’ll be in Singapore to inspect financial documents, or (more likely) to prevent an ancient and powerful ninja clan from building a Space Laser. What matters is that I will miss her dearly for those two weeks. Also, I may self-destruct, just like the mission briefings Ayako probably gets in her secret underground lair.
Living with another person, you see, forces me to be a decent human being. It’s not just that I’m sharing my life and living space with someone whom I love deeply, it’s also that my actions and decisions will usually be known to another person, a person who both loves me deeply and also does not at all take me seriously. For instance, if Ayako comes home and all I have eaten for dinner is a bag of chips, then she will understandably look at me, and the crumpled bag, askance. However, if Ayako is out of town, then there is no possibility of future shame to prevent me from eating a bag of chips for dinner, or breakfast.
Now, before I self-deprecate too much, let me say that I generally am pretty good at keeping it together and being a responsible, reasonable human being. Until she got the new job, I did the lion’s share of the housework, since Ayako’s hours, especially this time of year, were insane and mine are pretty normal. Laundry, dishes, floors, trash, dusting, were my arena, and we usually more or less split the cooking duties. I am all over that shit.
But with Ayako gone for two weeks, that all goes out the until-now very clean window. There will be nothing stopping me but my deeply underdeveloped and futile sense of shame to prevent me from spending my evenings eating an entire large pizza and watching the endless run of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on ABC Family, with commercials, even thought I have the damned DVD five feet from me but am too lazy to get it. In other words, nothing is stopping me from doing that and that is already my plan for Friday evening. I put it on my calendar.
I expect that, by the time Ayako returns from her “business trip,” the apartment will be in a state of affairs normally only associated with Ankor Watt and freshmen dorms. The windows will be gone. Pizza boxes and unidentifiable debris will be strewn (a word I don’t use lightly) across the floor. The toilet will be held together primarily by duct tape. The stove will be held together primarily by the solidified and radioactive orange remains of an Instant Mac-and-Cheese making attempt gone terribly wrong. There will be squirrels, raccoons, and at least three different
In 1912, the People of Japan gifted 3,000 Japanese cherry trees to the People of the United States. Next to the Statue of Liberty, it’s the most substantial gift from a foreign country the U.S. has ever received. The trees currently line Washington, D.C.’s Tidal Basin and are famed for their beauty when they blossom each spring. Thousands of people flock to D.C. to see them in full bloom and take part in the annual National Cherry Blossom Festival.
Sadly, due to our nation’s Puritan drinking laws, the Tidal Basin trees can’t be enjoyed properly in the traditional Japanese way of Hanami: by sitting under the trees and getting totally hammered.
Hanami, or flower-viewing, is one of Japan’s most ancient and beloved traditions. For almost two thousand years now, the Japanese have gathered under blossoming cherry trees (sakura) and gotten sloppy drunk while enjoying the beauty of the blooms.
Hanami is woven into the very fabric of Japanese history. Flower-viewing parties are mentioned Murasaki Shikibu’s millennium-old novel Tale of Genji. During the Warring States Period, brutal samurai warlords would take a break from burning down castles and slaughtering peasants to sip sake and pen tender odes to the delicate pink flowers. These days, your typical hanami party involves a blue tarp to lay down beneath the trees, a portable grill for BBQing, and a cooler full of Asahi or Sapporo. Such a serious business is hanami, that the weather stations track the blossomings across the country the way they normally tracks typhoons.
Every city, town, village, and hamlet in Japan has their own version of the Tidal Basin (sometimes it is a tidal basin), their own spot where citizens can gather with their blue tarps in the spring and enjoy the subtle, effervescent beauty of nature in beer-and-meat soaked delirium. In Toyotama, the town where I lived in Japan, the prime hanami spot was right next to Watazumi Shrine, an ancient sea-side Shinto shrine with floating gates. It was a beautiful spot, and a great place to enjoy Japan’s greatest tradition (while eating meat and drinking, of course).
