wildcat

And the hermit leans on his knotted walking cane (tipped with mother-of-pearl), presses his mouth to the hole in the wall, and speaks: Well. Halfway between the interjection and the deep dark water hole. The hermit alone, for the most part, but for his Fear, open-lipped for most of the day in his old shack and rambling over and over and over with nothing approaching coherence. Cohesion. Coordination.

The evening walk was cancelled on account of bad weather over in Daniel's part of town. It's setting sun and blue sky over here, bit of a breeze, but painting-perfect. Instead, I'll make myself a bagel (purchased from the Mount Royal Bagel Factory) with cream cheese and alfalfa. After that I'll open a file and work on my Moloch poems to make them suitable for submission and then maybe I'll open the rantbook for some pen-and-ink time. I've mostly wasted the day beyond a trip to the grocery store and eating. Well, not wasted. But I have not produced, not yet, and I'm so very much in love with the process of production.

Buddha, Shiva, and Ganesha say: Good Day.

Anyway; the light wanes and I need to flick a switch for some artificial illumination. My words have gone all funny and thick, like syrup, which by coincidence was poured on the stack of pancakes I made myself for breakfast.

Moloch continues to elude me. I need to go through those poems again because something's missing. I think the final title is going to be "The Moloch Letters," but we'll see. It's simple and too the point. Maybe this would be easier on the typewriter with a cigarette, shot of whiskey, and a bad tie. I nearly through in a couple lines of a Marilyn Monroe/Jane Russell number as an epigraph, but that didn't quite fit. The last section, the Paris Hilton section, is causing me the most problems. Anyway, I'll crack this nut before the day is out. In the meantime, I need to eat, and write some stupid fiction.

It is, I think, a moral imperative that you all go NOW, and thew "Look Around You," a YouTube thing. British. Humourous.

Go Now Please.

Afterwards, please turn in your examinations to the head of class. Yes.

[via Richard]

Do you ever just want to give up on your poem? Cut the cord already, send it off to college, make it move out of the house? I stared at the screen for twenty minutes, justified the text because it is a prose-poem, took out one segment of one sentence - a decision I'm not sure about, even now - and then closed the file. I'll make sure that it is all formatted for a submission and print it off at some point soon. I don't know who's going to take it but I have to send it somewhere.

"Most probably, Egypt was the country in which the umbrella originated and where it first became an item of religious and ceremonial regalia, rather than an article of fashion. By 1200 BC, models of smart and intricate design were being held over the most distinguished nobles, to denote their higher plane of royalty overshadowing the under-world of lower planes, and especially to symbolize the vault of heaven over the king."

-- T.S. Crawford, A History of the Umbrella (David & Charles, 1970)

I should probably be in bed but it's far too hot in here and my skin is too small for all the things inside. Too many hours in the sun today, no sunscreen because I'm a fool and I know it, but I'm happy to report the insanity has ebbed a bit, I can almost hold my hand up and touch fresh air.

There will be fish in my next story. Sorry, no chickens, I feel no affinity for chickens, that's Michael's department.

Today, I saw some baby goats and held eye contact with a peacock (male of the species), indeed, yes, good day.

If I open my mouth? Symphonies.

IT'S BEEN SOME DAYS since I last updated, but the news is thus: plans to away myself and my sweet man to the island of Salt Spring, four days hence. Tomorrow evening? Dinner with Christian. Otherwise I've been working and quietly freaking out. Had a rather lovely indoor picnic at Steph's new apartment yesterday, Sunday, after which I scumbled home to sit around at my leisure. A day off! Such rare beasts.

I wrote three pages on my lunch break today. Glory. I shall be typing soon, mere moments, and then extrapolating. NOTHING worth mentioning, but it felt good and was highly enjoyable.

Steph suggested a new idea for an endeavour which sounds good. She's very good at coming up with practical applications of right-brained skills.

A number of points.

1. I am very, very proud of Michael. He was worried, but all is good.

2. I have just spent ten minutes wandering around my apartment, looking for my favourite thumb ring. I keep putting them in my pockets and forgetting about them. Both rings dropped out while I was cleaning up some clothes. I couldn't find it and just when I'd given up all hope, there it was, beside a pile of Justice League comic books.

3. Decent dinner: egg roll, shrimp fried rice, mushroom chow mein, and deep-fried prawns. All the dishes are done, leftovers are packed cleanly in the fridge; the floor of my apartment is (mostly) clear; I'm in my jammies (hush); I found a hidden, emergency set of clean underwear (I really need to do laundry) packed up under my bed; and now I've got some excellent music on and plans to write for the evening.

1. Something must be done with regard to the umbrella thing. I shall open a window shortly, take a breathe, and begin. Imagine me poised on a bench, about to lay my hands upon a Bösendorfer. Or maybe something more appropriate, because I'm hardly musical beyond that brief flirtation with the guitar (which ended badly, as all ill-fated affairs, because of terrible pacing).

2. Christian was on the island, over from Salt Spring, for an interview - so Michael and I had dinner with him last night. We went to Pagliacci's, which was not too busy by local standards. Afterward we had impulse gelatto and he went off to catch the ferry. Be back next week for a home-cooked meal at the Margaret Atwood Boarding House. It sounds like his interview went quite well, and he should hear back from them on Thursday.

3. I picked up a copy of Daniel Handler's latest, Adverbs from work this morning, to be read over our little vacation this weekend. It looks good, the prose cracks (at least insofar as the first page), and it makes me want to put a book out. Something pretty, with well-chosen paper and font.

4. I need to fill out the census thing. Probably soonish. Huh. Fancy that.

1. Tonight, I'm off to the George & Dragon over in Fernwood to see a friend of mine off - he's heading back to the East Coast where he was born and raised. He's been working with me for a couple years but is finally finished up and wants to go home. Sad to some extent, but he hasn't been really happy around here for a while and sometimes the gravitational pull drags one home without much choice.

