Zak's Production Journal.

Starting a new story.

Mon, 12 May 2008 18:56:34 GMT

My two favorite non-writing activities related to writing are research and building playlists of music.

The current project -- a decidedly time-limited distraction from the novel -- requires an enormous amount of research, a lot of which is difficult. Good difficult. I know I'm getting close to where I need to be because of the dreams I had last night. Saturation dreams, the kind I have when my brain is putting together all the pieces and making sense of a bunch of stuff. It's not totally different from learning a new game (especially a mmporg). It feels strangely like swimming. At the moment I can't touch bottom, but I know it's there now.

The even more fun part for this story was putting together the playlist. I habitually do this for short stories. I suspect it's actually more important for short-form stuff than it is for longer works because short stories live or die by their hold on mood and music is an extremely effective way for me to get into the feel of the time and place. The times and places of this story are extremely particular.

Sometimes my playlists are heavy on music with lyrics. This playlist is largely instrumental, or with chanting. I even fit in a couple of Wimme's solo yoik pieces.

I'm being coy about the story itself because it's for the Haunted Legends anthology and... well, I feel like being coy about what I'm doing. If nihilistic_kid or ellen_datlow want to know what I'm working on before I send it, I'll be glad to tell them. I'm guessing not, though.

Also, I'm at that phase of story ideation here I get superstitious about saying what I intend to do, lest I pin down things that should be mobile.

Mini-Review: Iron Man -- Maxi-rant: Product placements

Sat, 10 May 2008 22:03:49 GMT

Saw Iron Man yesterday.

I was reminded of an exchange between Jerry Lewis and Stanley Kubrick. Lewis -- this is all according to him, as reported by Peter Bogdanovich -- while editing one of his movies, had Kubrick looking over his shoulder. At some point he says to Kubrick, "you cannot polish a turd."

Kubrick looked at him and replied, "you can if you freeze it."

Iron Man is an exquisite coprolite. It is very nearly the best movie it can be, only really failing at the points where the producers needed to cash checks from corporate sponsors (Bulgari, Burger King, Audi, Verizon, V-Tech). Oh, and the climax of the story is a fairly pointless excuse for explosions. However up to that point the whole thing is heavily larded with careful character work, to the point of almost making up for Stark's assistant being named Pepper Potts.

I am now extremely tired of comic book movies. I'll be happy to see Hellboy 2 and I'm definitely interested in Batman -4+2 but I think you'd have to get out the Beethoven and the eye-clamps to get me into a theater with Hulk 2 or The Spirit or even the Watchmen movie (that last being a painful one). Something about the enjoyment desperately eked out of Iron Man's fundamental dross just left me with a profound disinterest in more comic book stuff.

Part of it was that I wanted to scream at the theater every time a motherfucking product placement came up. Though I wouldn't mind seeing the Verizon phone guy doing his shtick in Afghanistan. I have visions of Taliban guys tying him to a chair, putting a sack over his head and making him say "can you hear me now?" into a 1980's era portable video camera and then slicing his head off with a Motorola Razr phone. What sort of monocular holoprosencephalic attic-children do they think we are to believe a Verizon phone works in the mountains of Afghanistan? Am I really supposed to believe that Audi cars will protect me in the event of a ridiculous explosion of budget-induced exoskeleton warfare? I seriously fucking doubt an Angelino -- on being kept captive for 3 months -- is going to return to LA and crave a Burger King hamburger. No. NO. NO. These product placements make me want to completely avoid the advertised products. There is no subliminal effect for me. I directly interpret these images as checks being handed to an oily executive. Most likely after said executive has killed a bum in an alley, tripping like a right-wing radio host on prescription drugs. In fact, every time I see a product brand, this is what I imagine getting that image into a movie. Especially when I'm supposed to believe that a mega-wealthy playboy/asshole is driving a middle-of-the-road Audi sportscar and not something interesting like a Tesla Roadster or a Bugatti Veyron.

Ahem. Yeah, I am tired of comic book movies, but I've never had a great love of superhero comics. The only one I really liked was Marshal Law, but I got hooked early on Mills and O'Neill with Nemesis The Warlock, and I never really got over the atavism.

