wildcat

The vicious predilections of musical theatre. The viscous predilections of a picnic by Elk Lake; the Riesling in plastic cups, and Mexican Bean Dip. Thick. Hot. The company was conducted with some recrimination but once we got going, we got going, and ate a lot while we sunned ourselves and avoided hurtled bags of dog-shit. Dog-shit! Gigantic strawberries that threatened to terraform our insides and make us into Strawberry Factories, biological hot-houses. Jason & Stephen brought a picnic basket out of Donna Reed. A walk around the lake until we were distracted by frogs jumping and baby ducks.

A chocolate martini is a humble thing when applied to the lips, tongue, and throat. Alcoholic miasma may occur. Anyway, I've been diverted from usual Sunday layabouts to listen to music and write stories in the living room. Our frying pan has been stolen! Christian, Michael and I went to buy a new one. Michael wanted an old-school Nintendo but the only game available was Super Mario Brothers slash Duck Hunting. First video games I ever played, 8:30 in the morning before being driven to elementary school by the babysitter. To think there was such a time that I had to have a babysitter.

Later tonight I might slip in a DVD with old Superman cartoons from the Nineteen Forties.

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter cry.

- Lewis Allan, "Strange Fruit."

Billie Holiday sang it first, but I think I prefer the Nina Simone version.

Need to fiddle with the resume a bit. I may actually have to include the Dark Times, because there was cash involved in that, the closest thing to "retail experience" I've got. Close, but no cigar. The Fear is there to divest me of pride. I rushed home afterward to get out of those uncomfortable pants.

There is a rumbling in my tumbling. My stomach, like. I need to fill it with food, and soon. Possibly pancakes.

I seem to have been plagued by heartburn all day; my metabolism has made the inside of my body into a scouring pad.

Tonight, I'm going to spend an hour or so working on the second draft of "The Inexplicable Face," which clicks along in my head and demands I continue. I'm hoping this draft will be suitable for showing to other people. I'm in the middle of the parish scene and I'm finding that the shift from present to past tense is helping the quality of the prose. The first scene still fills me with doubt; I'm not sure if it's active enough, if it needs to be active, or what. I've made some changes about the opening but I'm not quite sure that I go far enough. Afterward, I might spend a little while working at my resume and then I'll do some reading. Maybe bake some cookies.

A couple short story collections out of the library; working my way through Fay Weldon's Wicked Women, there's a V.S. Pritchett book, and Annie Proulx's Bad Dirt. I'm rather captivated by Weldon at the moment, by the open breath of her lines. Really. It had never occurred to me how precise, minute, and delicate Margaret Atwood's work was until I read Weldon; her drive is often in similar directions, but the voice, perspective, and language are all so loose and confident. I'll put up some further thoughts when I finish the book.

Wow! Look how sunny it is outside! I suspect I may have gotten high on Vitamin D! Exclamation points comma exclamation points period. A list, as if to say "Wildcat Day to Day Annotations," something along those lines:

1. Spend an hour getting the resume adjusted, deciding how to format it to include everything I need on one page. Succeed. Experience a brief moment of elation before immediately questioning myself. Elate, debate, elate, debate.

2. Receive convoluted, bizarre phone call from Michael, with regard to the status of the Big Green Van of Death. Stolen, you say? Try to negotiate with the cellular reception and provide basic comfort.

3. Manage to get all the bills organized and into their correct envelopes. Stamps. Re-glue the phone bill's envelope after inevitable fuck-up.

4. Dress for success: navy pin-striped suit with white dress shirt. Debate merits of tucking in shirt or leaving untucked. Tuck it in anyway, downstairs in the washroom with a wonderful lighting. Spend half an hour getting everything you need organized. Fight with hair product and the mangy mass of auburn hair. Not even a mop, not even mod.

5. Stop for five minutes on the street downtown to talk to Michelle, vis-a-vis hanging out sometime soon to see her new place. Marvel at the fact that both of us are dressed up for business-style dealings. Consider incorporating, and conducting a hostile take-over on Bolen Books for requiring retail experience. Settle for De Biers, despite the try-hard gaudiness of diamonds on a young woman (to paraphrase Audrey Hepburn).

6. Hand in resume at the British Columbia Royal Museum. The big one with the ridiculous clocktower out front. Wish I could go have a look at the Tibet exhibit like random hot French people ahead of me in line. Fail to name-drop because of a lack in opportunity, but look sexy and watch the girl give the resume to the appropriate superior.

7. Go to the bank to deposit Christian's half of the cable bill money. Dump the bills in the mailbox.

8. Spend money on a cheap haircut: thank Gods for male chromosomes! Become convinced that the hot barber doing my hair is from Trinidad, fail to translate the convolutated quotation tattooed to the underside of his forearm. He says almost nothing, which is preferrable. The long, brooding hair is cut away and the handheld vibrator is applied to the back of my neck and shoulders. Brood on the question of when exactly the bulgingly masculine environment of Jimmy's Barber Shop became a comfort, rather than alienating.

9. Take the hot bus home. Avoid embarassing eye contact with the anorexically-thin guy I made an ass of myself in front of at the bar about three years ago.