2. Apparat: the Singles Collection is a trade paperback made up of four short genre comics that extrapolate a world where the Superhero never gained prominance and domination of the market. Written by Warren Ellis, they each delve into a different genre of pulp fiction: "Angel Stomp Future" is the science fiction piece, illustrated by Juan Jose Ryp; "Frank Ironwine" is a hard-edged crime comic with art by Carla Speed McNeil; "Quit City" has art by Laurenn McCubbin, focusing on daredevil pilots; and "Simon Spector" is a decadent vigilante comic in the vein of the Shadow or Doc Savage, with art by Jacen Burrows. The collection suffers from the indie publication's black and white art in different degrees; "Spector" and "Ironwine" work fine, but "Quit City" could do with colour and "Angel Stomp Future" is desperate for it - the linework is so ridiculously detailed and frenetic that the lack of real contrasts hampers are a fun and vicious little story about body modification and simulated birds that chirp corporate ringtones. Some of the stories worked better than others, but the containment and fullness of each tale left me happy with them, overall.

3. "The person having their ears cleaned would lie down with their head in the lap of the person doing the cleaning. It is generally considered a pleasant feeling for Japanese, like having one's back scratched. The cleaning of ears is thus considered an act of intimacy, often performed by a mother to a child or, among adults, by one's lover. It may also be performed alone."

4. Tomorrow morning I have to get up and rush down to the laundromat, make clothing clean, come home and pack. Then I have five hours of work out in Colwood until Michael picks me up so we can rush off to the ferry terminal and get off this island for an even smaller one, with hippies and hippie-type markets and the promise of some mythical bookstore I've never been to before. Staying with Christian and John with fresh air and space. The chance to get some reading accomplished, and some writing most especially.

Sat in the laundromat this morning while my clothing tumbled, ostensibly reading but actually listening in on the conversation a couple of people were having. It was a guy and a girl, I presume roommates, and he was going on about his love life or some such. Hilarious. Apparently he moved to Victoria and started dating this girl and they fell in love but "the timing wasn't right," (sounded like glossing over), so they split up and he ended up rebounding with a second girl for a couple weeks. He started off that relationship by specifying that he was in love with someone else and it had to just be a thing. Girl #2 was developing feelings for him but he dumped her to run back to Girl #1, who of course would have nothing to do with him because she "didn't trust him." He said that he tried to remain friends with Girl #2 but it got weird. Big surprise.

And then he started to slag Girl #2, who had different, "liberal" values that he couldn't share and didn't want to be involved with (he didn't really specify, but it seemed to indicate either (a) he's a dumb-ass, (b) she was asking to fuck him with a strap-on, or (c) all of the above), and she was in a band. "Don't ever date someone in a band. They're different people, all they want to talk about is music and I don't know anything about music so why should I talk to them?"

Never has the laundromat been so rich with innuendo and soap opera at nine in the morning.

I'm a touch hungover and have work this afternoon. Meanwhile, I need to clean up the apartment and pack for the weekend on Salt Spring.

Salt Spring Island, the inside of some kind of deck illumination device. Yeah, I know. I don't really bother with nature. Edited a little by Michael, as I'm busy thinking through a layer of allergy-induced psychosis.

Well, I've been back at the Atwood for about an hour now. After work on Friday, Michael picked me up and we ran around coordinating things - picking up Penny, who was going to stay with Michael's mum for him over the weekend, getting groceries & booze - then picked up Daniel and headed for Swartz Bay. The ferry ride was only about forty minutes and we met up with Christian's boyfriend John on-board, who directed us through Fulford and Lower Ganges, up Salt Spring Island to his parents' house, where Christian has been house-sitting. We were all settled by about ten o'clock.

It was a relaxing two days, other than the problemmatic presence of two cats who had fur on everything, so I teetered between madcap insanity after a night of insomnia and then fell into near-comas. I bathed a lot, at one point serenading the house with very loud mantras during a forty-five minute meditation session in a whirlpool bathtub. I enjoyed harmonizing with the water jets. We ate far too much, drank far too much, stared out over the beauty of the island, made witty comments and spent too much money at the Ganges market. I picked up various goat cheeses - with truffles, and flowers, and cloves of garlic - and then of course there was a bookshop, because Christian and I gravitate toward them with inspiring regularity. I bought The Selected Cantos of Ezra Pound, a copy of Nick Bantock's pop-up book for Kubla Khan, and a book of Arthur C. Clarke short stories. Productive in an unproductive fashion - we played a few games of asshole and I spent this morning building houses of cards. Too much food! Too much sun, as well, I'm burnt within an inch of my life and everything I've worn for the past two days is in the laundry bin to get the cat hair away from me!

It is a very strange thing to do: stand in front of a mirror for ten or fifteen minutes, slicing away at facial hair with a razorblade. And not just that; before we start slicing, we apply this foamy gelatin and make the beard worse, we given ourselves a momentary Father Christmas look. Every couple of days I shave, although it's a lot more sporadic than it used to be; when I was young I did it, clockwork-like, every two days. No question.

Now if I'm lucky it's every other day, or every three or four days depending. Depending on my mood in the morning, if I have enough time to do it before I have to sit and wait for the phone to ring. When my bus comes, if I need to go do laundry that morning, et cetera. I like to be freshly clean-shaven but I hate the act itself, mostly because of the little things like that spot that I almost always miss or the way none of the hairs go in one direction; I have to shave the same spot at least twice, often more, from different angles. Shaving can be a pain on some days but after it's done I feel revitalized.

What biological imperative does the beard fulfill? Peacock-like plumage, or simply protection of the mouth from things like exposure?

"In the course of history, men with facial hair have been ascribed various attributes such as wisdom, sexual potency, or high status, but also a lack of cleanliness and refinement, or an eccentric disposition."

At some point I started to like stubble. I like a day or two's worth of stubble on my chin, although I prefer my upper lip to be smooth and hairless. Occasionally I experiment with something more like a half-goatee but that only lasts until the hair growth is weedy and unmanageable and off it goes, because I'm no good at symmetrical trimming.

1. Coming home from work on the bus, well, there were band geeks, you know. Jazz band, marching band, with uniforms. On the one hand I wanted to protect them from a cruel world that will probably never appreciate then, and on the other I wanted to beat them up and steal their lunch money. Because I'm a terrible person. But marching uniforms? Why on Earth would anyone do that to their child? Because it would look just darling? Honey, that doesn't get anybody a date to the prom.

2. Moose tracks ice cream is good, very good, but perplexes me. Is it called that because it resembles snow with moose pellets? Or because the top of a fresh container looks like a hoof print?