This and that

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:28:25 GMT

First up, GUD Magazine is teasing people with the cover art I did for them. It's been a very long time since I'd done a cover for anyone, and I had a blast doing this one. There were no guarantees they'd buy what I did, but the premise of the cover was just too cool to pass up trying, and then they loved it. They're good folks. Go check them out!

I've just finished chapter 4 on my novel. I'd gotten a bit bogged down in research on drug culture, since I want my character to have just exactly the right kind of OD experience, but I've sorted that out now. (If anyone knows how much any street drugs cost in Kansas City circa 1985, please speak up!)

With chapter 4 done, I'm pausing the novel long enough to dig through my obscene backlog of unpolished fiction. It's damn well time to get stuff out there. I've got ~~six~~ nine stories that I could be circulating that I'm not because I haven't revised them.

Once that's done I'm strongly considering a piece for Haunted Legends. To which I'd also just like to say a huge thanks to both ellen_datlow and nihilistic_kid for having an open submission period.

When I do my research late.

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 06:59:26 GMT

I finished writing Chapter 3 today, and started Chapter 4.

In preparing to write a description at the beginning of 4, I did a bit of research I really should have done before chapter 1 and neglected to do because I thought I could trust my memory.

Hah hah. WRONG!

At the beginning of the book, it's June 1985. My main character runs a Commodore 64 BBS and has a huge collection of demos and games -- in fact, he's got a hard drive, which was a hugely exotic item at the time. Due to plot things, his collection of demos becomes important and he trades a bunch of them with another character.

The problem is that there was no established demo scene in 1985. The first few appeared that year, morphing out of the crack intro, but there wasn't any sort of established scene until later in '86.

For a variety of reasons I can't easily just move the narrative forward a year or two (there's a bunch of plot stuff depending on very specific and time-limited tech). It's note a huge problem -- I've already solved it, in fact. I'll just make the focus in that part of the book be entirely on cracked games.

It's a problem that got me thinking of prevention, though. So I went out and got a copy of The Puzzle Palace by James Bamford, and I'm going to order up a couple more books from Amazon. I don't want to get caught similarly ill-informed when it comes time to write the government agency parts of the story.

Between phreakers, crackers, carders, a registered nurse and the FBI, CIA, NSA and NRO I am going to be utterly swamped in jargon. It's going to be interesting balancing it all so it's comprehensible to readers. Not everyone liked the new Miami Vice movie, and a commonly cited reason was that it made pretty much zero concessions to explaining things to the audience.

A delicate little rant.

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 07:52:16 GMT

You might want to stand back, I'm about to yell until spit froths out.

You see, I went to see My Blueberry Nights this evening (it was good, not flawless, but I really liked it warts and all), and before the movie there was the requisite 15 minutes of indie charm offensive.

The first thing I noticed was: oh my god I am being drenched in white privilege.

(I would like to preface the following bit of alligator-like carnivorous mean by saying that I'm just as rabid about women who have kids on purpose, or because it's the right thing for them to do.)

The second thing I noticed was EVERY MOTHER FUCKING MOVIE MADE THAT HAS A FEMALE PROTAGONIST FILLS HER FULL OF EARTH-BOUND BABY.

Can we PLEEEEEEEEASE have an abortion now? A good one? One like actual women get in the real world?

Yeah, I've heard the arguments from the dicknuckles who splattered out Knocked Up, "it's haaaaaaard to write about abortion. The dramaaaaaaaatic aaaaaaaaaaarc is HAAAAAAARD."

Fuck you. Just, fuck you. The stories are OUT THERE. People do this. WOMEN ARE PEOPLE. It does not have to be a devastating blow. It does not have to be yanked from the jaws of evil totalitarian coathanger police. It does not have to be about how dehumanizing China is. It does not have to be an indicator that the woman in question is a ditz. IS EVERYONE MAKING MOVIES ACTUALLY BRUNDLEFLY GRABBING GEENA DAVIS BEFORE SHE GETS AN ABORTION AND STICKING HER IN HIS CLONE POD FULL OF GOD DAMN BABY MOVIES!? I WANT A FUCKING ABORTION RIGHT FUCKING NOW, HOLLYWOOD!