10. Come home, take off all my clothes, and put on something comfortable and summery.

11. Cookies! Also, consider the curious tendency of Fay Weldon to write about aging couples with fidelity problems and a proclivity for having a faggot son and a dyke daughter. Especially in relation to how often those children end up in relationships with transgendered people. The Fuck?

12. Add Jess to the Friends of Wildcat. Belated, but whatever.

One of those days where little is accomplished in terms of actual, physical moving around. I baked cookies and the landlord came over to fix a few things while he's in town. Michael and I drove around and around looking for this house where the van's insurance papers were found; we navigated through road construction after road construction and pulled over for phantom ambulances.

The second draft of "The Inexplicable Face." Working on it today. It's going much slower than the first draft - I'll completely ignore it for a few days and then all of a sudden I get this lucid moment and there are the characters, waiting for me to finish them off. Really. I want to write something very warm, watery, and feminine after this - it's all about the boys. Boys, boys, boys. Boys and their balls. Religion and comic books.

It's actually quite difficult in places, I have to write about this pastor, right? I'm trying to imagine all these bits and pieces that go into being a pastor. I need somebody - probably Joy - to read this draft once it's done and tell me what the fuck I'm doing. If I'm getting at all close with this character. I feel like all of a sudden it's this major failing that I can't come up with relevant quotes from the Bible. Research! I suspect Draft #3 is going to be research central, it's going to be all about the niggling little details. I need to flesh out some of the super-hero filters, the private mythology, for the story. As well.

But it's not going so badly. I've had a few moments of genuine surprise at my own prose, which is generally an awful sign - but it keeps me going through this revision.

Otherwise: Margaret Cho's performances, Fay Weldon's story "Through A Dustbin, Darkly" reminding me of Atwood's "Lulu, or the Domestic Life of the Language" -- the thing where you have a group of fucking intellectuals, and the main character doesn't even really differentiate between them, and she's not an artist like they are (from what I can see), and there's that divide. She's the practical woman who deals with things like unpaid heating bill that keeps the apartment cold.

Have reached the sixth page of the second draft; the pounding of keys under my tips. The story´s quite a bit different now, vast explosions have overtaken the original course of the story and diverted it. Characters have been deleted or (worse) merged, and I´ve rethought some of the logic behind the final scenes, which haven´t been rewritten yet.

Calamity! I never really expected to enjoy an Elmore Leonard story, but "How Carlos Webster Changed His Name to Carl and Became a Famous Oklahoma Lawman" is a really solid piece of fiction. It´s in the McSweeney´s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Stories - the one with the red-jacketed masked man getting read to whip a panther-man on the cover. It straddles the line between mythic storytelling and up-close character development, with a lot of brilliant details. So wicked outlaw names, as well.

Swaggered around in direct sunlight for a while, popped Claritin, rode the bus, chitter-chattered with Steph and Matt for a few minutes at SUBText, went and reserved a cap and gown for the ceremony. Home again, home again. Too many old ladies on the bus with walkers, along with young parents and bulky baby strollers - all at the same time. Ladybug infestations and the snaking in between bodies just to get off the confined space on wheels and out into the air!

Mission objective: complete the second draft by midnight. One way or another. If I get distracted, I'll tattle on myself.

Got distracted, got befuddled - first by adjusting the tool bar over there on the side. I kept redoing the bits and bobs, moving links around.

Then I got back to work, again, scribbling away downstairs rather than up here directly onto the computer - sometimes you need to walk away from the work environment and then start. Okay, fine, scribbled some more.

Made pasta. Drank juice. Had a creamsicle with Christian.

Sent Michael messages while he sat in class. Worked on the short story.

Got distracted again by the Reading Of Poetry, the recitation of various works by various poets. Rekindled my interest in Frank O'Hara, his poem "Why I am Not a Painter," which I think reflects some of my creative procedures. Talked Atwood. Reading out the poem about the Hangman's Wife, and this other one where the cowboy is addressed by the movie set.

Scratched my head a lot. Loaded up the dishwasher and poured soap in, closed the door and turned it on. Marvelled at these modern, labour-saving devices.

Thought about working on the story, which will most certainly not be done by midnight, which fast-approaches. Probably this weekend. Heard about a birthday party on Saturday night. Michael seemed concerned about Ethan Hawke's rendition of Hamlet. The Danish Prince; consider pastries.

Read more poetry, threw aside a copy of the America's Best Poetry 2002 because it's all apparently self-important twaddle and really - Robert Creeley! What were you doing publishing some of that?

Considered writing a few short poems during this story and for a week or so afterward. To clean out the brain. Or something. Why do I have this desire to write love poems now? Beautiful but strange love poems.

Raged against the "romantical" impulses which certainly go against quite a few of my long standing assumptions about the world. Feel diabetic from the saccharine impulses.

Thought about the story some more. The Wise Old Man is the Wizard Shazam? The final scene might be successful in having more tension in it with the second draft. Might be. I'll never be sure.

The story.

Bed.

Which is 'Hashi,' I believe. I'm not sure about the spelling.

After a long day at the library, having secured an extra three hours on my Monday shift for next week, I went for dinner with my co-worker Kyle and his girlfriend Hiroko. We went to Koto Sushi, which I'd never been to before - it's down on Fort Street, near Wharf, beside the Siam Restaurant with its lovely Thai food. It's the one with the fake sushi in the window, a fact I've always found slightly bizarre. Plastic food scares me.