As part of the centennial celebration of the original gift in 1912, Japan is gifting thousands more cherry trees, and tens of thousands of cherry tree seeds, to cities and organizations across the country. A big part of my job right now is helping with that process here in the Midwest, helping to coordinate the gifting of the trees and the seeds. We have nine sites across the Midwest, from Minnesota to Missouri, that will be receiving cherry trees this spring, including the Chicago Botanic Garden and the Governor’s Mansion in Springfield. The trees are small right now, but in a few years they will grow and blossom like the trees in Toyotama.
My co-worker Dan and I have also been tasked with finding places in the Midwest for 9,000 cherry blossom tree seeds Japan is sending to the U.S. this spring. This mostly just involves calling botanical gardens, arboretums, and colleges and seeing if they’d like to accept any of the seeds. Sadly, despite my initial conceptions of the project when told I had 9,000 cherry tree seeds to distribute, I will not be wandering around the Midwest barefoot with a giant burlap sack full of seeds, scattering them at random in the prairie soil like a latter-day Johnny Appleseed.
It’s ironic, actually, that I’m part of this cherry tree project. Growing up, I was the odd one out in my family when it came to plants. My parents and sister have always enjoyed gardening, working in the yard, and growing various trees, flowers, and bushes. Thanks to them, we have a beautiful yard at home. I a
I know that for most of you, oh my loyal tens of readers, after you finish reading a Mab Ipswich story in Underneath the Juniper Tree, on this blog, or just in your dark dreams, your first thought is, “that was so much better than Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.” The second thought is, “I wish I could share my love of Mab with the world while simultaneously protecting my smart phone from damage.” Well, readers, your strange, disturbing wishes have come true!
Marcela Vargas, the talented artist who did the amazing illustrations for my story The Monster and Mab Ipswich in the UTJT February Issue, has an online store where you can get prints of her work, along with iPhone/iPod cases and covers, laptop covers, t-shirts, and even hoodies.
One of her works currently available as a print and upper-torso/electronic device cover is the main illustration done for my story. It shows Mab walking to school with her Yedoese Omukada monster on a leash, surrounded by flying homework dragons (if you don’t know what those are, click the links above and read the story!)
So, if you’d like Mab on your wall, smart phone, iPad, iPod, laptop, or chest (and who wouldn’t), head on over to the Little Miss Machete Store, and drape your life in monsters and Mab!
Underneath the Juniper Tree has published my terrifying (and true!) story about my haunted Japanese cell phone on their website. You can read it here (and I apologize in advance for any chills received): The Ghost in the Machine.
Every word of it is true. I’ve shown the photos to a few people and they have all reliably been freaked out by them. Because the photos are freaky and I don’t have any logical explanation for them (which doesn’t suggest that one doesn’t exist, just that I haven’t found one yet).
I am not a particularly superstitious person and despite my career in writing witch-centric literature, I am also not particularly prone to belief in ghosts. Having worked in the tourist trade in old cities like Charleston and Williamsburg, I’ve spent a lot of time in reputedly haunted buildings and houses, often after hours and at night. I’ve never seen a ghost, nor felt myself in one’s presence. I’m not convinced that ghosts exist. But I still can’t explain the photos of that gray face in my old cellphone.
I believe, in the end, that there is a logical, earth-bound explanation for them, but I doubt I’ll ever discover it. Either way, the photos are proof of one thing for sure — the world is a mysterious place, full of dark corners and niches, and inside those dark corners and niches dwell dark things we cannot explain.
Last week, I watched the first three episodes of Downton Abbey, the critically acclaimed British upstairs/downstairs drama. Set at the palatial home of the Earl of Grantham in 1912, the show follows the lives of the earl and his family, their servants, and the heir to the estate, a middle class lawyer from Manchester. It’s a great show and it’s easy to see why it’s attracted such a devoted following. The show is well shot, well acted, and immerses you in its particular time and place. It trades equally well in gripping melodrama and thoughtful human drama and comedy. And it has Maggie Smith laying down burns like a battle rapper.