Maybe I'm just sensitive about this because the idiots were out protesting the local Planned Parenthood (just a couple blocks from my house), and I'd seen them driving there and could tell because they were in a ginormous SUV plastered with four hundred million bumperstickers about how god is a total dick and we should all lay back and think of England or he was going to be really pissed and then we'd all collectively need to tell the doctor that we're stupid clumsy people who fell down the stairs and landing on god's class ring which he accidentally dropped on the landing because we were unfairly asking him to stop brewing meth in the coffee pot again.

That could have been why the preview to whatever that fucking movie was pissed me off. Maybe. Except that Knocked Up sent me into a minor yelling tizzy and that was before the bible-wipers on the corner of Free Condoms and STD Tests were holding up their half-cooked cherry jello baby signs.

No, this has just been pissing me off for a long time and seeing Helen Hunt get milfinated by a nebbitzy Matthew Broderick (who was totally immature and callow because he just couldn't want to have a sprog come out of his dick) just made it explode kind of like Yellowstone will when the supervolcano goes off.

In short, Hollywood? I know you're not listening, but please. Fuck you. Fuck you in both kidney holes. Fuck you in the airtube. Fuck you in every single goddamned sprocket. Fuck you in the avid bay. Fuck you in the Michael Bay. Just fuck you. Fuck you very, very much.

Some very different research notes today.

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 05:38:23 GMT

By the time I was done taking notes I'd developed a formula for the rate at which humans use volumes of time (measured in liters).

This pleases me.

Packrats: I need your l33t sk1llz!

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 20:54:00 GMT

Do you box up everything because it might be useful some day? Have you been doing so since 1985? Are you a computer and/or gadget freak?

I need stuff from the 1985-87 era. What kind of stuff?

Sharper Image catalogs
Issues of Computer Shopper, Byte!, Compute, Computer Gaming World (or any other publication of that variety -- and yes, I'm aware there is a collector's market for some of that stuff; I don't want to collect -- see below)
Manuals for telephone equipment (consumer or otherwise)
Any ads for tech stuff from any magazines of the era

I don't need (or even want) actual physical copies. Scans are ideal and they only need to be good enough to be legible. If you can't scan them yourself, I'll happily pay for postage, scan them on my end and return whatever you sent me in the same condition you sent it (or pay you should something evil and postal happen in transit or while in my care). I don't even really need entire magazines. The ads are most useful to me, though reviews of hardware are great too, as well as speculative articles. I am completely aware that in asking for scans of ads and reviews from 1985 era Computer Shopper I am asking for A LOT. I'd be completely happy with a representative sample of just 10-15 pages, preferably covering several different areas of tech (pc, C64, Atari, printers, bulk floppy sales, etc).

Just to make matters easier, you can be enormously useful to me if you've got any of the stuff listed above just by leaving a comment here with some of the following information:

Prices of floppy disks, tractor feed paper, ink ribbons
Vendors for above
Location of users group meetings and what their focus is
Names of equipment manufacturers, what they make, how much it costs
Ads for things that sound stupid or impossible

Also, if I'm being completely dense and missing some available public source (or even quasi-public) for that stuff, I'd appreciate being told I'm a bonehead who doesn't know how to google. Providing you also include a pedantic example of how I should have done it.

If you don't have anything of this sort, but know people who might, please send them the link to this page.

All queries should be directed to the comments, where I'll happily arrange whatever variety of transport is required.

Hurrah for Erowid.

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:26:19 GMT

Today I wrote a character going to a party, getting some PCP and jumping into the great big swimming pool of radical depersonalization. It was extremely fun to write, but I enjoy taking my characters to places they don't intend to go. Though, to be fair, this character signed up for more or less what she got.

In other news, I've got an art project to finish now. I think if I'm to balance the two impulses, art must come after writing. Doing the pixel-pushing thing is no sweat after I've been writing for a while, but trying to write after using the visual part of my brain for a bit simply doesn't work. I not only forget how to type, but putting words into sentences gets to be an insurmountable difficulty.