Really good vegetable gyoza; actually, they had a decent vegetarian menu there and it wasn't too expensive. The atmosphere is really strong - the waitresses wear beautiful kimonos and there's bamboo everywhere. The miso soup is made with white miso, which I find a bit too salty, but the sushi rolls are big and fat. We also had Udoun soup, with ginger dressing. So good!

This was also really the first time I've ever hung around Kyle outside of work - it's always a weird transition to make, the first few times can be a bit awkward as you start to look for other things to talk about besides work; at work itself you have lots to talk about. I could probably use the SUBText method of getting hammered together, but that involves more money than I have right now. Unless it's on Boone's Sangria, best four bucks you'll ever spend!

Half hungover and half burnt out, like a light-bulb or the smoulder of a campfire. I think the high point of yesterday was the harbour ferry from the Inner Harbour to Esquimalt; the sun was too bright in spots, but the beauty overwhelms. Paradise. Otherwise, the usual operation of poet's ambrosia (Boone's Sangria, four bucks a bottle, parfait for the starving poet on the go), some Rye and Coke, a Corona. Remarkably good Chinese food from some place called Jack's; Szechuan Tofu! Gloriana.

Anyway, burnt out, hung over, and half-naked in my house right now, determined to make the most of this precarious situation. I'm going to write nonsense and flail about in my interminable horror...

Half-way amidst Shadows over Baker Street, a fabulous short fiction anthology; essentially, various writers provide stories of Sherlock Holmes locked in combat with the horrific mythos of H.P. Lovecraft, with Holmes forced up against the edge of his Reason and overlooking an abyss. While the stories range in strength, quite a few of them are really quite brilliant; "The Curious Case of Miss Violet Stone" is my favourite so far, by Poppy Z. Brite. I really enjoy Brite's short stories - I've read several as it stands, in various collections. Afterward, I have Selected Stories of V.S. Pritchett, Fay Weldon's A Hard Time to Be A Father and Ann Packer's Mendocino & Other Stories. I'm building myself up on stories so that I can finish the "Inexplicable Face" in it's latest form, and then show it around to people.

I also have the barest consideration of another Lenore story, one following Weird Harold from "But You're on Earth, Mister Spaceman." I think it'll be the supernatural horror story for the collection.

Otherwise: went for a lovely walk after a long day at work, with Christian. A smattering of extra shifts when I can get them. CBC radio with discussions of "the fruit machine," a mechanism devised by the Canadian Military in the Fifties to screen personnel for homosexual tendencies which would - of course, really - make them more suspectible to the Red Menace's influences. Fuck, I'm certainly prone to Communist mind control, I'll tell you that!

Wrote up a short-short interlude for Rantbook, featuring Johnny Damocles & Teiresias Jones: "Pull yourself together, Damocles," said Teiresias as she hitched up her Gucci miniskirt and pulled out a service revolver from the holster around her left thigh - the very pistol she inherited from her father, the Right Honourable Ferdinand Horatio Jones, Esquire.

I feel rather inspired to play around with Esque some more; a return, perhaps to the multimedia entries of the olden days.

This episode of Frazz is just so odd. It certainly reflects my own sick, and twisted mind. Frazz! He's like Calvin, only grown-up and disturbingly well-adjusted.

Finished the Holmes book; some of the stories were more satisfying than others. Essentially, the inventive and innovative ones, which took advantage of the atmospheres and elements given to them by the Conan Doyle and Lovecraft oeuvres, but then added something, expanded something, and regarded things in a new fashion. I rather enjoyed the one where Sherlock Holmes didn't appear at all, but Irene Adler, some (in my mind) obscure member of his supporting cast took a pivotal role. Additionally, there was one where no grave episode was afoot, but he had a memorable encounter with a Balinese woman trained in the destruction of the Old Ones.

My dinner is mashed potatoes, at ten o'clock. My other roommate, the Fear, feeds on other things, chiefly my self-esteem, drive, and satisfaction. He doesn't pay any rent, either, and mooches off us as far as the bills go. He's just there to drool on the pillows and remind me that I'm "not living up to my potential," and that I'm "going to die starving and alone." And he sits on the toilet too long and never flushes when he's finished. He says things like, "How much of it is you actually enjoying this library job which could potentially lead to something with more money involved when they finally hire clerks in a few months, and how much of it is inertia, exhaustion, and anxiety holding you petrified?" That wouldn't even bother me if he didn't say it DAY IN and DAY OUT while nobody calls me about an interview and everybody says "Retail experience required" and he just repeats "Retail experience required" over and over and over again. He's such a goddam bitch, and he always takes all the blankets and then he reminds me that nobody's ever going to want to publish anything I write, they're just going to send me uniform rejection letters probably typed up by robots on recycled paper, and that my latest story is no good, utter shite, and doomed forever.

My other roommate, the Fear, is a bit of a drama queen.

The library can't spring for an extra three hours a week because they're already over budget for their page hours and I need to buckle down with this job hunt, because it's just the Fear and my own little head slowing me down. If I can survive until the end of June I can maybe get some extra hours when Amanda leaves. The whole place is utterly on edge until the new computer system comes into effect and they can - gasp - hire some more staff. And today there was random drama with librarians. Really.