One of the most brilliant aspects of the show is how it examines class and privilege from different angles and in all their complexities. The lower class servants and the upper class family are equally disdainful of the middle class lawyer and his mother, who do not understand the rules of this new world they find themselves in. Some of the servants, like the butler Carson, are more passionate in their defense of the aristocratic system than the earl and his family. Carson sees it not as the source of his degradation, but as the source of his livelihood and profession.
The earl himself is disturbed to find out that he’s related to someone with the lowly profession of a lawyer, but clearly has enormous respect for the work and professions of his various servants. And the middle-class lawyer’s good intentions to make do without the extravagance of servants winds up robbing his appointed butler of work and purpose. All the characters are sketched deeply and with great sympathy.
Oddly, the show it most reminded me of was Game of Thrones. In some ways, you can’t find two more different shows. One is a realistic upstairs/downstairs drama, the other is an epic fantasy with direwolves and dragons. But both are centered on the lives of an aristocratic household from the North in a time of great change that threatens the family itself, and the system and society that gives them their power (fittingly, Downton Abbey is set in Yorkshire, and House Stark of Game of Thrones was inspired by England’s House of York).
There are some similarities: the Lord of Winterfell and the Lord of Downton Abbey are both honorable men trying preserve their homes, families, and world against the upheaval around them. Both have “foreign” wives they love dearly despite the fact that their marriages were originally marriages of convenience rather than love, and both those wives are powerful players in their own right. Both have older daughters who hold on to to their class identity fiercely and pursue ill-fated romances, and tomboyish younger daughters who rebel against the constraints and snobbery of their class.
What’s interesting to me is to consider the two shows as part of a continuum, portraits of a single noble English family at different moments in its history. Game of Thrones takes place in a fantasy world, but one modeled very closely on medieval Europe. The Starks of Winterfell are feudal warrior-lords, their power and place won or lost by the strength of their swords and castle walls.
The Crawleys of Downton Abbey are Edwardian aristocrats, their power and place resting on title and tradition. Their estate has no walls. The Earl fought in the Boer War and portraits of armored ancestors hang on the walls, but other than that the vestiges of the family’s warrior past are simply relics. Their primary pursuit is leisure and the maintenance of the estate.
One can easily imagine that Downton Abbey was once a castle like Winterfell, but as often happened in England in the 16th and 17th centuries
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey trailer debuted online last night. You can see it here on the YouTubez. This is a trailer for the first of the two movies based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved children’s book and quasi-prequel to The Lord of the Rings. The first movie comes out next December, and the second movie, called The Hobbit: There and Back Again will follow in 2013 if the Mayans are wrong.
The Hobbit is one of my absolute favorite books, so I’m both excited and a little nervous about the movie(s). Excited because this first trailer seems to capture the humorous and adventurous spirit of the book pretty well, a spirit which is very different than the grimmer, sadder Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit is children’s adventure story first and foremost, and one of its most impressive feats (besides having characters wander thousands of miles across the earth without once encountering a woman), is that it manages to maintain its wry, witty voice even while subjecting Bilbo Baggins and Co. to numerous unpleasantries like goblin slavers, evil wolves, giant spiders, and dragon fire. It’s fantastic.
In fact, let me be blunt: The Hobbit is not only a great book, it is better than The Lord of the Rings. It is by far Tolkien’s best fictional writing. LOTR is often clunky and cumbersome. The Hobbit is fleet of hairy foot and perfectly written. Not a word is wasted, or out of place. Even Tolkien’s mythology is used better in The Hobbit, since the legends of Middle-earth (like the Fall of Gondolin) are briefly alluded to in The Hobbit, in intriguing glimpses like flashes of heat lightning, while in LOTR they are spelled out explicitly and at-length in the form of history lectures and pages-long songs all but the most ardent nerds skip when reading the trilogy.