3. I made a library card up for a lovable blind reverand today. Religion doesn't seem so odious right now.

4. Another old man started in on me today about Jackie Gleason making a movie about Soviet Russia in Quebec City a few decades ago; he kept seeing these men in Soviet uniforms everywhere, and then someone told him they were making a movie. The film apparently went nowhere because it was so bad, and he wasn't sure if this was connected to Jackie Gleason drinking himself to death. Yes, I was on desk in a library with a line-up and some old man actually used the phrase "drank himself to death."

5. A thick-accented Eastern European grandmother was complaining to me as I signed out a copy of The Wizard of Oz (fully illustrated) to her that Dorothy was wearing silver shoes on the cover, rather than ruby slippers. I tried to explain that in the original version they were silver, and were changed to ruby for the movie, because it took advantage of the new colour technology. She seemed befuddled by the whole thing, because generally the slippers have been ruby ever since the movie, and I don't even think she believed me, and this is all Judy Garland's fault. The original movie slippers are apparently in the Smithsonian.

6. I feel the need to resurrect some old characters and write myself a little story.

7. I'm working on a couple revisions for one of the poems I wrote over the weekend, mostly because it was the product of fevered, insomniac, allergy-attack madness and needs to be cleaned up a little.

Image by Greg Capullo. [Via scans_daily]

I haven't read any Quasar comics in, ah, eons - and I certainly miss my old ones! The early issues were really bizarre and utterly existential.

You will note, for the record, the lack
of proper bathroom curtains;
this is an invitation.
The mystery of someone else's toilet
requires our undivided attention.
Of particular interest is the three-quarters-empty roll of toilet paper
beside the three-quarters-full one,
like old Jack, thin-limbed, and his fat wife.
This is an example of unbridled enthusiasm;
they can not wait to deflower new rolls
to be held, possibly for ransom, on top of the tank.
The whole scene is caught in overexposed ceramic white,
even the listless toilet brush beside,
in its stand like a witness or accomplice or murderer.
We must consider all permutations.

(c) 2006 Ben Rawluk, all rights reserved.

1. "A virgin microbe..." (Tristan Tzara) / "In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn..." (Marcel Duchamp) [Link provided by Michael]. Ah, to be in New York in the summertime, one hundred spoiled fish splayed out front of me, muttering "Dada, Dada, Dada," over and over and over again.

2. The fortune on the bottle cap of my Green Apple Jones Soda: A happy event will take place shortly in your home.

3. I'll take some photographs of the apartment once it's in more of a working order. Michael helped me pick out some sarongs down in Fan Tan Alley to hang on the walls, and I need to figure out more effective ways of storing things. Possibly, this involves throwing things out and making room. I tend to accumulate things like paperwork that I don't really need, so those have to go soon so I can function.

"There are billions of people in the world. And I'm young, and pretty and fancy free. I've even got a man waiting for me in my motel room. But I've never felt so alone in all my life. I've never felt so crazy either, and I have, in my time, been pretty crazy. I hold the bottle of vodka close to my chest and try not to look around me. If I don't look they might all go away. We're in Texas. Maybe that's it. Maybe all little Texan towns are like this. Nah. Admit it. It's me. It's me. I'm out of my mind."

And with that voice-over, Peter Milligan opens the very first issue of Shade the Changing Man and introduces us to Kathy George. This was 1990, before DC Comics had moved its comics for mature readers over into the Vertigo imprint. Chris Bachalo pencilled and Mark Pennington inked the initial image, Kathy walking down a street with a bag of booze to her chest, surrounded by half-solid faces and petrified super-aliens.

Yesterday, while I tumbled through quarter bins at the comics shop, I picked up a copy of Shade #3, and I bought it with a stack of other items. With this weird-looking comic book, I now have an almost complete run of the entire series, which is probably my favourite series of all time, regardless of all the Johnny-Come-Laters. I am, in fact, missing only six issues from right around the end. I have never seen how it ends, beyond spying the cover of the last issue in an art book once, a beautiful image of the three main characters - one of whom, by that point, was dead - crammed into a photo booth. I will have to do something about this void in my run, one day.

Peter Milligan's Shade the Changing Man has influenced my artistic sensibilities as much as Allen Ginsberg, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Margaret Atwood, the Coen Brothers and Wes Anderson.

I can, in fact, remember the very first Shade I ever found; this was back in Prince George, the summer before I moved down to Victoria in the first place, when I was working for the day camp. I was getting craft supplies at a dollar store and chanced upon this beaten-up looking comic book:

Shade #33 (cover by Bachalo), the first issue as a Vertigo comic, which was wild and strange and only half-confusing, really, having read nothing else of what had gone on before. I started to read: this alien called Shade with powers of Madness was dead, dead, dead. Instead, I was introduced to Miss Kathy George, in a bubble-bath with short blonde hair (dyed), a cigarette in her left hand, and a book in her right hand balanced on top of her knees. Her back to me, of course, and across from her with a newspaper in her hand: Lenny, Kathy's lover at the time, the third main cast member. Lenny, the bitch on wheels. Leonora Shapiro, the fastest wit in the west. Androgynous New York woman who fairly captured my heart right away. And then some black guy emerges from the bubbles - Roger, apparently, blood still gushing from a bullet hole between his eyes. Kathy's ex-boyfriend. A ghost. After that the plot kicks in, and we get around to the resurrection of Shade (well, a resurrection of Shade, who died and came back with bran muffin regularity).

Who were the three main characters? Rac Shade, an winsome alien poet who never fit on his homeworld of Meta, sent across the dimensions in something called an M-Vest - through "the Area of Madness" - to combat the contagion of Earth insanity. Especially something called the American Scream, a cancerous projection of America, the idea of America, the crazy of America. His own body dying in between dimensions, Shade and his powers of Madness (to make the outside world reflect his internal states; to summon and mutate the world; to change shape; to create out of thought) land right in the middle of an execution. His spirit enters the body of serial killer Troy Grenzer at the moment of death, and he ends up on the run with Kathy, who watched Grenzer kill her boyfriend Roger (that ghost up there) after killing her parents. Shade is a sensitive man trying to work through an America built on all the old ideals of manly men and masculinity; he has to conjure up vicious alter egos to deal with this, half the time. Even has to fight the remnants of Grenzer's soul.