But I'm afraid this is going to sink deeper and deeper into the utterly self-involved seas of DESPAIR, so I'll say that I'm loving Fay Weldon's book, It's a Hard Time to be a Father, I put Frederic Tuten's Tintin in the New World on hold, and I've taken out From Hell on DVD. I wish to drown myself in art. I have to finish the second draft of "The Inexplicable Face," which has stagnated for a few days and now needs to be reclaimed with great abandon, and I have to go up to the school tomorrow morning to pay off an outstanding debt of SIXTY CENTS after I got a letter in the mail which probably cost them forty-nine cents. Ridiculous.

I'm up very early and I'm on a mission, but look at this: The Lester Dent Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot (courtesy of Warren Ellis). I'm halfway tempted to use this thing for my summer pulp novel experiment, which should be coming up post-haste, as in crazy-close-to-soon. Best get to work on that story so I'm finished it in time. But, you know. Talk is cheap. On to the writing--

I now have a receipt for the sixty cents I paid to the University today. So many trees are needlessly eradicated everyday for all that. But I visited with Penny, listened to Joanna rant on about food services, chattered with Steph and made plans to go out tonight for a cheap pint. Hoping the service at Swans will be better than it was last time, when the waitress brought me a napkin as if I'd dropped it on the floor and then asked if I knew what it was for.

The Fear has subsided for a nanosecond, I applied for some jobs, I soaked up sunlight and spent four bucks on a comic book - the guy at the comic store even knocked off a couple cents from the charge for no apparent reason. I might offer up a review later on.

This scene will not die! I've been writing it for three days and it won't finish, it isn't even very long. I'm almost at the end of it, and there's only really one scene after that, but it's going to go on for a few pages. If I have some time, I'm going to give Caroline's story, "Expiration Dating," another read through so I can scrawl some notes down and maybe give her some solid feedback. It feels good to use those muscles again, and I like doing it for people whose guts I do not actively hate. MY GOD, I'm free from workshops with people I dislike. Who will I complain about? I'll have to redirect the vast reserves of heat-death murderous rage onto random people I meet in the street. News vendors will be obliterated by my laser eyes.

Joy's coming over shortly to write and drink green tea from little tea-bags. I have no shirt on, I must get one on.

Just saw From Hell - my feelings are mixed. Everybody was overacting. The visuals were amazing. I'm a little sick to my stomach and never want to watch it again, but maybe - at least - it managed to provoke an actual physical reaction, as opposed to slack-jawed bovine interpretations. Heather Graham's red hair was disturbing with its technicolour intensity; I thought my retinas were about to burn out at any moment.

Draft #3 of "The Inexplicable Face" was inaugurated mere moments ago; Joy read through the second draft and gave me some comments. I'm not sure how grandiose the changes and revisions are going to be to this draft, but I suspect fairly sizeable in some sections and fairly small, picky, line edits in other sections. The scene with the old man needs to be worked through a bit more, and the final scene is another big one that needs to be developed; I've also got to attack the scene between Paul and his father, and try to adjust it and develop some of the religious tone. There's the question of whether or not he should be presented as an intellectual or a labouring man, but I'm still torn on that so I think that element might be more of an issue once I get the rest of this draft done.

I'm still unsure of how I feel about From Hell. Heather Graham's character is spared the fate that the real life girl experienced, but it in her place, a relatively minor character was put in her place - literally. The other character was a woman who doesn't show up for the first half of the movie, isn't terribly developed, and is one of the two lesbian characters in the film; both of them are given the most vicious and visually arresting death scenes. There's also a definite feeling of punishment (both explicitly and subtextually) for the other lesbian character, who was generally presented as being a bitchy, alcoholic woman who is also brazenly stupid.

Obviously, there had to be a lot of gore in the movie, which hinged on discussions of the human body and the visceral nature of the crimes, but I found (ironically) that the best murder sequence was the very first one, where we see the woman walking along get pulled by shadow hands into an alleyway shot from straight on, medium-shot, with absolute darkness just inside the mouth. The only visual we receive is this one shot, as a blade is raised and dropped several times - the only thing we see is the blade (because light is reflecting off of it) and the shadow hand gripping it. It is very quick, very simple, and then cuts to a shot of a gargoyle above the alleyway's mouth. There's no way to get around the body horror of the later murders, certainly, but I think this scene worked best to demonstrate the surgical precision of the whole thing as well as working both the "psychological off-camera horror" aspect and non-lurid depictions. At times, From Hell threatened to become an action movie, and Jack the Ripper becomes this almost ridiculous super-villain; by the end of the film, I felt like he became this ultra-stylized Batman villain being carted off to Arkham Asylum.

From what research I've done, the graphic novel it's based on - which is predicated on similar distortions and rewriting of the "true" events - is much better, in part because the writer (Alan Moore) included an afterword discussing the implications of being a male author writing about the Ripper and the horrible killings of the women, as well as the spectacle and mythologizing done to the Ripper over time - and how it's destructive. I believe the library has a copy at one of the branches, so when I go into work tomorrow I'm going to try and find it and put a hold on it.