The Hobbit tends to get less respect than its brawnier brother, since it’s lighter in tone, less sweeping, and more for children. But it’s a cultural trap to assume that the grimmer, more epic, more violent, and ostensibly ”adult” a thing is, the better the quality. LOTR is a classic, no doubt, and changed the face not only of fantasy, but of literature as a whole and, thanks to Jackson’s movies, has now transformed Hollywood into the nerd-dreams factory. But as a work of prose and literature, The Hobbit has it beat.
So, what worries me about the movie version of The Hobbit is that director Peter Jackson, who did a masterful job with the LOTR movies, will make them too much like LOTR. I’m happy to see the same sets and costume designs, and of course the cast, because all that worked really well in the LOTR movies and it’s nice to have continuity.
BUT, The Hobbit is tonally different from LOTR and I worry that, given the success of the original movie trilogy, the impulse will be to make it too much like the older movies, and the trailer seems to indicate that will be the approach (especially given Galadriel’s presence), though Martin Freeman’s Bilbo Baggins is pitch perfect and I have a feeling he may save the movie from its own LOTR-impulses.
Making The Hobbit more epic and serious is a tempting approach, one Tolkien himself almost gave in to. After the success of LOTR, he went back to re-write The Hobbit in the style of LOTR and clear out the fun, but pesky details that made it less narratively cohesive with his larger mythology (like the aside about Bilbo’s ance
Vaclav Havel and Christopher Hitchens both died of cancer last week. Both were great writers and great political thinkers. Hitchens leaves behind a mixed legacy, as any warrior-for-his-own-opinions will, and one gets the feeling that he wouldn’t have it any other way. Havel’s legacy is brighter and more enduring, the playwright who lead a people and a nation to freedom.
A third great writer died of cancer last week. His name was Rafael Torch. He was 36. He hadn’t yet reached the levels of renown that Havel and Hitchens had, but his prose had all their raw, honest power, and more. I never met Torch, though he did MAPH the year after me, but I’d read some his pieces that were published in the literary magazine Contrary.
After Torch’s death, Contrary emailed out a piece Torch had written when his cancer reappeared in June. The link is below.
Please read it. You will be glad you did. It is one of the most beautifully written and powerful odes to love and life I’ve ever read.
http://blog.contrarymagazine.com/2011/06/love-like-all-the-stars-in-the-sky/
I am fascinated by living rooms. That’s weird, I know, but bear with me. Living rooms, or sitting rooms, or dens, or parlors, or salons, or whatever you want to call them, are the strangest and most telling rooms in our houses, apartments, condos, and castles. They are the least and also most human of rooms.
Your house or apartment, like almost all human dwellings, can be divided into four basic rooms, based on functions*: sleep, waste, food, living. Sometimes these spaces are simply corners of one large room, or are combined in various ways, but if you have the Internet and are reading this blog, then chances are you have specific rooms for these functions.
The first three are the bedroom, the bathroom, and the kitchen. These are biological rooms, the rooms in your house specifically built for you to carry out your survival functions of a biological organism. You sleep (and sometimes mate) in the bedroom. You dispose of wastes and clean yourself in the bathroom. You prepare and eat food in the kitchen. Without these rooms, and the functions they allow, you would die.
The fourth room, the last room, is the one built for no specific biological function. Granted, most of us have probably slept, mated, and eaten in our living rooms at one time or another, but that’s not really what the living room is for. It’s not for anything related to our biological functions or survival.
In the living room, we relax. We read. We watch movies and TV, or play video games. We waste hours on the Internet. We welcome visitors and chat with them. It is the space where we function as social and solitary creatures, often at the same time. It is, biologically speaking, a useless room. And yet, it’s probably the room most of us like the most. The room where we feel most at home.
*You might protest that you have more rooms than this, but all are really extensions or additions to the others. Dining rooms are extensions of the kitchen; libraries, studies, sun porches, and game rooms are extensions of the living room. Sex dungeons and screw closets are extensions of the bedroom. Stairways, garages, and hallways are the spaces in between, and closest are for storage, but none of them are really rooms.
