wildcat

Canada's Next Top Model was dull. I went over and watched it with Joy, Matt, and Steph tonight partly out of morbid curiousity and partly because I haven't really seen the three of them for a while. The show, shot on Vancouver Island, is stupid. It's not even an issue of the content, per se, but the quality of the show itself; the film quality is painful, the cinematography is trite, and the editing is decidedly amateur. The models are portrayed as vapid, vacuous, and emotionally stunted; but never in an intriguing, bloodsport, Colosseum sort of way. A hefty portion of the episode was shot in Plan B, a club that used to be called One Lounge. Less than a block from the gay bar. That was weird. I was left feeling rather embarassed in a self-effacing, Canadian fashion that Canada was being attached to the project.

Consequently, I'm going to lavish you with artwork by Adam Hughes, reasonably acclaimed "Good Girl" artist. Both images have been ganked from Adam's website, which is worth looking at. I have an odd relationship with Hughes's work, because I like it even though in some ways it epitomizes some of the problems with the comics industry; his highly idealized depictions of women always strike me as having an appropriately mythic content and air about them. He is primarily a cover artist these days, known for his work on Wonder Woman:

I absolutely love that cover, although there's something a bit weird with the shape of Wonder Woman's breast. This cover had some actual context within the comic itself, something about time-travel. The current trend is to have the cover be a pin-up with little connection to the story inside; I dislike pin-up covers mostly because they become so generic after a while and you can't actually tell the comics apart on first glance. I like the falsified aging to the paper that they've added.

And because I like good boy art, here's one of the X-Men, Nightcrawler:

Oddly, I think you could consider Nightcrawler to be one of my earliest boycrushes, because I used to absolutely adore him when I was young. I still quite like the character, although some fairly dubious things have been done with him. He's a wall-crawling, superhumanly agile pseudo-demon with three-fingered hands and blue fur. Not to mention the prehensile tail.

The astonishing variety of my unfinished stories. Quite often these are characterized as "aborted fetuses," or some equally cruel and horrible metaphor that implies blood, guts, and stillbirth. Either way, I should sit down and cordon off all the unfinished stories in some file folder marked "Unused," or "Primarily Imagined, only Partially Written." Maybe I should release a book of false starts, poor attempts, and deleted paragraphs. My stories have been a little unfocused since graduation, maybe I'm still adjusting to the absence of whip to buttock and deadlines. The unfinished stories pile up and it's hard to explain that I've already imagined most of them in their entirety, it's the transcribing, editing, revision, writing in a physical sense that goes nowhere. The Rapunzel story, for example, exists halfway in the world and mostly in my brain, and it exists from every angle and has development and it's run its course. It sits on a shelf in some Borgesian divine library with annotations and an index.

Sometimes it's an issue of boredom. I have some peculiar idea at least three times an hour, I have no time to write every single one of them down, and they get in the way of each other. They demand attention, they distract, they are selfish and irresponsible to each other. For a while, just after graduation, I spent a month or so working on a particular story and then moved onto another one. But then the momentum dissipated and I've ended up starting things and failing to finish them. Sometimes it's because I talk about them or I don't have enough time because of procrastination and work.

I think the big issue here is my own lack of discipline. I have had very good times where yes, I've been on the ball and disciplined and working. Writing: putting down text and working with it, polishing it, doing my job. Sure, there's the day job, but that isn't my job beyond necessity and let's speak of it no more. I like writing. I enjoy it. Why haven't I been doing it? Failure of drive, I suppose. So, to go along with the plans toward physical fitness - the bicycle, more athletic activity, the goal of getting rid of this pudgy middle section - I have to make my plans toward literary fitness, the completion of stories, the writing of poems, the constant use of my writing muscles.

Michael made some comment recently that he was concerned that all my good writing was going into my blog rather than being sent out for actual publication. His concern is valid, I suppose, but my goals toward writing are sporadic and segmented; maybe what I put in my blog isn't exactly what I write about when I want to be published (and when I'm failing to be published), maybe it is but I want to put it somewhere else, maybe I'm just bored and sad and tired of sending out submissions which are ignored completely or result in a slim rejection notice generated by a computer somewhere, claiming to be an editor. I've been pondering the importance of my blog in my daily writing routine and its significance, how it stands up against my serious (okay, maybe, publishable but never serious) fiction. Most of the bits of fiction that end up on the blog are written specifically for the blog, written in the little text editor screen, edited whether niggling haste.