It should be noted for the people who don't know comics that read this blog, Alan Moore wrote one of my favourite comic book series, Promethea - a pretty long meditation of feminism, spirituality, mysticism, and the "Wonder Woman" archetype - and also wrote The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which was also turned into a horrible movie. Two other properties written by him are being adapted as we speak; V for Vendetta is about a futuristic fascist England with a terrorist hero, starring Natalie Portman; and Watchman is in pre-production, with some pretty sketchy casting decisions being rumoured.

The German keyboard will be the death of me. Last night was the Night of Many Parties: Michael and I planned in a careful route from party A to party B to party C. Started at Ashley´s going away party out in Royal Oak with a bottle of the homemade Riesling, followed by Michael´s coworker Beth and her birthday party behind the rose shop on Quadra, followed by Casey´s much belated birthday party.

Ashley´s going away was good, Beth´s birthday was a great time with totally new people we didn´t know at all, who discussed the creeping discrepency between irony and sincerity. And Casey´s party? She was just barely out the door to go home by the time we got there at quarter after eleven, being too drunk to stand. So two parties and a vague confusion following arrival and a stranger´s home. We ended up - again - drinking with Christian in the park behind Míchael´s house at midnight, discussing our position as the Mean Old Bitches.

On the hunt for sunsets. Must be tinged with purple on the edges and violent red in the middles, with an outcropping of pink clouds. Preferrably smelling faintly of ice cream sundaes, but this can be artificial; the best sunsets are calorie free. For a present, for somebody special. That kind of thing. I'm also planning on buying him the moon, with associated fauna like spring-heeled lunar foxes.

Job interview in a week, thankfully. As well, it's even on the accessible part of Douglas Street, not way the hell out there where it's almost impossible to get to without walking in a suit in the unbearable heat. And I managed to pick up two extra shifts in the next two weeks, and I worked last night - it's manageable that I might be able to survive this month and make it to June. Brilliant.

Mission statements for the day: go for a late morning stroll in the sunlight, making sure to take Claritin before hand so that the creeping hand of allergic reactions doesn't make its way to going up my nose. Work on the third draft of "The Inexplicable Face." Finish watching the "As Time Goes By" DVD I took out of the library. Read some more of the Vonnegut short stories.

Kurt Vonnegut describes short stories as having the same psychological and physiological effect on people as some forms of Buddhist meditation, and labels a short story collection as "a bunch of Buddhist catnaps." The collection I'm reading, Bagombo Snuff Box is made up from assorted stories he published during the Fifties, when he was first married and when a writer could make quite the decent living off of selling stories to magazines which got quite the circulation. Apparently Steinbeck wrote from Women's Home Companion. Decent read, I think, although there are definitely better and worse stories, and it makes me get butterflies in my crotch to think about a time when we could have done that - you know - actually sold stories to magazines that people actually read. He didn't quite support his family doing that - he had to work at General Electric writing publicity releases for a while, and he taught at various points as well - but the magazines provided sufficient supplemental income. It inspires me to submit another story, I think. I might pick one and prepare to send it out.

Sadly, Frank Gorshin has passed away. He played the Riddler on the old Adam West Batman show, and I think he was probably one of my two favourite villains on the show, beside Julie Newmar's Catwoman.

I prefer brown miso to white miso; it's really rather remarkable that I can tell the difference, and that it was a breath of fresh air to have a bowl of brown miso today after months with only white. The flavours in the brown variety are much more complex while the white miso just subsides into saltiness.

Found some cheap clothes! I've been in dire need of pants other than jeans to wear, and I'm going to need them for if I end up getting that clerical job at the library - clerks aren't supposed to wear jeans unless there's a casual day declared, and all I had were the pinstriped pants, a pair of dark brown cords which are too small for me now, and a pair of khakis that I bought when I was nineteen and are fraying at the bottom. I bought two pairs at Value Village, a pair of nice light corduroys with the thick ribbing, and a pair of proto-space age clean-cut non-raver pants (I can't think of the actual term for the damn things) which are decent and comfortable. I've actually found pants which are comfortable, baggy enough, and also pseudo-professional slash attractive. They're not pleated, they don't make me look like a grandfather, and the legs flare appropriately. Excellent. Especially because they were ungodly cheap.

Oh my god, I just spent a paragraph talking about pants. Plus there's an instrumental version of "The Look of Love is in Your Eyes" that just came on.

This writing gig stinks, my friends, of beans left too long in the can and then exposed to oxygen - OXYGEN - over night. I can't quite seem to generate an image of this train station at night, the characters are still quite sluggish and unwilling to respond, and all the dialogue feels forced and far too expository. I've been imprisoned in a box made of inappropriate gloves stapled together. To get the words to move - MOVE - in the direction they need to go, to get them to flutter and buzz with energy rather than just sitting there, dull and flaccid on the fucking screen without anything to care about. The overwhelming impulse to become some kind of urban vigilante with bad teeth, breath, and marksmanship.

The weather is similarly afflicted, by severe bouts of identity crisis. Muggy, hot, burning sunlight, rain, volumes of thickened black clouds, snapshots of blue sky.

Anyway, I have to get back to these awful toy soldiers with their jerky head movements and their inability to deliver fresh conversation. I need a bull whip or somesuch.

Sent out a submission just now. The deadline is the end of June, and apparently I'll hear back by the end of August. The Danforth Review. I decided to go with "Wildcat Days," because it was magic realist and second person, so I'd like some rejection or acceptance of it to let me know if I'm done with it.