But you know what? At the moment, I am loving my novel so much.

I hope I'm not liking my book so much it's making gregvaneekhout angry at his.

I've been hanging out in this park watching the other kids play for long enough that I know there will come a day when I'm certain that the novel I'm working on is made entirely from raw sewage, so I'm just going to bask in the love I feel right now. Also, I am doing art things.

A thing that makes me very happy.

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:19:40 GMT

Despite owning the album for years now, I'd never really listened to 'Frank's Wild Years'.

My introduction to Tom Waits was 'Bone Machine', and I immediately took to the sandpaper beauty and the diesel fume drift. It scratched itches I didn't know I had. So when I got earlier albums like 'Raindogs' and 'Swordfishtrombones', the more crooner-mode just wasn't binding to the same receptors, so I didn't listen to them as much.

However, building up music to listen to for my 8-bit Cyberpunk story I decided to use almost entirely period music (1985-1988, and of course anything that came before), so I dumped a lot of Waits into the list. I was sitting down to do the little crab-walk up to writing some more words one day when 'Cold Cold Ground' comes up, and it goes straight into my bloodstream in a way music doesn't do that often. Not just the swaying melody like a swingset in a New Orleans cemetery, but the words. They stopped me in my tracks and I just listened.

Sometimes a piece of music is just exactly perfect to put down roots behind all the walls and I can see the leaves when I look out my window. I can rarely ever get them back out, but it's not so bad really. The music that's done that for me is a hugely eclectic lot: there's 70's era Vangelis, Simon Bonney (the lead singer of Crime and the City Solution), Cliff Martinez, Talking Heads, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Nick Cave, Astor Piazzolla, Carl Orf, The Cramps, Steve Reich. I keep thinking that garden is full, but stuff keeps sprouting.

And so it begins

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 21:25:21 GMT

After a lot of floundering around and picayune 'preparation' where I did silly things like name my characters and find out what BBS software they were running, last night I wrote the first scene in the 8-Bit Cyberpunk novel. This book is going to be absurdly fun to write and startlingly, it's also funny. I didn't realize I could even do that.

Back home.

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 08:09:19 GMT

The Viable Paradise party at drumiller's place was excellent!

I'll write more in detail tomorrow, and likely with pictures too. For now though I am headed to bed. Something about spending 8 hours in the car wears a guy down.

Some writing.

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 06:13:56 GMT

I finished a new story today, The Gardens of Lithia. A strange little thing, and short. 2400 words at the moment, or thereabouts. It's about a city that started out as a single block of stone that a woman gave birth to. For fun, I wrote it as a directed first-person narrative that heavily involves the 'listener'. There are effectively 3 different stories in it, at varying scales. kirizal thought the city itself was impressively creepy, so I'm happy.

Capsule reviews of I Am Legend, Doomsday and The Mist.

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 23:18:42 GMT

I gorged myself on post-apocalyptic movies over the weekend. In a nutshell, here they are.

I Am Legend

3/4 great. 1/4 watery shit tossed in a blender with Signs. I can think of few stories that needed god shoehorned into them as little as this one. I was offended by the original cut. I nearly vomited at the theatrical cut. WHAT THE FUCK IS THOMAS KINKADE DOING IN I AM LEGEND YOU DIPSHITS.

Also, you are not allowed to use butterflies as a symbol without acknowledging Chang Tzu.

Few things on this earth irritate me off as much as something which is excellent right up until the point where it lets you know it was just kidding with all that good stuff and then shits a ditchwater enema into your lungs while you're taking a breath. I should learn to stop trying to breath around assholes (I'm looking at you, Akiva Goldsman).

Doomsday

Exactly the opposite. It knows it's dumb. If you're paying attention, the signals are quite clear that, yes, this bit is going to be silly. The idea is that you laugh at the absurdity, the excess. I laughed a lot and enjoyed the hell out of it. It was joyful in its merciless pillaging of primary sources (with two guys who die early named Carpenter and Miller there can be no doubt whatsoever), and it had a great sense of exactly when to seriously undercut it's heroic posturing.