I don't necessarily want to write about my day at work because most of my days at work are the same, and while I enjoy it, the library can't really extend beyond opening hours for my own sanity and for my audience's no doubt waning interest. There's a lot of things worth writing about in my life, hour-long conversations on the telephone about so-and-so's ex-boyfriend having hepatitis or such-and-such's drug debts from back in the day, the issue of moving whether it be fantasy life on Salt Spring or jetting off to Montreal to do whatever, politics, endless afternoons, whatever. Sometimes the blog is purely here to provide some written content on those days when the words are sputtering forth or I need to limber up the muscles for the bigger tasks, and sometimes the blog is goal enough for itself.

Superman has a fatal allergy to a radioactive space mineral, or he's a landed immigrant so assimilated that pieces of his homeland are his weakness. Green Lantern has a power ring that can do whatever he wants, but he's impotent to the colour yellow - his weakness is a sexual dysfunction and is we later learn, entirely psychological - yellow represents fear and anxiety.

But Wonder Woman and Zatanna? Their weaknesses are bondage and domination. They are defined not just by their gender but by their sex.

Princess Diana comes from a secret society of Ancient Greek warrior women, beloved of the gods and Diana in particular has been granted the power aspects of the major Greek Goddesses, allowing her to their representative in the Patriarch's World. But those powers are rendered useless when her wrists are bound by a man - she is debased and her strength leaves her. At times this has been an excuse for writers and artists to portray her in submissive situations, barely containing the sexual subtext to get it best the late Comics Code Authority. But the weakness to bondage is more intriguing than mere titillation and runs alongside the feminist underpinnings of Amazon society - she must be ever vigilant to maintain her freedom, independance, and super-power. Any false step could leave to slavery. It also reflects one of her own primary skills; Wonder Woman derives strength from the Earth itself, but also wields a magical lariat woven from the girdle of the Earth Goddess - a lasso so she can tie up other women, men, and bad guys to compell them to tell her the truth. She is a dominatrix who must be wary, because she doesn't want to be bound herself.

And you can't deny the sex, either; Superman is sexy as an extension of adolescent wish fulfillment but Wonder Woman's artistic origins start in her creator's sexual politics and his desire to be dominated by beautiful women. Wonder Woman is cool because she's a goddess, an integrated goddess, but often her sexuality is held in a state of subtext - no matter how close to the surface - and some creators recently have stated that she should be presented as a virgin which frustrates me because she is about sex as much as feminism, she's a pro-sex feminist with control and agency but apparently you're not supposed to show that. They've also said she's supposed to be straight, but that's just pathetic - island society of super-women. No men. No desire or need for men. Ha. Come on. I don't even mean it in a nudge-nudge-lesbians kind of way, I mean that they've evolved on their own and value the beauty of goddesses, the power of goddesses. These are not Zeus's other wives, these are Athena's warriors. They're not like the Norse Valkyries, who were beholden to Odin. They would be wholly bisexual if not outright lesbian.

Zatanna #1, art by Ryan Sook.

Zatanna is not merely my favourite super-heroine, she's my favourite super-hero, men and women both included. Partly this is for similar reasons to why I love She-Hulk; they both started out as a female counterparts to established male heroes, but they transcended the classification in a way that Batgirl and Supergirl never did. Zatanna is the daughter of World War II era magician hero Zatara, who performed miracles by speaking backwards. He was a stage magician with a top hat and tails, and his daughter didn't show up until he was long gone; she had a chance to establish herself as her own person.

Zatanna up on the billboard for Catwoman #50. Her power is performance.

Zatanna is extemely powerful and I love her for the weirdness of her magic but also for her image; while other heroes struggle with secret identities and try to make their lives work out of various fractured parts, Zatanna worked as a stage magician and saved lives on the side with no divide between them. Everybody knows who she is. She is sexy because she's a burlesque character, a performer, running around in fishnets to get the audience's attention and while she's saving the planet from being sucked down into a Black Hole or whatever. She likes to be sexy, she likes to perform, she stays up too late and has adventures. She sees no problems with any of this.