"The Inexplicable Face" is hovering. I'm working on something else to give myself a break, but that's not going well so I might just dump it and go back to revisions. It's really important to value the moments when what you are producing is not crap, because the rest of the time? Really hard to be a writer. But it's worth it.

Michael and I interrupted our plans to watch the Lord of the Rings this long weekend (with the drinking game involving "drink whenever it occurs to you that no women have been on-screen for the last forty-five minutes") when we happened by the Odeon yesterday and went inside, intent on seeing the latest Star Wars flick, Revenge of the Sith.

I did not go into this movie with "high expectations." I did not expect heaps of brilliant dialogue with solid performances. I thought - big space ships and silly explosions and cool special effects. I was, mostly, going to get closure for the rest of the trilogy. I was completely unprepared for how utterly detestable it was.

Cliche dialogue is one thing, but when they can't even get the cliches right - "If you are not with me, then you're my enemy" - and seem powerless to give half the actors anything to actually do (Insert many still shots of Natalie Portman looking sad/depressed/shocked/concerned)? It goes over a line. When every single sequence is intercut with a parallel sequence that's meant to be meaningful? Stupid. When both of the climactic battles occur between characters we know survive to the "next" set of movies? Dramatic tension gone. When you don't even get to wow over the special effects because WHOOP! There, it's gone after a nano-second and we're already onto something else? All the cool "that would be a fun toy or action figure" moments that made the originals so much fun depended on enough exposure that we'd actually be able to take in the special effects. Really. That fucking Count Dooku character was in it again and they kept saying his name - did they not want to burst out laughing?

My god, the only characters I cared about for the entire thing were R2D2 and Yoda. Nobody actually played by a human was worth caring about. Anakin's tragedy? Well, other than having a decent upper body on display for five minutes I didn't give a rat's ass about someone with only three facial expressions (angry, lusty, confused). It matched too well with my Matrix Revolutions experience, when I was rooting for the machines to win out and eradicate every last vestige of emotionless human drivel. What should have been the beautifully gothic moment of Darth Vader's cyborg rebirth was reduced to him gritting his teeth, shaking his fists, and screaming "No!" like a complete twat. It broke through the fun veneer of melodrama into the weird, telegraphed side of complete bullshit.

On the other hand, we managed to have good brunch somewhere with decent food and service; Rosie's Diner. The food was delivered in a timely fashion, and it was still hot.

Thoughts after spending twelve hours viewing The Lord of the Rings (possible spoilers): Hobbits are, like, totally bisexual. I'm quite impressed by the cinematography and the use of CGI; while the Star Wars movies drown you in meaningless CGI, the Rings trilogy gives detailed but simple images and allows you enough time to take them in and appreciate them. They are a little too fond of their "following an object/actor as it falls off an edge and descends toward certain death" tracking shots, using essentially the same one over and over again (to the point where it can be used in a drinking game as a rule). Eowyn's triumph over the Witch-King pleases me because here's this woman who's constantly being told that she's not supposed to go off to battle because she's, you know, a woman - and she utterly destroys Sauron's greatest warrior with only a small help from a hobbit, who's also been told over and over again that war is no place for him. While the images of natural destruction and environmental ruin are hard to watch in places, every circumstance is responded to later with images of the environment fighting back; the Ents, the giant animated trees attack Isengard after thousands of trees are pulled out of the ground and burned for the purpose of running war machines. The Ents attack with stones and root-feet, and then by destroying a dam and unleashing torrents of water - by the end of the Two Towers, the local environment's brought back into a semblence of balance with the elements overriding manmade process. Long, drawn out battle sequences with shaky camera work are hard on the eyes, especially when you're sort of tired of seeing hulking men bash into each other in a non-sexual fashion and can't help but notice that virtually anyone in a position of power is paralyzed by indecision and small testicle disorder.

On the main women: three of them. Arwen, Eowyn, and Galadriel. Eowyn is the only human, mortal woman; Arwen and Galadriel are idealized, magical goddess figures. Galadriel is a "pure" goddess and recedes at the end of the film, only aiding in indirect ways; men fall all over themselves for her. Eowyn is allowed to resist social constraints and not only be acknowledged as a leader "in her domestic domain," but chooses to avoid her leadership role in favour of actually taking action and following her heart. She knows she was meant for battle. Arwen is a mixture, she is a Goddess Figure who is loved by a man, and chooses (against his wishes) to be mortal and fail as an idealized woman. While she does go from being a warrior maiden to being "pretty as a princess," she makes the choice herself even as Eowyn goes in the opposite direction.

Not quite a top ten, because tastes always change and whatever new story I read that I like instantly becomes one of the best in the world, or something. But a list of ten favourite stories, with the understanding that it's actually impossible for me to count all my favourite instances of short fiction. Rules: only one story per writer, one story per anthology, and it has to be widely published.

1. "People Like That are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk," by Lorrie Moore. She's normally known more for her second person stories, but I like this not-quite-third person story from Birds of America. It works with a very carefully balanced ratio of bathos and pathos, and you're never quite sure where you stand with the narration. Additionally, it succeeds in being a hospital story that doesn't make me want to retch.