Shade is supposedly the main character, but this is a lie. Kathy is the main character, and while you have the bright, electric super-madness of Shade on the one hand, you have Kathy's recovery on the other; she struggles with her own growing up, recurring alcoholism, and her grief. The two of them change continuously throughout the series and Kathy even gets pregnant which has problems of its own. She loves Shade and later loves Lenny, and then loves both of them, and it gets complicated for her. Right up until Kathy is killed and the series loses something, with twenty issues of confused, befuddling grief by the other characters.

The third - who shows up shortly after Kathy meets Shade - is Lenny, who reminds me of Steph in a lot of ways, Joy in other ways, and Caroline as well. Lenny is often confused with being male, possibly, androgynous, transgendered occasionally, but she's a lapsed jew with rich parents who she ran out on after an incident at a wedding (not hers). She used to rob gypsy cabs in New York and attend gallery openings, before being swept up on the madness train. Her only power is her wit, and her sex; Lenny has a lust like nothing else. L is for Lenny is for Libido. Men and women don't matter. She and Kathy become involved on the sly and she falls in love, and she never quite gets away from that.

The series changed in small ways all over the place and in big ways; artistic shifts or settings (all across America to mostly around a bizarre hotel, to New York), and bodies (Shade starts out in Grenzer's body but that one dies, eventually, has to make due as a disembodied madness-form for a while, then becomes a women, then dies and is dumped into an empty body by a higher power). Hair, as well: long Byronic hair to gossamer feminity to short and spiky, a quiff, matted down blood-red.

And the stories! The American Scream, a skeletal Uncle Sam bringing all the neuroses into full-colour expression. The JFK Sphinx. #31 & 32, guest-starring James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, with a cameo by Gertrude Stein. #39, which was the self-aware meta-comic. #40 with the ghost of Jim Morrison. Or #41, with the feminist retelling of Pandora's story. A crossover with John Constantine (to be played close to fifteen years later by Keanu Reeves) that sends everybody back to the Salem Witch Trials. The character Shimmy, who claimed to be living art. "A Season in Hell," a five-part Arthur Rimbaud riff with all the plagues! The plagues! Shade moving to New York and dealing with his depression, after the loss of Kathy, by changing himself into a dance floor.

The cover to Shade #62, painted by Duncan Fegredo, remains one of my favourite images from the series. To get over everything, Shade extracts his heart using his madness powers and encases it. Metaphorically, in a way, but literally as well. Lets go of his emotions. Operates as a callous monster who just can't quite deal with things.

I liked that while Shade's powers were never defined and scrutinized, they were so tied into his emotions and neuroses that they were weaknesses as much as powers. The series explored identity, sexuality, gender ("Did I ever tell you my theory about the male menstrual cycle?" / "Actually, Lenny, you did. I think that was right after you told me your theory about the female testicle."), dipped into literature, explored those last horrible moments of life ("I don't want to die with a bad pop song in my head. I don't want a piece of mental chewing gum clogging up the final glimmer of my consciousness."), and managed three solid, believable, weird, human, strange, alien, fucked-up, lovely characters.

After finding that one comic in that dollar store in Prince George, I've only ever been able to find Shade the Changing Man in that one comic shop on Johnson Street in Victoria, and I spent most of my first year here - in between trips to Vancouver, Writing 100, hanging out with Joy, and living with Krista - building up my collection. I bought them in sporadic bunches and eventually sucked up almost everything in their stock, beyond a couple doubles. That copy of #3 that I found yesterday is the first one I've found that I didn't have in three years.

I would still very much like to read the ending.

1. Dear Metabolism: Yes, I know, I know you're slowing down, I don't need to hear about it over and over. I know I've gained a bit of weight. I'll do something about it. PS: You smell.

2. Tomorrow, all well and good, I'll get up at seven, have a shower, eat breakfast and go for a walk around the block before I have to leave for work. We'll see if it happens. Or maybe I'll get up and do some sit-ups or something. I need to figure out ways of getting into shape that don't actively involve gyms, because I don't like gyms; all those sweaty men really creep me out, I never know how to use the machines properly even after I've had a trainer, and get so bored. And I don't really have anyone around me pushing me to use a gym, so I'm certainly not going to change in that direction. Maybe I'll pick up some sports, Vicky and I were talking at work today about doing sports rather than going to the gym.

3. Dietary changes need to occur.

The first chapter of Daniel Handler's latest novel, Adverbs, was charming and I felt intrigued enough to keep reading. The second chapter was a stumbling block, however, and I very nearly put the book down because it didn't quite click.

But I kept reading and then, like a flash, it came back upward and soared! Right up until he drops a lyric from "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" in, because that's my move, bitch. Well, really, it's a terrific book so far.

Imagine that instead of writing postmodern detective fiction, Paul Auster wrote postmodern love stories. Adverbs is about the infinite varieties of love, and each chapter has the potential to be a dead-end, self-contained bauble or it can extend into further chapters. Occasionally you're not sure if this is the same character from before, or someone with the same name, but the details bleed over and time unravels and occasionally there's supernatural elements but mostly not, only sometimes that's upside down.

And, oddly, while I was in the laundromat this morning trying to avoid human contact even though there were all these people who decided out of all the machines in the damned laundromat, they had to pick the ones right beside me, I started to write a story. Or something. It will properly collapse in on itself but I don't care, I'm going to sit in my bed, possibly naked, and work on this thing. Maybe I'll just skip the previous assertion to get up early and do exercize related things in favour of staying up until I can find an end for this story, which will be short, and so I can start writing a second draft this weekend. Or the story will combust.

Or I'll combust because I need something fresh to send out and I need to finish something for my sanity and I fear I'm becoming unstuck in time.

I've also been working on a poem disguised as a catalogue of curios contained in the cabinet of one Narcis Pravda, mysterious shadow photographer of Esque. There's only ever been the one polaroid of him, shot by the performance artist M-Factor following some strange and apocalyptic night on the town:

I accidentally fell in love with a bicycle a little while ago, a dark grey number called Vendetta, charcoal really. Most days it sits out front of the bike shop on Yates Street, the one over by the Patch and beside the scooter shop. I fell in love round about Good Friday, and more recently I've decided that it would be a very good thing to purchase a bicycle for myself, something simple. I could therefore exercize without the discomfort of going to a gymnasium -- don't look at me like that, I would have fared terribly in the San Francisco of the Nineteen Seventies -- and this way I could bop around town on a bicycle, take it to work with me and get places in half the time. I would still depend on the bus as much, but the bicycle would be good and get me a bit more in shape.