The single detail in which all else is contained for me is when our heroes, after battling through a debased and wilded Glasgow escape into the country with high tech future weapons only to find that the next guy they have to see lives in a castle. The camera swoops and pans through it showing that everyone is dressed in medieval garb, they all have swords and horses and crossbows. The head lackey comes glowering out of the inner sanctum of the castle and just next to his head is a sign that says 'Gift Shop'.

If all dumb movies were this smart the world would be a much finer place.

The Mist

Holy crap. I thought that the real, actual horror movie had pretty much died and I never would have expected Frank Darabont to prove me wrong. The guy's made a career out of feel-good adaptations of King, so I guess he was saving it all up for this movie. It uses a double-whammy meta-technique to keep you from getting a firm footing. On the one hand it's shot to look like the safest form of entertainment possible: the TV movie. On the other hand, there are no recognizable stars on which the audience can pin hopes of budget-negotiated story points. It does something that I've been hungry for in horror. It convinced me that there was a place I didn't want to go, and then it took me there, and then it showed me what was just beyond it. It has the bleakest ending I've seen in ages and ages. I approve!

In summary
I Am Legend: Will Smith + Apocalypse = Good. Apocalypse + Thomas Kinkade = Zak hate you now.
Doomsday: Hooray for blood and Bentley!
The Mist: Consider my ass kicked.

Hackedy hack hack

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 22:45:06 GMT

So <lj user="kirizal"> and I are out at Panera today to get lunch and write for a while.

I've been using the C64 Scene Database to download old C64 demos and cracks and games to get a better handle on the era of the story. It's been really fascinating to see that era through the lens of history and to be able to compress things or expand them as I choose. It's also been neat to see a lot of the old demos I'd watched on a proper PAL C64 (emulator) so they work correctly, but that's another story completely.

At the moment though, I'm at Panera and I've discovered that there's a nanny filter on their free wi-fi and it considers the Scene Database to be pornography. Odd.

Mind you, a nanny filter hasn't stopped me even a little bit. I'm working on a story about hackers, can I really justify letting something so petty get in my way? Of course not. So I'm hacking into a database about hackers so I can gather research to write a story about hacking. Delicious!

Learning about the scale of industry.

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 04:08:31 GMT

As part of the research on one of my two current novel projects, this afternoon I sat down and tried to learn about what the petroleum industry will look like in 25 years. The short version is: big.

The biggest change is moving away from the extraction of 'light crude' -- oil that's in a relatively easily processable liquid state -- to extracting heavy crude. Heavy crude is oil sand or tar sand. I've seen at least one petroleum executive describe it as 'shit', and indeed that's what it looks like.

This change is an extraordinarily important one. There are an awful lot of oil sands in Canada. Depending on how you want to look at it, the oil sands of Canada have been 'discovered' either since the Bering Straight migration or 1760-something. These aren't some kind of major new thing.

Now the important question is: if people have known about them forever, and the oil companies have been sticking hypodermics into every apocrine gland on this planet looking for tasty, tasty Earth-sweat why did all that stuff with the Middle East ever happen at all?

The answer is that oil sands cost all kinds of money and resources to extract useful oil from.

There's an excellent, brief writeup about it at Technology Review.

Behind the cut I've assembled a collection of images to illustrate the physical scale of the project.They're stolen from all over the place, so if you see an image here that's yours and you don't want it here, please contact me and I'll take it down.

Currently there are only two of the above Krupps strip mining machines and they're both in Europe. However, the scale of the production in Canada is likely to necessitate something similar.

Notes from the front.

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 22:18:41 GMT

So the novel thing is barreling down the track with no regard to safety or braking.

It's quite clear that I've got a trilogy about hackers. So far though there are only two books. Categorically not a trilogy. So I've been periodically poking the idea to try and get a third novel. As it stands I've got an 8-bit Cyberpunk story and a Post-Petropunk story. I've kicked around a lot of options, but only one of them had a cover image to go along with it. I mooted the idea of setting a story in Rhodes during the time of Hero and his automatons (when the main drag of town was supposedly lined with machines doing all manner of things).

Greekpunk, says I. nihilistic_kid can be on the cover! Wearing a studded black-leather toga!