2. "Light is Like Water," by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Magic realist, or fantasy depending on your point of view. A pretty loose little story which worked with Marquez's wonderful voice while avoiding the confusion found in some of his longer works, like One Hundred Years of Solitude. I think I like it because it takes a basic conceit - that light is like water - and runs with it. Gorgeous ending. From the Strange Pilgrims collection.

3. "Calling," by Richard Ford. I believe it's in A Multitude of Sins. Introduced me to the retrospective narrator concept, and works it really well; we get a good sense of where the character is now, versus where he was then, and the character's father ran off with a gay opthamologist, which is a great detail. Unfortunately with Ford, after a while you start to be overwhelmed by all his stylistic tics, but this one stands well on its own.

4. "Burn, Baby, Burn," by Poppy Z. Brite. It's a peculiar form of genre fiction, found in an anthology of prose stories inspired by the characters from the Hellboy comics. I've only read a few of Brite's short stories, and would certainly include her story, "The Devil of Delery Street" which has a lot going for it, but for some reason I keep coming back to this story which is fun and amusing and tragic at the same time. The first line: "The girl waits by the side of the road, just past Lolita age but obviously still jailbait."

5. "Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass," by Carol Shields. From Various Miracles. While quite a lot of Shields bores me - particularly The Stone Diaries, this story is probably one of my all-time favourites, with a roving point of view and some deliciously nasty moments. Starts off with a fairly surface scene and then implodes inside the character of Mrs. Turner, exploring her "wild days" before and all the twists and turns she's gone through.

6. "Lusus Naturae," by Margaret Atwood. From McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories. I'm being a maverick by not selecting something from Good Bones (think "The Female Body") or Wilderness Tips ("Hairball"), but I like this because its more recent Atwood that I still really enjoy. It's her horror story, written from the point of view of the monster, as it were. It has some delightful choices of diction like "dry whiskery sausages" and drips Gothic feel while holding so much of Atwood's wit at the same time.

7. "The Fall River Axe Murders," by Angela Carter. I'll always have a soft spot for Lizzie Borden, but this story is quite brilliant - a stylistic experiment I'd never seen before, taking place in an empty house before the murders actually happen, when everything is just potential and repressed desire. This was my introduction to Carter, who I find myself rather at odds with because it feels like she was writing my stories decades before I was born.

8. "The Wishing Box," by Sylvia Plath. Published in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. A small, depressive story surrounding a woman's inability to dream and her growing hatred of her husband's ridiculously vivid dreams. If you've heard of Plath you can probably guess how it ends, but there's something haunting about the story and its explorations of lost imagination.

9. "Careful," by Raymond Carver. Available in The Paris Review Book of... Probably one of the most beautiful stories I've ever encountered, with lack of communication between estranged Lloyd and Inez. It's pristine. It's a delight, even as the growing unease is there.

10. "Pastoralia," by George Saunders. Mad, weird satire on theme park culture and the revisionism of prehistory. A contemplation of how deeply we must become our occupations. A man and a woman working in a Natural History museum, where they must act out lives as prehistoric people. The slow breakdown of the living situation.

Next up will be ten favourite poems, or ten favourite movies.

Michael Chabon discusses his favourite superheroine. [Via]

Christian lent me an Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories, so I'm gobbling up fresh, small narratives. Morley Callaghan's was quite intriguing, and I'm looking forward to reading Dionne Brande's.

Working on "The Inexplicable Face" is frustrating, but I think this is an important step - getting to the point where I can do this on my own, without aid of school-sponsored workshops. Taking criticism when I can but being able to self-edit and consider all my flaws and work on them. I'm trying to fill in the first scene a bit and then I need to go through the second one and rewrite parts, try to bring more depth to the Pastor, possibly make him more of an intellectual - to make him possess what Paul is looking for, the Word. Trying to express what it is that Paul wants most of all is straining.

But it's coming along. I have ideas for my next short story, so I think that will hurry this draft up a bit - the tantalizing prospect of writing about something else, being done with this piece of the Lenore Stories, it's a bit like rocket fuel for the editorial regions of my brain.

Last night, while we were on a date, Michael and I witnessed a strange woman walking around downtown with a crow sitting on her head. This was an actual crow, not an ornament, that nestled in her frizzy brown hair and looked around while she walked. We saw her several times. At one point, this crow lady was attacked by about a dozen or so other crows; they swerved through the air and dive-bombed her for a good five minutes. She disappeared for a while and then we saw her again on our way to Fort Street to catch the bus. She took off into View Towers.

Koto for sushi dinner last night. It's down Fort, near Wharf Street, beside a really good Thai restaurant called Siam. Really good atmosphere, amazing food, solid Vegetarian section of the menu, not badly priced. It was a bit more expensive mainly because we ordered hot sake. We shared tempura, had some miso soup; I had a spicy tuna roll and an Ebi roll (boiled prawns); Michael had a chicken/onion shish-ka-bob thing the name of which I can't remember, and a negitoro roll (tuna). It was all really good and really filling. The spicy tuna roll in particular was different than I'm used to, it had the rice on the outside, a healthy dose of the sesame seeds, and was spicier than any other spicy tuna roll I've had. Good green tea, as well.