I have a Master’s Degree in the Humanities. I’m not really sure what that means. I know that the degree grants me certain expertise and authority. For instance, when I speak of the Humanities, or a singular humanity, or humans, I know of what I speak, even if I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. Aside from that, though, it’s difficult to tell people exactly what I studied when I became The Master of Humanity. In order to help explain it, I am below publishing the abstract of my Master’s thesis. I hope it will enlighten you not only regarding my degree, but also on the radical ideology of Lionel Richie, and the pervasive bourgeois oppression of gravity.
Ceiling and Time: Lionel Richie’s ‘Dancing on the Ceiling’ as (Rad)ical T{ex}t
by: A. Hearn R. Gilkeson III
Submitted in concurrence with the requirement for the degree of Master of All Humans
The University of Chicago at Chicago
In 1986, Lionel Richie released on the public the most radical piece of art since Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel I Am Afraid of Myself. The song, and subsequent video, “Dancing on the Ceiling” was a shot across the bow of America’s late capitalist, gravito-centric culture. Less a piece of pop culture than a deconstruction of our reified cultural and scientific epistemology, I will argue that “Dancing on the Ceiling” re-centers notions of artistic ecstacy and creation in new spaces and conceptualizations not weighted down, as it were, by prevailing Western notions of gravity.
The song begins with a desperate cry in the darkness for meaning. “Man, what in the world is happening down / at the end of the hall?” Richie sings in the first verse. Note the problematic appeal to “Man” or rather “The Man.” Richie begins the song still subject to authority, still begging “The Man” to provide answers to the existential/ontological question of “what in the world is happening?”
This existential confusion grows in the second stanza. “What is happening here / Something’s going on that’s not quite clear,” Richie states, clearly explicating the seminal confusion of a culture in the throws of late capitalism, when, as Adorno makes clear, all meaning of cultural production has been alienated from both laborer and consumer. We know that something is happening, but it is impossible to know what.
Richie’s answer to this ontological conundrum arrives in an instant, and it is as radical as it is physically transgressive. Richie does not seek some Western, bourgeois notion of knowable Truth to balm the wounds of his existential crisis. He says, simply, “We’re gonna have a party / It’s starting tonight.”
Note here not only the appeal to a common humanity in the “we,” but the absence of the previously invoked authority of “Man.” Richie has realized that authority can provide no answers to the question “what in the world is happening?” Authority is as clueless as we all are. Richie appeals now to “we,” to all of us, to throw a party, and start it tonight.
Like a Nietzschean Ubermensch, Richie casts of society’s authority and embraces the Dionysiac frenzy. Indeed, as Richie sings, “Everybody start to lose control / when the music is right,” and then admonishes his fellow revelers to “not get uptight” because “all we want to do tonight / Is go ’round and ’round / And hang
We are made for patterns. Our brains are wired for them. We argue about the utility of the humanities and the sciences, but deep down the study of The Canterbury Tales and the study of a galaxy are the same. They are both the study of structure, and through structure function, and through function, meaning. The structures and functions of our studies are different, but the meaning is the same. We search for meaning, even when that meaning is that there is no meaning.
That search for patterns can throw us off. We’ll find them even when they’re not there. It is easy to fall for this stuff. We all do every day. Satan isn’t hiding dinosaur bones in the ground to fool us into disbelief (perhaps the ultimate conspiracy theory), but the universe often generates patterns that seem to have meaning, patterns that seem to portend Fate or Destiny or Doom for us, because we must be special and the Word or World must be speaking to us, when really it’s just a coincidence, a cosmic joke on us generated at random by an apathetic universe.
I stumbled across one of these myself recently. It is a slight thing, a quote from a line in Andrew Marvell’s famous poem “To His Coy Mistress.” Yet the pattern is so striking that I cannot shake it.