We wandered around looking at different bicycle shops today. The one with the Vendetta doesn't look like the best option, more's a pity, but there's a bike shop on Fort Street that offers a lot of incentives for buying from them, including maintenance and secondary hardware (buying a helmet would be necessary, after all), and it was there that the informative saleswoman went over what I'd want a bike for, exactly, and I think buying a cruiser is the best solution. Michael thought the cruiser's handle-bars were a little bit dorky, but I am a little bit dorky and I think the bicycle in question would suit me quite well.

Now, let's be honest: I would not buy the cycling magazines or the clothes, I wouldn't sublimate myself into West Coast cyclist culture. Not me. But bombing around on a cruiser? That would work. I need to speak to my landlord before I do anything and make sure I can get a key to the storage shed out behind the Margaret Atwood Boarding House, so that I could store my future bike in it. I'll do that this week, and then we'll see about buying something.

Contents of my fruit bowl: one potato, four avocados, and two pears.

Contents of my sink: Two bowls, two spoons, one fork, one knife, one plate. These need to be washed, post-haste.

It's raining haphazardly outside but the temperature is for once just right, neither too hot nor too cold (and let's turn now to Goldilocks for the week's weather forecast). I caught a bus from Michael's place and stopped off at the Market to pick up a couple things for some avocado-and-provolone paninis, as well as a big bottle of Happy Planet because it might cost a bit more but I'm in the mood for that particular texture of liquid, which is probably a very odd thing.

Either way.

I've moisturized, and I need to go turn on the light and clean up the apartment a bit. Mostly wash the dishes, pack up a couple stacks of comic books that I've left out, and make my bed. Open the curtains and finish Daniel Handler's Adverbs, because I've only got about a dozen pages to read. The book by and large is quite excellent, although some chapters work better than others, and the habit of reproducing details between groups of characters only feels appropriate half the time - magpies in particular recur without there being any real need for it. The problem is the "necessity" for literature to tie all its ends together while occasionally you need to leave a shoelace hanging.

I'm going to spend the day writing, I think. After I clean and eat, of course.

I've just spent nearly an hour reworking WILDCAT's link-sidebar over there. Added Catherine, Dan, and John to the Friends. I stabilized sections for Literati, Comic Book Blogs and Art Space with relevant links therein. This is all generally the stuff that I look at on a regular basis, partly because WILDCAT serves as my bookmarks-away-from-home if I'm not on my own darling computer.

Blockade Boy does fashion critiques for comic books and occasionally redesigns super-hero costumes. Project Rooftop is all about such redesigning, with different featured artists taking classic or reasonably classic characters and redoing them. Ragnell is the Amazon Queen of the Planet Femnaz.

Dorian at Postmodern Barney loves Wildcat and reminds us that Wildcat Loves Us. Oh, and for the record, courtesy of the Trusty Sidekicks.

Both Calamity Jon's livejournal feed and his APE-bLAWg have been included, although I believe he's having technical difficulties right now so it might be a while before any new content is up. Though, he drew the cutest Frankenstein's Monster I can think of.

Scipio Garling enjoys making fun of Green Lantern on the Absorbascon, and tries flirt with men using pick-up lines he learned from the Legion of Super-Heroes. Man Adventure features some amusing, cartoony, beefcake superhero artwork, because the world needs more examples of the Justice League men in the locker room.

k-punk: Even when she tells the truth, it's a lie.

"The characters, such as they are, have no more depth than the buildings they move through or the clothes they wear. Stone's wardrobe and jewellery - assembled by long-time Gus Van Sant associate Beatrix Aruna Pasztor - is certainly far more important than anything she says, the clothes far less off-the-peg than the character. Reviewers who complained about the reliance on nudity or sex weren't paying attention. The film is much more about what Stone wears that what she doesn't."
-- mark k-punk (04-06-2006)

In a backwards, backhanded, bizarre fashion, somebody has actually made me halfway interested in seeing Basic Instinct 2. This may have to be declared one of those awful crimes against humanity, or not. I saw about ten minutes of Basic Instinct the other day - Michael Douglas and his partner have showed up at Sharon Stone's luxury apartment, or house - very beige, very modern, all clean and smooth. Glassed in. They stand in the kitchen while Stone wonders off to "change into something appropriate" (or was it "comfortable?") and stare at Michael Douglas's picture in the newspaper right up until Douglas catches Stone's reflection in a mirror down the hallway. She's completely nude, of course (perhaps, due to the apparent vulnerability, naked would be more appropriate) and pulling on the famous white dress from the famous scene. The shot of her in the mirror is both beige and gaudy, drawn out, ridiculous; Douglas watches her as one more sleazy Douglas character (cf. Fatal Attraction and its weird mirror Wonder Boys), drawn out, potentially about to be caught. Apparently his partner was looking at the newspaper and didn't notice the blatant voyeurism. Anyway, Stone emerges from the bedroom and we realize that it is indeed a mirror she's been viewed in, and then she walks past the boys. "Maybe you should call your lawyer?" / "Why on earth would I need one?" Then the television clicked over to a commercial and I went and did something else.

Odd scene to catch. Something about the way Stone's character has carefully arranged the mirror to catch her image from the bedroom, all the house's modern glass, the beige vibe in there with the sex vibe. Sex is banal and people have become furniture?

Anyway: we all know the drill. The Roxy Cinegog ("Where movies are a religion!"), Tuesday, two dollars and fifty cents for two movies, maybe I'll shamble in to see Basic Instinct 2 when it shows up like an uninvited guest or that one-night-stand from seventeen years ago who shows up to your son's graduation.

Warren Ellis: "I am compelled to mention, however, that I wanted to called it NEXTWAVE: EROTIC WAX PLAY or NEXTWAVE: THE MARVEL TRY-OUT BOOK FOR MENTAL PATIENTS."