Her weakness is bondage, though. Again, like Wonder Woman, the political aspect makes sense - Wonder Woman is about being dominated, but Zatanna is about having a voice. If she lets somebody prevent her from speaking, she can't perform magic. Gag her, tape her mouth shut, silence her and Zatanna loses her power. She has to safeguard herself and her right to speak. A good portion of Zatanna's day to day problems come from her love life, the fact that she habitually dates the wrong men (she got involved with John Constantine for a time, for god's sake) or bad things happen to those men (She dated Doctor Thirteen for a while and accidentally got him incinerated during a seance), and she's always been defined as a very human character despite her power. She struggles to keep going when she's exhausted from touring, she uses her powers to support herself as she much as she uses them to help people. She's a fully integrated comic book character rather than trying to hide who she is or lie to those around her. I like Zatanna better than I like Wonder Woman because as sexy as Zatanna is, as ideal as her thighs might be - she is a woman in the mortal sense, she is a person and is allowed to be sexual on an overt, direct level. Even if she has problems doing so, they tend to be human problems.

(Cover to Zatanna #4; pencils by Ryan Sook, inks by Mick Gray)

I mentioned before that Zatanna Zatara is my favourite super-hero these days. Part of it is the fishnets and the top hat; you can't help but be captivated by the character, who recognizes the element of performance in superheroics (all the splashing colours and spandex) and successfully integrates both sides of her career -- Zee has no need for a secret identity.

But it's also Zatanna's connection to language. Her power is the Voice, the ability to perform magic by speaking. She's a personification of language right down to her very core. She spent years trying to track down the Liberii Zatarae, the four books of magic left behind by her father, Giovanni "John" Zatara. During a particularly large threat to the planet, she's led to believe that these four books will be a great weapon in the fight. But, after harrowing trials have left her lost and barely holding it together, she encounters her father's spirit and learns the truth: she's the books, in herself:

"The Book of Water is a kind heart. The Book of Earth is a graceful body. The Book of Air, a keen mind. The Book of Fire is strength of spirit."
-- Zatara, Zatanna #4 (written by Grant Morrison)

Periodically, changes have been made to her powers. Never to the language aspect, which plays so well into meta-commentary in comics about comics, but she has had her powers reduced to merely controlling the elements. I prefer Zee when she can do anything but mostly doesn't because it isn't as satisfying or because she honestly doesn't know how to articulate a particular desire. She once summoned the man of her dreams and ended up with a shapeshifting monster because she was having prophetic nightmares at the time; the guilt blocked her magic and Zatanna was forced to face him with a couple secondhand magical weapons and a top hat. That's it: no power of her own beside some basic self-defense skills. She defeated him through showmanship and experience.

(Cover to Klarion #4, by Frazer Irving)

Zatanna is all about performance; she is the spectacle of magic. By contrast, Klarion the Witch-Boy is the mystery, secrecy, and control.

Probably somewhere upstate of New York or miles away from Gotham City; deep underground, it's raining. Almost always.

They started out as puritans, the people of Limbo-Town, birthed beneath the Earth by ancestors too horrified by what they'd done to let their children out onto the grass, under the sky. And time went on and on, the sky a distant myth called "Blue Rafters," and the children of Limbo-Town grew. Each and every one of them was a witch by birth. Each citizen is bound to a familiar, like Klarion and his cat Teekl, who act as their second eyes and share something like a sibling bond.

Things were run, initially, by the Submissionaries, a horrible reflection of The Crucible's clergymen - the Submissionaries protect Limbo-Town and hand down edicts from the absentee witch-god Croatoan via their own blood on the iron pages of the Book of Shadows.

Only, there is something approaching progress and over time the people of Limbo-Town have pushed toward having a Witch-Man Parliament. The witch-women are, of course, not included in this, but generally there's an edge that they see the parliament as a bit short sighted. There's secrets that only the Witch-Women know.

And growing up, like Klarion or his sister Beulah? You get to look forward to having a family, toiling away like a good witch, and dying. After death, your family digs up your undead corpse and the Submissionaries bind you magically so that you spend the rest of your unlife working in the fields for them. Maybe if he's lucky, Klarion might get a chance to work as a Submissionary, but it's no work for a wild card and layabout like Klarion. Instead, much like Zatanna's quest for the knowledge of her father, Klarion goes in search of his own mysteriously exited father, heading up past where it's safe to find Blue Rafters. He hasn't had the chance to sin yet, and doesn't see any point to feeling guilty.