Marvell’s poem is famous for the beauty of its structure in contrast to the rather dirty function. The point of the poem is basically, “if we had all the time in the world, I’d make love to you slowly over millions of years, but life is short, so let’s go ahead and just bone, okay?” It’s most famous line is the first, “if we had world enough, and time,” but it a second quote: ”My vegetable love should grow/vaster than empires, and more slow” that haunts me, that weaves a pattern I can neither decode nor put aside.
In the past month, I have bought two books. Both are collections of fantastical short stories (“speculative fiction” if you must) by preeminent female authors of similar age who have achieved nigh-legendary status in their respective literary fields (sci-fi/fantasy and literary fiction). The first is The Wind’s Twelve Quarters by Ursula K. LeGuin, the second is The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Faerie Stories by A.S. Byatt.
I bought both at labyrinthine used book stores, one in Lincoln, Nebraska, the other at Myopic Books in Wicker Park. I bought both after long wanderings in the store, searching for a book to read next. Both caught my eye since both are short story collections (which I find easier to commit to than novels) and both are by renowned authors I’d meaning to read more of.
The quote from Marvell appears in both. In the LeGuin, it is the title of a science fiction story about the exploration of a remote planet where there is only botanic life, but that botanic life constitutes one massive, planet-sized collective being (James Cameron ripped off this concept in Avatar). The title evokes both the growth of epic scope of interstellar exploration, and also the planet itself, a vegetable consciousness that is vaster than any empire and must have taken billions of years to develop. Like Marvell’s poem, one of the meanings in the structure and function of this story is the meagerness of humanity in the vastness of time and space. We are small and fleeting, and “before us lie, deserts of vast eternity.”
In the Byatt, it is remembered by a middle-aged English professor as she makes love to a djinn (a genie) that she has accidentally released in her Istanbul hotel room. Byatt’s invocation of the line is more straightforward and more ironic, since the djinn is immortal and is capable of loving on the scale Marvell’s poem des
I turned old yesterday. Specifically, 31. Just two days ago, I didn’t feel old. Being 30 was exciting. It feels good to say, “I’m 30″ when people are rude, intimate, or foreign enough to ask your age ask your age. You’re on the cusp, you’re standing on the threshold between the intoxicating, insecure freedom of being in your 20′s and the maturity of your 30′s.
“I’m 31″ feels boring, somehow. Like you’ve already stepped through the door and are now on the other side of respectable. Like people expect you to show up to parties wearing a sweater and having thoughtful, non-committal opinions about the national GDP. I am still young, but I feel I am on the road to old.
So, I compiled a mental list of things that make me feel old right now. In the future, when I am inexplicably even older, my daughters and sons will come across this post in the catacombs of the Internet on their iPad 26′s and then mock me relentlessly for being so ancient. In those heady, futuristic days, when everyone is bald and we all wear silver body suits all day, Facebook and WordPress will evoke the same giddy derision as the words “Friendster” and “GeoCities” do now.
All of them, I realize, have to do with technology. Which perhaps isn’t fair given the speed of innovation that computer technology and our late capitalist economy are capable of. I mean, Steve Jobs helped invent and promote the personal computer and the iPad 2, a device even school children think looks like it came out of the future as depicted in Star Trek (you know, that very shiny JJ Abrams movie).
In the past, and by that I mean, pretty much the entire history of our species before about 1960, technology moved at a snail’s pace. We have technological ages like the Stone Age and the Bronze Age that lasted hundreds, if not thousands of years. Back then, a dude would invent ovens and then 834 years and millions of burned hands later, a different dude would invent oven mitts. These days, something like the iPod comes out and revolutionizes entire industries and then is nearly obsolete as technology (meaning, a device that only plays digital music) within 3 years.
Perhaps that’s the cost of living in an age of rapid technological change. The technologies of our youth (land lines! long distance rates!) become obsolete before we even get married or have children. Perhaps it makes our own past seem more distant, or perhaps it’s just that blogging encourages more self-indulgent self-reflection than is healthy.