Marvel is putting the crayon in your hands with this very special Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E #5 Crayon Butchery Variant. Just remember to try to stay inside the lines, or it’s your head. Oooga booga.
--(newsarama)

Did I actually need an excuse to buy pencil crayons? Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen's NEXTWAVE #5 comes out tomorrow in both standard, coloured version and harking-back-to-the-1990s, gimmick-laden colouring book edition. It's difficult to articulate precisely the mixture of OH-COOL and I'M-APPALLED that the whole idea generates in my brain, because at least the cover of the comic isn't going to be die-cut, foil-enhanced with a hologram. Or glow-in-the-dark, like that horrendous issue of Green Lantern where the Silver-Age Green Lantern goes insane (yawn) and kills every single alien Green Lantern (snore) in an effort to get juiced up and recreate his reality.

I will probably just buy the regular comic with the colours pre-done, so I can sit and read it in a coffee shop or park somewhere. NEXTWAVE takes a bunch of reject, D-list super-heroes from the obscure bits of Marvel Comics and turns them into - well, okay, they're still D-list but they crack jokes and live in a metafiction and beat up robots and giant dragons even though we the audience are given the dragon's side of the story and fall into pathos and it's all very funny. Or stupid. Or throwaway. Or pop. Or fun, man. There's a guy called the Captain, who is basically every single throwaway superhero with the word "Captain" in his name. My favourite is Aaron Stack, a robot who refers to people as "fleshly ones" and is a bit of a dweeb derived from a 1970s 2001: A Space Odyssey comic drawn by Jack Kirby.

Oh yeah, and Dead Girl #5 is coming out tomorrow:

Cover image by Mike Allred with links by Laura Allred.
Comic itself written by Peter Milligan.

I still might pick up some pencil crayons, go home, and draw comics.

I tend to read forewords and introductions. Not always; I find those Penguin edition classics always have "introductions" that last as long as the work itself and are far too academic for my tastes, but I like a short, quipping foreword that doesn't illuminate anything but merely holds open the door for the book itself. If a book's first sentence is an open window, or door, or the steps up into a house, well, the foreword should be a doorman.

I keep having to correct myself after I spell it foreward. Onwards, upwards, forwards.

I finished reading William Gibson's introduction ("The Recombinant City") to Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren, which I've decided is to be my summer reading project. I want to toughen up my brain again, make it all two-fisted. Partly this is because of my failure with Joyce's Ulysses and there was Gödel, Escher, Bach, which I started but never finished.

Gibson's foreword does its job and both excites me and intrigues me. It comments on the author's experience with the book:

I have never understood it. I have sometimes felt that I partially understood it, or that I was nearing the verge of understanding it. This has never caused me the least discomfort, or interfered in any way with my pleasure in the text. If anything, the opposite has been true.

I'll probably record my notes and thoughts on the book on WILDCAT, off and on. Gives me something to blog about and might spark off some writing of my own. I'm working on a fiction of some sort (I hestitate, at this point, to call it a "story") and my things are usually influenced heavily by whatever I'm reading at that point, so I might record both tracks of thought simultaneously. Maybe I'll fiddle around with parallel texts on here. Although that sounds like work.

The peculiar nature of labelling: Samuel R. Delany is listed in his Wikipedia entry under the categories of "gay writers" and "bisexual writers" at the same time. Seperately. Curious.

His 2004 book Phallos has been described as pornography and he apparently agrees, although it's supposed to be more like meta-pornography. But he's not the first writer to be accused of writing porn like it was a bad thing (cf. William Seward Burroughs and oddly spankable Cities of the Red Night, not to mention Naked Lunch).

Pornography is one of those media or genres that can evolve so much, produce so much. What precisely (because we must always strive for precision or the illusion off; because we live on a grey planet but like to break it down into black particles and white particles) is the dividing line between pornography and, say, "erotica?" Is it something as simple and obvious and as "erotica is the stuff we can freely admit gets us off," and "pornography is the bad stuff we don't like?"

It was one of those mornings where I was in bed with Michael, but not booked for work yet. So, I got up at 7:30 and trundled in pajama bottoms out to the bathroom to take a boring, solitary shower. Afterward, I trundled back to bed and sat up with my cell phone on and the TV remote in my hand, because I had to sit around and wait for one of the branches to phone me.

And I flipped channels. To be honest, I don't have a television of my own, so there's a certain novelty to these mornings with Michael nestled beside me making non-committal grunts when I poke him. And flicked over to some interview being conducted with two doctors. I missed what their actual specializations were, but these were two doctors treating patients for depression with botox.

Yes, with botox. Not only are people injecting themselves with botulism to grasp at some sort of Fountain of Youth constructed out of straws, but they're also injecting themselves with botulism to cure their depression. Naturally, these presumably accredited doctors noted that the botox was "maintenance therapy" and that effects would wear off unless you continue to shoot up with botox.

This has disturbed all day long. The whole day. Weirded out because people inject a neurotoxin into their systems because they can't possibly handle themselves, their lives, whatever. Are ordinary antidepressant pills not doing enough for you that a neurotoxin needs to be injected? Instead of getting some exercize and eating right for dealing with more minor depressions, why not just shoot some botox in with your regular cosmetic surgery routine. Eliminate wrinkles and pesky psychology at the same time!

And then someone at work told me about a news report she saw last night about a murder on some ritzy golf course in Vancouver, where they show a blonde, rich woman in a silver Mercedes complaining about the murder because she's had to miss her golf game and it's ruined her entire day. On camera, she said this. The only thing that made it even the slightest bit better is that apparently the news station ran that footage of the woman over and over, and no doubt she's going to be ridiculed for being the heartless bitch she is.

You know, despite the fact that I can't stand the idea of people today, I'm still in a relatively upbeat mood.

(This whole entry is probably a safe bet as Not Work Safe)

Candida Royalle operates Femme Productions (with thanks to Krista for reminding me), a production company specializing in more artistic pornography. She was apparently invited to join the American Association of Sex Educators, Counsellors, and Therapists. Femme Productions, and the work of Royalle, are good examples of why the lines between "erotica" and "pornography" are not quite as specific, or obvious, or even there. I tend to use "erotica" to refer to erotic stories, and it is more a medium of pornography (in my mind) than something completely different. Erotica is a genre?