He started out as a villain in Jack Kirby's The Demon, about the rhyming, Arthurian demon Etrigan, who sometimes wanders about as an immortal human called Jason Blood. And then, more recently, Grant Morrison got ahold for Klarion for his Seven Soldiers project, with Zatanna; Klarion sits around in a witch-puritan purgatory and then leaves to seek his fortune, has weird adventures, with kid gangs and the Father of Limbo-Town, who is of course an evil sod and worth nothing. He nearly gets burned at the stake by his own mother. The whole thing reeks of Roald Dahl fornicating with Shirley Jackson during "The Lottery," with Charles Addams on art.

He heads up into Manhattan and I would dearly love the series to have a sequel, where Klarion and the remains of his family end up in the city for a kind of Amish in the City reality show, out of date, fiercely moral, and possessing dark prowess. Oh well, if I ever get to write comics for DC...

And to deliver this threat during a childish scuffle: "Would you like to know the exact date and hour of your death?" With creeping, witch-lit eyes.

Nina Simone is very close to my ear right now, singing of pirates against the piano.

The operation was a delicate one, but all parts worked (relatively) in time with each other. I woke Michael up just after 7:30 this morning, we hopped into the shower and got ready. His uncle took him up to campus and I stayed behind with his mum and granny, then got them packed up in a wheelchair-accessible taxi and the three of us went up. After some confusion between ushers we were seated with a good sight line and then off went the convocation for ninety minutes. Michael's uncle tried to take a picture of him in front of the chancellor, but some idiot desperate for a cigarette barrelled past at precisely the wrong moment.

I'm very proud of my man with his Bachelor of Science. We should go out and fight crime together; I'll bring my Bachelor of Fine Arts.

Afterward we went out for lunch at the Penny Farthing - once the family was safely home - and now he's having a nap. Probably drinks tonight with the associated ambassadors of various foreign lands. Dignitaries, cocktail in hand.

1. I enjoy putting spine labels onto library books far too much. Putting the labels on, then the mylar or the book tape. Ensuring perfect symmetry and smoothing out the mylar before it has the chance to be muddled by anything. The sort of odd pleasure that one might write a bad short story about. Halfway between kitchen sink and magic realism: "Ben really enjoyed putting spine labels onto library books..." Followed by a tawdry love story between obsessive neurotics that culminates in a sex scene amid stacks and stacks of shuddering, mewling books. There would be a tornado of filing cabinets, a hairline crack along the lens of some spectacles, and every person would have an ISBN. Actually, no, I'd write it in the second person, "Question, once in a while, why you enjoy putting spine labels onto library books so much. Quiver at your fingertips against sticky mylar. The glue holds onto the ghosts of your fingerprints..." Otherwise, continue as before.

2. A woman keeps her cheating husband shrunken and locked inside a glass jar, only he's begun to have an affair with Thumbellina using only semaphore and miniature carrier pigeons to run their love notes back and forth. Possibly, this story is snippets from the woman's diary, and may end with her stepping on Thumbellina in retaliation or simply running off with the Beanstalk giant.

3. Rapunzel goes into a hair salon in Devonshire, attended by several ladies-in-waiting who hold her blonde locks off the tawdry ground, and sits down in front of the mirror. Possibly, the hairdresser is Pan or one of those German fairy-tale Scissor Men who generally rush around cutting off freshly sucked thumbs. "Cut it all off," she says, and her ladies-in-waiting hold up the golden hair as if it were trays and trays of dessert. "I'm going to wash that man right outta my hair," she sings under her breath while the first, tentative snips are snapped. The ladies-in-waiting are only ever referred to as a singular group, although possibly one of them entertains notions of running off with Prince Charming herself and will end up on the outs with Rapunzel for seven years, seven days, and seven hours. Either Rapunzel gets a bob cut and falls in love with the Lady of Shallot, or she goes with a clean-shaven scalp and opens a publishing company in London.

4. Man walks into a bar only to realize he's misplaced twelve years of his life and is now below the legal drinking age. Gets thrown out on his ass by a burly bouncer named "Tiny" or something equally obvious. Ends up gatecrashing some high school party and gets drunk on watered down beer that his body can no longer handle; he passes out in the arms of some chess club geek and dreams about elephants on Wall Street, unable to remember his wife's name anymore.