Anyway, here’s what’s making me feel old this week:
1.) I owned a first generation iPod. The scroll wheel was a physical wheel that physically turned. I still have it. I got it in college. It’s only 8 years old, but it feels like a relic of some lost age, like it was Charlemagne’s personal music device.
2.) Seriously, I had a Friendster account in grad school. Grad school! MySpace was still for bands. Facebook was still a glimmer in Zuckerberg’s eye. There was only Friendster. It was big back then. As Oline commented on Twitter, we “crafted testimonials as though they would be read at people’s funeral when they died.”
3.) When I was a kid, we had a typewriter in the house. It was not an antique or decorative. It was functional. My parents used it to write things. It was soon replaced by a Mac II, but still. We had a typewriter.
4.) I remember people smoking on airplanes. The no-smoking light above your seat actually meant “put out your cigarettes in the little ash tray built into the arm of your seat,” not “
By far the coolest part of my story “Mab Ipswich: the Wickedest Witch” getting published in the November issue of Underneath the Juniper Tree was the illustrations that came with it.
When UTJT accepted the story, they said they were going to get someone to illustrate it. I was thrilled, but also a little anxious. It’s nerve-wracking to hand a story over to people for them to read or edit, but it’s even more nerve-wracking to hand over a story and have someone make their own art out of it. As you might imagine, Mab is a character near and dear to my dark little heart, all the more so now that she’s gotten me a publishing credit, and I worried the artist would get her “wrong,” though I didn’t really know what that might mean, other than Mab not looking as I imagined her.
Mostly, though, I was excited to see Mab illustrated, since my own artistic skills withered long ago and the best I could do now to draw Mab would be a stick figure with a witch hat.
The first illustration of Mab ended up coming out before the story itself. Drawn by the artist Elizabeth Rose Stanton, it was posted on UTJT’s Facebook page as a teaser for the November issue.
copyright 2011 Elizabeth Rose Stanton
I instantly loved this portrait of Mab. The details are great: the big witch hat with the monogrammed “M,” the orange eyes, the little skull dangling from the tip of the hat and the spider on her shoulder. It doesn’t quite match my own image of Mab, but the mischievious, almost defiant grin perfectly captures the spirit of the character. And the toothy hat is awesome!
The illustration that appeared with the story in the November issue was done by the artist Stacey Byer and shows the climax of the story, when Mab’s teacher Mrs. Johnson makes Mab take her witch hat off and the hat lets loose a deafening scream.
copyright 2011 Stacey Byer
Byer’s Mab is more menacing and scary, and that fits well with how dynamic the painting is. I love the color contrasts and the colorful scream issuing from the hat. It’s also fun to see Mrs. Johnson pictured and I love that it includes the little detail of the evil eye necklace she wears. Like Elizabeth, Byer gives the hat’s screaming a great physicality by giving it teeth and a tongue, which is a vast improvement over my simple simile in the story (I wish I’d thought of it).
Stacey Byer also did a couple of other illustrations for the story that she posted on her blog. One is the very first picture of Mab’s hometown, the City of Wyrm! It shows the contrast between “quiet, leafy” Apple Street where Mrs. Johnson lives and the “dark houses” of the witch families on Black Cauldron Lane.
I am delighted to announce that my short story Mab Ipswich, the Wickedest Witch has been published in the November issue of the macabre children’s lit magazine Underneath the Juniper Tree! You can check it out by clicking here and going to pages 35-40! Read it, love it, “like” it, live it.
The story comes with an awesome illustration by the Caribbean artist Stacey Byer, whose other great illustrations and paintings you can check out on her Facebook page: The Art of Stacey Byer. This being the 21st Century, give it a view and a “like.”