"You get to blog about that one, dear," says kirizal.

However I don't think that's the third book unless nihilistic_kid really, really wants to be on the cover.

Maybe for shits and giggles the third book will be a cyberpunk high fantasy novel.

That New Laptop Time of the Year.

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:43:49 GMT

My neat old laptop -- the Toshiba Tecra M4 -- had gotten sufficiently long in the tooth that the time came to get a new laptop, and lo, I did. The Toshiba taught me some things. While it was very nice to have both power and battery life galore it got kind of old lugging around a huge laptop. As a Tablet computer, weighing 6-7 pounds was also decidedly suboptimal. Standing around for a couple hours and holding the thing to draw on was a good workout though.

I'd actually gone back and fixed up my ancient Sony Z505 laptop to use for writing. It had no battery life to speak of, but it was tiny and had enough power to run word processing. So I kind of alternated between the Toshiba and the Sony depending on whether or not I wanted to do graphics things.

I looked around and around and around. I saw that Fujitsu's T2010 had absurdly great battery life (upwards of 8 hours with real world use), was tiny and weighed very little. It also had a lovely, lovely screen. Of course it was also a tablet. I'm kinda hooked on that for using ZBrush. After reading some reviews of it I kept seeing it compared to the Lenovo X61T, so I looked into the Lenovo. It didn't have quite the same quality of battery life but it was higher res, significantly more powerful and built way, way better. Every review I saw of the Fujitsu commented on its flimsy construction. In contrast, every review of the Lenovo commented on its sturdiness.

Then there was a fire at the plant that makes Lenovo's LCD screens which was predicted to raise prices, so I figured I should order Real Soon. Luckily I found the model I wanted on Lenovo's outlet site. That cinched it. It wasn't long until the friendly UPS fella was handing me a box full of new laptop love.

The upside to ordering from their outlet store was that I got very nearly the exact laptop I wanted for $500 less than their regular price (technically nearly a full $1k, but it's hard to take a sale seriously that ends and is immediately followed by another one with a different name and the same discount). The downside to ordering from the outlet was that I had absolutely no choice about the configuration. That wasn't a huge deal though, since I was able to find a model that was very close to what I wanted. The two things that were different were that it came with a Verizon WAN card built in and it had Vista Business installed (with a recovery CD for Tablet PC, curiously enough).

Vista.

Wow does Vista suck. I had to do a registry hack just to get it to reliably connect to wireless networks. It insists on constantly indexing files (help FAQ - Q: Can I turn off Indexing? A: No! This helps Windows Vista pretend to compete with Google applications, so you are forbidden from disliking it). What does constant HD activity plus laptop equal? Shitty battery life. Reboots are glacial and Vista simply adores doing reboots. Mind you, the first thing that I did, before the laptop had even arrived, was to buy 4 gigs of ram for it. Not much help there, nope. There is no central configuration for "who has control of wireless connections", so both Windows and the Intel wireless manager seem to have an equal say in what's going on. I don't see how this improves functionality to have two completely different interfaces that do exactly the same thing. By default Vista protects your sensitive eyes from seeing things like file extensions, 'Operating System' files or hidden files. That's fine, XP did the same thing. It's one of the first things I turn off. In Vista, making all those things visible means you end up with a buttload of previously invisible files that are scattered all over your desktop and it's unwise to delete them. Then there's the joy of Vista's security system. Are you sure you want to use regedit to fix a problem that Microsoft really thinks you should have? Are you sure you want to install that program? Are you sure that the universe actually exists? Are you sure you want to not send Microsoft a rotted sheep's colon full of unmarked bills? Running Vista is like having a toddler for an OS. What's that? What's that? What's that?

I have one more thing to attempt with this piece of crap OS before I scourge it from my laptop (besides getting a larger hard drive -- this fucking OS is taking up 25 goddamn gigs just for its ego). I want to get Vista Business 64 bit and try it. The laptop has 4 gigs of ram. I use a handful of 64bit software (such as ZBrush). It would be very helpful to allocate the full 4 gigs to any given app (that knows how to ask for it). Sadly, the 64bit edition of Windows XP isn't tablet flavored and to the best of my knowledge its not possible to run 64bit Windows apps under Linux (and I'd guess there's a slight overhead for having 2 OS's instead of just one, even if only half of them are Microsoft).