The writing has been fruitful this weekend. My brain is fruiting: producing fruit.

The setting sun paints the white house next door a pale orange. Like the idea of tangerine.

We bought bicycles today, although they'll be at the shop until tomorrow for some basic maintenance and set-up. I'm having the wheels and seat bolted on to deter theft. I bought a lock. It was remarkably awkward at first to ride a bike again after so many years - ten? Twelve? But it was beginning to get better by the end.

I had brunch with Michael which was very sweet, and we went to the glass-blowing gallery afterward to watch them work for a bit. In between was the bicycles and ice cream with Steph. One three-egg omelette with feta cheese, mushrooms, and onions. Double-dark-chocolate-with-raspberries.

There is a shed out back with cement in it that's beginning to harden in its bag. "Keep it in here long enough and you'll end up with diamonds."

I brought home my new baby today. I sat around with Michael at Moka House while we waited for them to finish putting his bike together, and then I took off home on my new bicycle. Took about five minutes to coast between the shop and the Atwood. It's very exciting. I'm going to have to get used to the gears and Michael needs to stop laughing at how wobbly I am, but all this will come in time.

No name for the chariot as yet. I'm tempted to name it "Clara," after the Robin Skelton story about the bicycle, but that might not be original enough for me.

Sputtered home from Michael's house on the Epileptic Bicycle this morning. It took me about twenty minutes, but there was a lot of cursing involved; I'm still not used to riding in traffic and stress makes me swear. Like a sailor. I probably looked and sounded pretty strange out there on Oak Bay Avenue, some weird Potty-Mouthed Rider a-cussin' down the road. I should put on a mask and become an urban legend. I could get together and have adventures with that monk that lives somewhere on the edge of Fernwood.

Otherwise, I drifted in a malaise today; not quite ennui, more vague depression and feelings of detachment. In other words, I hadn't enough in the past two days, had a weird thing happen yesterday, didn't sleep much last night, and my internal chemistry was all out of wack. Terrible emotional states are sort of irritating when you can work out what the cause is. I had a sub sandwich with a ton of vegetables in it for dinner, and some iced tea. The whole thing wouldn't have been such a drag on me if I wasn't weighed down with sinus pressure and goo. I'm not actually a person; I'm a factory and vehicle for sentient mucus colonies who want to explore our world and interact with human beings.

And Michael clipped my hair last night, so I'm back to almost-bald. Brilliant. He puts up with a lot from me between the mood swings, weird sense of humour, constantly muttering about comic books, spoiling endings to movies, pestering him to read Hunter S. Thompson, declaring that I'm going to end up being Ian McKellen when I'm old, and my enjoyment of foods containing garlic. But he still clips my hair when I ask him to and doesn't kick me out of bed.

Tomorrow shall be a better day, even if I have to kill virgins and sacrifice them to a dark god to ensure it. I'm going to skip doing the mess of laundry and instead go grocery shopping because I have no food, followed by picking up the week's comic books and possibly a stop-over at a coffee shop for a ritual hot chocolate and comical book read-through. Sure, I work in the evening but it's only four hours and then I come home and dissolve into a puddle.

Time perception fluctuates, obviously, and stimulants duly (or unduly)
influence slash extract slash compress this effect further. Needless to
say: certain caffeinated beverages make me practically transdimensional. I
reposed in an expensive, no-good corporate brothel slash coffeehouse and
wrote slash twitched for an hour or so this afternoon after having Noodle
Box and gelatto with my good friend Jenny. The product has a fleeting
attraction for me but we'll see how long before I convince myself that it
is shite and needs to be put down.

Actually, I'm going to shut up about that now.

I am at work and everything is an inconvenience and I'm very caffeinated
and possibly my grasp of the English language (in particular: grammar) is
shaky and possibly beginning to lose an element we know and lot: the
comma. My pauses are becoming more and more sporadic. I expect to be
possessed slash overcome slash filled by slash with slash by the spirit of
Gertrude Stein at approximately eight thirty this evening. Michael will be
my Alice B. Toklas.

The alarm went off around eight and then we half-argued, half-asleep, about getting up and it took us about ten minutes which is something of a record: up we went, two of us, straggling and half-naked and pulling on things (for me: old green bathrobe, Arthur Dent style; for he: plaid pajama bottoms) and into the shower. Yes.