While you’re at it, check out UTJT’s Facebook page and “like” them, too, and read all the awesome stories in the November Issue! The dark, demented stories therein are a great way to keep up that Halloween feeling for a little while longer…
One year ago today, just before the inaugural meeting of The NLB, I scribbled out a short story about a wicked young witch named Mab Ipswich. In 5 days, that story will be published in the November issue of children’s lit magazine Underneath the Juniper Tree. In honor of Mab’s first birthday and her impending publication, I present to you the following new Mab story:
Beatrice had never seen Mab so excited. The witch was hurriedly crafting some sort of spell. Mab flipped through thick, dusty books scattered across the floor of the little bedroom she shared with her two older sisters, and scribbled down notes so fast that sometimes the pen tip clawed through the paper. She grabbed handfuls of frog fingers and lizard lips from the glass jars lined up against the wall and tossed them into her little black cauldron in the middle of the floor. Outside, the sky grew dark. Rain tickled the window pane.
“Er, Mab. I thought you said we were going somewhere with free candy,” Beatrice said.
Mab wasn’t paying attention. She reached past Beatrice and took a handful of toad toes from a jar. She considered them for a moment, gave them a sniff, and then popped one in her mouth. She chewed for a moment, then made a face and spit it out. “Too ripe,” she mumbled to herself, then shrugged and threw the toes into the cauldron. Green smoke billowed from the brew. It smelled like rotted applesauce.
“Mab!” Beatrice said. “Where are we going and when are we leaving?”
“I told you, Bea. We’re going to the place with free candy. We’ll leave when I finish making the portal,” Mab said.
“A portal? We’re going to another dimension?” Beatrice asked. This was both exciting and terrifying news. Exciting because she had a chance to step out of her boring, routine life and into a place utterly alien and beyond anything she had ever known. A new, untouched world, full of free candy. Terrifying for the same reasons, and because last time she’d followed Mab through a portal, Beatrice had gotten stuck in heaven for hours. It was dreadfully boring. She didn’t want to end up back there, not until she was good and properly dead, at least.
“Of course,” Mab said and stirred the potion counter-clockwise. “If they gave our free candy in this dimension, we wouldn’t have to go to another dimension to get free candy. But I have to cook the potion right. Or else we might end up in limbo or hell, or even worse, Wisconsin.”
The room seemed to grow dark at the muttering of that evil-sounding word. “What’s Wisconsin?” Beatrice asked.
“My great-uncle ended up there once. He said it was a dark, cold place full of pale mutants who wear cheese on their heads.”
Beatrice shuddered. What an awful place. She’d rather end up back in heaven than there.
Mab grabbed a jar of basilisk-blood and poured the thick, red liquid in a circle around the cauldron. Then she spit into the potion.
“Your turn,” Mab said. Beatrice sidled up to the edge of the basilisk-blood circle and leaned over the cauldron. It felt strangely silly and rude to spit into a cauldron. Her mum would not approve. It was not ladylike. Beatrice held back her long, blonde hair and spit. The cauldron bubbled.
Mab stood up over the cauldron, closed her orange eyes, and began muttering a spell in the secret language of the witch-clans.
The other day I extolled the gentle virtues of blog spam. In that post, I said that I normally receive about 2 spam messages a day. Today I got 14. I assume the Spam-bots were lured here by my verbatim quoting of other Spam messages. They smelled blood in the digital water, and they swarmed. Or, perhaps they read my post about how nice Spam messages are and decided to make my day. The 14 are all very nice.
My favorite one, that I will not quote here, ironically attempted to latch itself onto “The Kindess of Spam” post. It extolls the merits of my blog and then asks that I link to its link-farm. And then it says something like “but you make a good point,” as if conceding its own Spam-inality.
Which, really, is just another virtue of Spam-bots. They are kind, complimentary, and self-aware.
Of course, self-awareness is the great goal of A.I., so if the Spam-bots have achieved that…
I think Skynet has a new strategy, people. It’s trying to kill us with kindness…
View Next 25 Posts
2 Comments on Drawing Mab, last added: 11/18/2011
I haven’t watched the HBO special yet – but I’ve already read the series twice… since I picked it up for the first time this summer.
Also: Scarlet A(ardvark Face)? HEART.