Afterward, we went to the Marble Slab Creamery and had ice cream; I had swiss chocolate with raspberries, and Michael had double dark chocolate with raspberries. Wanted to go have a look in Munro's, but it was closed; we sat on a Government Street bench across from the bookstore and listened to a busker perform Eric Clapton on his guitar while he sang scat. Tried to get people together to go to Drag Queen Bingo for once, but no one really seemed interested or available so we played pool at Peacock's until the heat became unbearable and we trundled out into the night to go home.

The interview yesterday was a bit weird but apparently I can type sixty words a minute, even with time taken to correct errors as I went. I took a data entry test and some other random administrative tests. They might have a position for me, they're going to call back next week depending. It's essentially temping, but it makes me feel like one of those women in all of Margaret Atwood's early stories, back when she had to include a typing pool in some fashion.

What gender is your writing? [Via]

I ran this twice, feeling that one sample probably wouldn't be enough. First off I ran through the draft of "The Inexplicable Face," and this Genie program determined that the writer was male. Then I ran "The Mushroom Cloud Called Sadie Valentino" through it and it came out as female!

The first one's a very male story in terms of the protagonists, and the second one focuses on a female protagonist, so perhaps I'm unconsciously adjusting my style? Let's throw in a few more samples.

"Wild Cat Days" - also with a female point of view - shows up as female.

"Drag Race on Mercury," which features a gay boy and his drag queen lover reads as male - but the difference in scores is only 7, rather than a wider difference. Which is interesting.

"You're on Earth, Mister Spaceman," female protagonist, scored as female.

"Tedford & June" - male narrator, scored as female.

That only one error between narrator and rating. This is interesting. I can't say it proves anything or whatnot, and I'm not entirely sure about the rational behind gendering various words ("with" is female, while "around" is male), but I'm moderately intrigued by this if there's some capacity to "switch genders" depending on the gender of your protagonist.

Of course, you can make the argument that it's sort of a weak algorithm if it only checks for male versus female words, rather than encompassing more options, but it works if you assume there's a spectrum for gender as much as for sexuality. I'm more fascinated by the capacity to change written genders based on the narrator you're writing.

Two sentences, which is to say "Two Characters," have ended up on my screen. I need to finish that up in about ten minutes if I can and work on the third draft of "Face," but I think this will make a very good story for when I'm done this one. Ostensibly, the working title is "No Wrong Turns on Those Curves," but this is only the most tentative of assignments.

My head is a crumpled bank note. I'm going to swish some ice cream into a dish and commence once again this writing thing, suspicious activity though it may be. When one feels inspired, one must act on the situation, even as the Fear threatens. You know. It is a Sunday.

And all the merciless things sneer as they skitter out from behind doors, bookshelves, and curtains; you rarely see them for they flicker as they walk, like airplane transmissions, and make careful notes about all the procedures of your life, your routine, your daily nutritional intake. They calculate old war injuries and examine the way you correct your posture when speaking to your mother on the phone. They keep a log of people whose numbers you can dial from memory without having to use an address book. They measure how much soap you use to wash your face at night. They acquire DNA scrapings from your nail clippers.

Made it up to page ten of the third draft, so I'm quitting for the night to drift in an aimless sleep with the window open and plugs in my ears to keep out the noise from Hillside Avenue. I doubt the secret agents are watching me right now. I'll get up in the morning and continue the Good Work of Revision, maybe squeeze two or three more sentences out for that new thing. Last night in a fit of summer heat, I dreamt I was forced to attend several math courses, including one called Geometry in Tenth-Dimensional Spaces.

A new roommate in the house changes the local energy, as it were; it takes some time before they stop being a guest and start being an actual roommate. The living room's in chaos and there's extra junk in the garage, but things are moving in correct directions. At least I'm not alone in the house. She has to get up earlier than I do in the morning, which means no fights over who gets to shower first.

Nearly finished reading Rohinton Mistry's short story, "The Ghost of Firozsha Baag." For the most part I really enjoy this story; the only problem I find with it is the somewhat cavalier use of italics. I understand the convention that you italicize non-English words, and for the most part that's completely fine - bhoot has to be differentiated in some way from ghost, even though they mean the same thing, because of cultural connotation; I can accept that even when it reads jarringly because the narrator uses so many of these words that they deserve to just be integrated rather than pointed out. However, dialogue is delivered indirectly, not with quotation marks, and sometimes is in italics and sometimes isn't. This bothers me, it disconnects me from the narrative I'm otherwise enjoying.

Dionne Brand's "Sans Souci" is next, although I'm trying to work on the third draft at the same time.

Monkey prays at Orissa temple. [Via]

This is my outburst of weird shit for the day. It's cited as a miracle, but I wonder what the "logical, mundane" explanation is, if there is one; it might be even wilder and weirder than a miracle. Maybe there was a travelling circus with a trained monkey brought up to worship...

Well, it's done for the moment. I don't know. "The Inexplicable Face." I just - yeah. I need to leave it alone for a month or something. I need to write something new and manic and fun, wild, bizarre. I'll look up "Face" in a month and maybe adjust things further, some line edits, and then I'll send it out or something. Otherwise, I'm going to write a couple short-shorts, get drunk, and maybe take a crack at the Spies. I have that paragraph I wrote the other night, so I might do something with that. Definitely want to write some women. Definitely want to write some action.