Have I found anything to like in Vista? Amazingly, yes! It's got precisely one feature that I'll be unhappy to lose if (when) I kill it. When you rename a file it automatically keeps the file extension separate from the name. If that isn't worth 5 years of Microsoft development resources, man, I don't know what is.

Ahhh. The Onion.

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 22:55:32 GMT

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

-Warily eyes last entry-

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:47:28 GMT

Well, that last entry is pretty impressively sloppy. I should probably not attempt to write book reviews at 1:30 am.

I'll leave it as is for shits and giggles.

Mini-review: The House of Leaves

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 09:45:06 GMT

I finished reading The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski today. I gather it made a pretty good splash when it came out in 2000. If you don't know what it is, The House of Leaves is a book a drifter that works at a tattoo parlor who finds and assembles the notes of a blind man who has written a scholarly treatise on a documentary that doesn't exist, which was made by an equally non-existing Pulitzer Prize winning photographer. The documentary is about the photographer's house, which has the slight problem of containing an impressively unsettling structural anomaly in the form of a hallway that leads into -- well, into someplace else. It's a fiction piece with footnotes that have footnotes that lead to appendices that have more footnotes.

The very short version is that I liked it a great deal.

The longer (but still comparatively short) version is behind an LJ cut due to spoilers.

In general, this sort of thing is very far indeed up my alley. The book has often been described as a horror novel, and I think that's quite fair. Sharon found its premise unsettling just from hearing me describe it. There are a lot of potentially gimmicky things in the book -- sections written backwards, mirrored, upside down, steganographically -- and they almost always (for me) rise above mere gimmick and inform the content. It's backed up by a central narrative (the film within the book, within the book) that is quite effective even when described. Plus, it's a book that's filled with real truths about people. Every day stuff, extreme stuff, sad stuff -- ooh, lots of sad stuff. But real. Lots of truth.

However I think it's got some problems. Centrally, it's interlocking narratives mesh up a little too neatly. The whole enterprise is wrapped up just a bit too tight for it to be as effective as it really deserves to be.

I spent about 75% of the book pretty certain that Zampanò was a fictional creation of Johnny Truant who was in turn a fictional creation of his mother Pelafina. By the end that seemed somewhat less clear, but it wasn't called as much into question as I would have liked. The effect of that was to compress things into a very, very neat package. Ironic considering how sprawling the book seems to be.

The steganographic section was very interesting, and I give it high points for feeling like the sort of thing that the character in question would hide. However, it was a pain in the ass to read.

Problems aside, I thought the whole experience of the book was extraordinary. It's a hell of a first novel. It's got some interesting lessons too. Though the book technically came out after 'The Blair Witch Project', it had been making the rounds on the 'net for two years before TBWP came out. I feel pretty confident that the whole 'found footage of spooky shit' genre that started in '99 owes the book a debt. Yet none of the films that have come from that genre have used the central conceit that Danielewski did. The amateur making the movie was still a photographer who knew how to compose compelling images. It'd surely be nice to see one of these movies that wasn't entirely a hurl-cam gamboling monkey festival. Cleanly composed images and verisimilitude are not antithetical. Really.

Magic.

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 10:46:36 GMT

Don't ask what you're seeing. Just watch.

Happy Valentines Day.

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 07:38:57 GMT

Oh yes, my pretties. Oh yes.

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:13:26 GMT

The model round is complete.

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 08:08:09 GMT

Now it's time to set up the render, but I've already done that once. It won't take terribly long. The picture is behind a cut because it is ginormous.

The eyes are a placeholder and his missing hand is hidden inside of a steam drill. Also, the real version of the work is not going to be a metal statue.

One more bit down.

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 23:46:34 GMT

Because my John Henry needs to be standing in front of something...

(The writing is Cherokee for "eat your grandmother, Q'iche". Or I think it is. Or maybe, I want it to be. I should find someone to help out...)