After that was the bus, a shopping bag with a dozen eggs and one block of cheddar cheese. For the purposes of brunching, at Steph's house. Joy showed up and Steph's friend A, with potatoes and strawberries respectively. Steph cooked, a vegetable scramble with zucchinis and such, with hashbrowns beside. Michael looked perplexed that I was eating my potatoes with a healthy gob of mayonnaise, which is very European, and he kept poking me when I went to put food in my mouth and was impish, with that look on his face, and we had lots of orange juice.

Some days just sound like "What I did on my summer vacation," by Ben aged seven and a half.

After that I took off for work and sat in the staff room after a ridiculous cloudburst of rain, soaking, reading Ann Patchett's The Magician's Assistant which is too beautiful to ignore and very well written, although I do occasionally find myself editing her sentences in my head. It is easy to find fault with the clause of another.

For my dinner break I went up to Mount Doug with Catherine and we discussed writing, which felt healthy and good and continued after we got back. She had a Thai noodle salad and I had a Greek pasta salad, and we had spinach-and-feta pies with Knudsen spritzers and nanaimo bars for dessert. We debated whether or not they actually originated up-island in Nanaimo, and whether or not Nanaimo was capable of producing such delights. The wind was extravagant, Big Bad Wolf, it huffed and puffed and made it hard to hear. It was like eating dinner at the edge of the world. The clouds were very Wagnerian.

And now I'm editing, and going to eat a cookie. The question of juice has also been raised.

I spent a couple hours writing something which was then crushed under the weight of logical error. This is not a waste: this is a first draft. I need to work on that thing I wrote the other day anyway, but this is a first draft and can be revisited later. I want to get this thing from the other and I want to type it out, polish it up, maybe expand on it. I don't know. It's something I would like to submit somewhere, but at the same time, the nature of the beast suggests that print media would be the wrong decision. I don't know. I'll pump it into word processor and see where I go.

I wonder. If I end up writing comics in the future I'd want to do a revamp on the old Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen series that DC once did; Jack Kirby was the artist on the old thing. I don't know. I want to write comics but the whole thing falls on its face because I haven't had an idea that specifically worked in my head as a comic script. Maybe the Jimmy Olsen ideas can be catalogued and banged out and scripted, on the down-low, in my rantbook, for future reference.

Finished up The Magician's Assistant, by Ann Patchett, which is very much a recommendation. It follows the life of Sabine, the assistant to her magician-husband Parsifal after he dies from an aneurism. I liked this book better than Bel Canto, my first exposure to Patchett - the focus on Sabine allows her to be fully fleshed out. It is not a perfect book by any stretch, and certainly the subject matter - burlesque Los Angeles magicians - is to my tastes. The novel is very sad, certainly, but there are so many threads going on underneath it. It uses the device of the dream quite effectively given how easily that can be misused, and has two layers of magic working at the same time. I felt genuine empathy with the characters and wanted to stop them at various points and suggest what they should actually do. I wanted them to have good lives.

My next plan is to read Isabel Allende's My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile, sitting in bed tonight.

I absolutely can not show Joy or Michael We3, a graphic novel by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. Which is too bad because the whole thing is an extravagant love letter to animal rights activism, but the depictions of violence and animal violence in particular might be too visual for them to handle. A dog, a cat, and a rabbit in government-built battlesuits. A dog, a cat, and a rabbit armed to the teeth and being pursued by men with guns who don't think they're worth much of anything. It's The Incredible Journey without anthropomorphism, although the animals do talk - just not in the way you expect. This comic is a perfect example of an idea that works with the form and flexes it's muscles - page layouts express changes in time-perception and that's just the start.

The cat, in particular, Tinker? Tinker is the stuff of nightmares:

(Line work by Frank Quitely; digital inks & colours by Jamie Grant)

Well, she does. Well, I'm listening to Marilyn Monroe sing, anyway, and she's urging me to pick any man at all as long as he's rich.

Anyway: tomorrow is Wednesday which means new comics are out on the stands, and there's a couple I'm looking forward to...

All-Star Superman #4 - Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, and Jamie Grant. "Mister Action" Jimmy Olsen in charge of a top-secret government genetic engineering P.R.O.J.E.C.T. for a day. I expect hilarity to ensue.