I suppose my problem is that pornography has all these nasty connotations - some of them, perhaps, quite justified - but it's difficult to seperate out what connotations are honest and what are detritus of the Puritan Days, and our Fear of Sex. Erotica sounds, in a way, fluffy; the world seems to imply more of a sensual experience, arousing but not neccessarily directly sexual. Pornography allows for the grunting, mechanical, bodily exertions, even if the models have unrealistic bodies and you can't quite believe the erections. They're both fantasy modes but the word "erotica" suggests a tantalizing component - the cum shot that is never delivered. The wet, naked close-up that is always just after the next cut - only it never comes. Heh. Pornography is associated with shame, it's magazines stacked under your bed. Erotica - say, erotic photographs - are framed and hung on the walls. Well, at least until your more conservative aunt comes over and you hide everything in the closet because the lines really aren't there in some people's eyes.

There's something very messy (like unidentified cum stains) about all that and I don't think I've come to any conclusions. I know that "erotica" feels - to me - like a euphemism more than its own seperate thing; it's a way of dressing up pornography for the benefit of the gentile. I know that pornography is a tangle of different associations, implications, levels of realism, levels of sexual expression. But conclusions? Or even further discussion? I don't know.

And the peculiar thing was that Roger never drank orange juice, in fact Roger hated orange juice. He hated other things, of course, like the sensation of massage oil on his skin, but orange juice was on the list, possibly at the top. He couldn't drink it without nearly choking on imaginary seeds; forget that the juice had come from a carton and hadn't seen a real orange in some time, having been squeezed out by machines and packaged for Roger's consumption. He'd work himself into a frenzy once the fluid went past his lips and had once or twice passed out completely because of the anxiety.

But there he was on a Tuesday morning - he couldn't sleep in on Tuesdays, even though it was his day off, because of some mental quirk - with his bare feet on the kitchen linoleum, drinking orange juice straight from the carton. He wore those purple pajama bottoms with the red stripes, the pajamas that he left until in the drawer until all the others were dirty. He'd woken up from a dream that he couldn't remember, of course, even now - just five minutes of waking world. But the dream had left a taste in his mouth and driven him downstairs like nothing ever had, certainly not his first love coffee, into the fridge to pluck the orange juice that his wife dutifully bought against Roger's best wishes, every week, from behind the cantaloupe and plate of butter on the top shelf. He stood there in front of the blinking stove-top clock that read "7:30" and he drank orange juice without pausing from breath.

"Roger," said Roger's wife, Alice, a pale redhead with a regrettable nose that he loved most of all, oddly, even over her arms with the little, dried-out elbows. She stood at the mouth of the kitchen, half-dressed and sour-eyed. She had thirty minutes to get ready for work and she was moving slow, ears sagging. She was a taxi driver and her boss didn't like his drivers starting late, he was a stickler for time, but here was her husband somehow taking up the entire kitchen, which was incidentally quite small given their modest means. She had to put on some coffee and scrape together some toast to eat while brushing her hair and pulling on some clothing. Roger knew not to come into the kitchen on Tuesdays, his day off and the start of her week, until Alice was quite through and screaming along with Ace of Bass on their radio in the bathroom. He was supposed to bumble around in the bedroom and smoke a cigarette on the back patio, maybe.

Roger could not stop drinking the orange juice; he was compelled, wildly, his fingers tapping against the cardboard of the carton while he sucked away at it, anything, last drops. He was drinking it and he was not choking, no, he was drinking too fast to think about the liquid or to even imagine the seeds collecting in his gums and teeth and throat. Alice said his name again with a thicker tone, irritation and confusion mixing together. Certainly, Roger was confused; he did not like orange juice. He had no reason whatsoever to race downstairs first thing to drink orange juice. But there he was, at least until the carton emptied itself into him and he set it down on the counter, not bothering to wipe the excess from his lips until it dribbled down his chin and then onto the floor. "Alice," Roger said, his mouth running dry again. More orange juice. "We've got another carton in one of the cupboards, right? You bought two cartons, at least, right?" Because of course his wife had to love orange juice and drank it off, as if to spite them. Regardless of their peaceable relationship and easy love for each other, there was much spite between them in odd moments, at strange angles. They didn't talk about it.

"You hate orange juice." Alice looked ready to bring up their agreement about Tuesday mornings but of course Roger was already into the cupboards over the sink, looking for a fresh batch of orange juice. It must have been somewhere, behind the household cleansers and the package of J-cloths. And then Alice said something odd: "Honey, your skin. Is there something funny about the lightbulb in here?" But of course they both knew that there was nothing funny about the lightbulb, certainly, it was an ordinary lightbulb and Roger always changed them, when he remembered, to the same brand and same wattage. General Electric, seventy watts. "You're skin's gone orange, honey."

There was something underneath the way she kept calling him "honey." Alice usually called him "dear," or simply by his first name. And then there were his hands, Roger gaped. His hands were orange, and his arms, and then he looked down at his chest and yes, it was orange. He reached down to look beyond the waistband of his pajama bottoms and it all looked very strange against the purple and red of the pajamas, really, he would never think to put all those colours together. Could it be the lightbulb? And there was still that sensation just under his chin, the one that had started with the dream, whatever it was, and now he was a funny colour in the kitchen with his wife who was about to run late for work, she was still wearing her slippers, and the orange of his skin was changing.

His skin began to brighten, which was odd, because it was not really orange any longer but a deep yellow, the half-orange colour of orange juice, and Roger turned to look at his wife and she reached out to him, which wasn't really that odd, he supposed, but it felt inappropriate. And then Roger began to speak, he wanted to at least say Alice's name to calm her down because she seemed so terrified, the way his skin couldn't decide what colour it wanted to be and then she touched his hand, lacing her fingers with his. "Alice," Roger began to say only he was caught short by a splotchy noise like water hitting the bottom of a bathtub only he realized quite quickly that this noise was his legs running out of his pajamas, in fact his whole body was making this noise.

And then, not even, well, in some way. Roger became orange juice and splashed against linoleum which would probably be sticky for weeks to come, even after Alice mopped up the mess. At least he wouldn't be forgotten: Roger knew right then that Alice would think about him every time she walked through the kitchen and her feet stuck to the floor, ever so slightly.

(c) 2006 Ben Rawluk, all rights reserved.

This is one of those stories you hear in a bar somewhere, a pub, maybe the Garrick's Head or Christie's. You probably don't hear it somewhere expensive, like the Penny Farthing; this is a cheap story, told over cheap beer on special, in plastic jugs dropped onto your table and splashing over, puddles of stout landing on your hand, soaking your napkin. This is a story told over onion rings dipped in mustard, as improbable as that may seem.

"Only, there was this girl," your buddy tells you as you sit down and you're pouring beer from the jug into two glasses. "No, wait, you're doing it wrong. There's going to be too much head." And your buddy grabs the jug and the glasses and finishes the job, because there's no reason to waste good beer, certainly not on a night like tonight and certainly not with a story like this. Allow him to pour the beer; he can be demanding, a know-it-all, sometimes it is best to let him have his way. He will pay for the next jug.

"What about this girl?" He probably means one of his ex-girlfriends, whichever, you can barely remember their names because they appear and disappear like museum-goers, like he's some painting to be examined, briefly. Either way, you've already had a beer and you want to hear this story. You want him to finish pouring so you can have some more and hear this story. "This isn't Karen, isn't it?" Because sometimes he tells the odd story about his cousin Karen, who lives halfway across the country and you quite liked, that one time you met her. She made excellent guacamole and smelled, strangely, of shallots.

"It's not Karen," says your buddy. "See, there was this girl and one day she woke up and yawned. Only money came out of her mouth." Oh, it's one of those stories, shit stories, really. Your buddy is known to tell them on occasion, when he's a bit tanked and talking shit. "It wasn't coins, it was paper - bills. She yawned and then there was something coming up and she thought she was going to puke, right, only it was a fifty dollar bill and then a twenty. She walked around the house half-starkers for an hour with her mouth closed but she could feel the money starting to pile up in her throat so she had to open it and then it rushed out all over the kitchen. The girl belched money!"

Tell your friend he's full of shit. Go on. Set your beer down in protest. The whole thing sounds like one of Scrooge McDuck's fever dreams.

"No, seriously!" He gulps at his beer idly, sets it down, and starts in again. "She didn't know what to do, she couldn't leave the house like that. Look, this girl, she studied economics in university. She was worried about what that would do to the economy. She was worried the cops would drag her in for counterfeiting. And she knew they'd try to interrogate her and more money would come out!"

Rack your brains to remember any ex-girlfriends he's ever had who might have been involved in money laundering. Give up, drink your beer, pour another. Try not to punch your buddy in the gut when he critiques your pouring technique yet again. Asshole. Ask, eventually, "So what happened to this girl? Did she ever find a cure?" Knowing this guy, she probably choked to death on her own daughter's eventual inheritance.

"Oh, she joined a travelling circus for a while. You know. Living the dream." Your bud smirks and reaches for his beer and finishes it off. "Last I heard, though, some mobster had her locked up in a basement in Switzerland. Or she became an astronaut and runs NASA on the down low. One of the two."

(c) 2006 Ben Rawluk, all rights reserved.

Inspired by and with tangible respect to Ali Smith's The Whole Story and Other Stories.

She mistakes the number 11, in very black ink on the lower lefthand corner of a righthand page, for an insect. A fly. She takes in the page number out of the bottom of her eye while she reads a particular sentence halfway up the page. Forget the sentence, the sentence isn't important, she's already forgotten the sentence and will have to read it again, much later, because she's convinced herself that there is a fly sitting on her opened book.

She doesn't particularly like flies, no. She isn't afraid of them but finds the whole idea of them a little sickening, regardless of their place in the ecosystem. She has trouble with flies - the buzzing. If there's a fly around her it will buzz, as flies do, and she can't stand the noise. In the corpse of summer she's been known to lie in bed, unable to sleep, because somehow a fly has made its way into her room and motors about like a winged Vespa, she's been known to lie there with her head on the pillow, a thin sheet pulled up to her collarbone, and eyes wide open with irritation. Because of a fly.

And no, the number 11 does not look that much like a fly, if we're to be honest, but she only saw it with peripheral vision and, besides, the ink is particularly dark and the font choice fat with possibility. So fat, in fact, that the number 11 stretches itself off of the page, having been discovered. She sits there, somewhat paralyzed, and watches as the number 11 unfurls wings and takes off the page. Indeed. Only to be followed by every other character on page 11 of this book that she's in the middle of - or at least, partway through the beginning.

And then page 10 goes. 9, 13, 14, and 8. Very quickly she is left with an empty book and a swarm of flies all around her, all throughout her apartment, settling by the dozens on top of the fruitbowl and lining the windows, both of them. They buzz in unison, hundreds of flies, and perhaps this is a little bit past rolled-up newspaper territory and into full-on fumigation. But in between the disgust - look, look, they're crawling all over the three fresh peaches she bought this morning, they've gotten into the grapes, they won't shut up - she remembers that this book is a library book and are they going to bill her for replacement because of this? The whole thing isn't her fault but there was that thing with the water damage that one time. There are no words left in the book, it's not like she's ripped pages out - they've gone blank, altogether.

Awkward going as she steps between clusters, around seething clouds of the little bugs, headed for the door. Ignore the flies sputtering in and out through the keyhole.

Oh, don't worry, this isn't one of those isolated incidents. This isn't just one book; every single copy of this book throughout the English-speaking world has done the same thing, belching its text into the world as a swarm of insects. An entymologist on the mainland was about to sit do with a cup of lukewarm orange pekoe tea when it happened to her; she was disappointed once she managed to isolate a specimen under a water glass, because it was only the common house fly and nothing more exotic.

(c) 2006 Ben Rawluk, all rights reserved.

1. My mission: four short story collections to be read one after the other/simultaneously/possibly backwards. I can't remember what any of them are, but they're in my bag at the moment and I'll be starting that this evening.

2. I finally have an idea for Joan of Arc. It requires other research on another famous figure which I shall try to do. Some question of word choice and diction will be present and needs to be addressed. Working title: "That's Why the Lady is a Saint." Accolades expected. Well, actually, I expect to write it, send it off, wait one year, and then receive a poorly written rejection letter. But I'll still write it.

3. Mental note: update address with phone company.

4. Dinner tonight: veggie stir fry with rice. Need to stop off and pick up some olice oil, soy sauce, maybe a nice teriyaki on the way home.