Wonder Woman: Destiny Calling - Book 4 of the trades collecting George Perez's revamp of Wonder Woman back in the late Eighties.

The Ultimates II #11 - Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's morally bankrupt, Republican stooge satire super-team with their hopeless trapped in the Forties Captain America. Half the time I can't decide if I like this or not, the irony is at times too thick and the action is too widescreen to allow for much character development, but I'll flip through it and make a final decision.

That's about it. I might pull the Tony Harris-drawn Liberty File trade as well, which reimagines the World War II DC characters as secret agent pulp heroes...

I had a brainwave about how to use that thing I wrote while all amped up on caffeine last week. I'll work on it tonight after work, around 11pm when the first muse opens his mouth in my head and stirs me to action. This is going to have to work in multiple pieces and it's going to take a while, but I have to get myself back into the routine and working later in the day means I can (a) get up later and (b) go to bed later, having worked enough at the time of the night when I'm most inclined.

I have no idea if any of that parses.

Occasionally I end up with scraps of things that I've written, maybe some free-floating characters, a title, snippets of dialogue or description or a scene in my head with little to flow around it. Think of all this as kindling, and then someone lights up a spark and potentially we've got a fire. I've never been good with fire but occasionally it works and I don't burn my fingers.

The scary thing is that I may actually have to plot this thing out first.

Strange to think that Anne Sexton was a model for a time during the Forties. In Boston. I wonder if any of the images still exist somewhere, like "Glamour Shots of Future Poets," something.

Her birthday is one day after mine.

I think I'll read her book Love Poems today.

BibliOdyssey: Zoomorphic Calligraphy

"This new mode was not a matter of script metamorphosing into living forms which are also readable letters, but of using script to delineate such forms. Seldom had the flexibility of the Arabic alphabet been so tested."
-- Jila Peacock, from the introduction to Ten Poems for Hafez.

The peacock example from the 17th Century is particularly good, and the inscription slides well into one's brain. The zebra or horse at the top is probably my favourite image, though. Would one classify this as a form of concrete poetry? I'm not sure. Someone once told me in a workshop that concrete poetry was dead, but we all know what Mark Twain said about death.

I think I fell in love Jimmy Olsen a little bit somewhere around page 11 when he takes off his moon-googles and stands there, wide-eyed, with a cone of styled red hair and his borrowed Wonka-jacket, while Superman begins to go apeshit evil after exposure to Black Kryptonite accidentally mined from the Underverse. All-Star Superman #4, "The Superman / Olsen War," was wild fun and and a bit madcap. Perfect, mostly.

It made me a little bit frustrated that Jimmy got to really participate in his adventure while Lois Lane's outing as Superwoman in #3 - where she had actual super-powers, albeit briefly - she was mostly relegated to be the observer and damsel on her own birthday while Samson and Atlas did battle with Superman for the honour of having a date with her. I was disappointed with that story because Lois didn't get enough to do physically, even though the emotional territory Morrison has been staking out with her has been superb - after years of constantly being disproved whenever she tried to find evidence that Clark and Superman were the same person, she can't handle when he reveals that he actually is. I actually quite liked #3, but Lois not getting to save the day while Superman struggles with his super-midlife-crisis seemed like a wasted opportunity.

But back to Jimmy. Jimmy is fabulous. Perry White sums it up for us:

PERRY: "...I have to hand it to you, Olsen. Half the guys in the country hate you, the other half wanna be you. And let's not forget the half that wants to date you."

JIMMY: "That's three halfs [sic], chief. And so far they're all guys."

Morrison & Quitely bring in the full range of weird psychosexual undertones straight out of the Silver Age and always with a straight face that both persuades and dissuades the audience - sure they're there, but who cares? Even when Jimmy, freshly naked and reverting from his latest transformation, cradles the stricken Superman in his arms, screaming that nobody can see Big Blue like this - sure, it's homosocial and homoerotic but it's also just a guy who's holding onto his best friend through a very bad moment and hey! They're new age guys who can admit they love each other.

And, you know, at the same time, Jimmy manages to rescue himself from a potentially dodgy situation with his girlfriend leaving him for "Rock Hansom, the space pilot" wasting millions of dollars in military budget on a message of love for her and saving the day.

Jimmy is frenetic, jumping from idea to idea with the passing wind - "Wow! I can't decide who I am from one day to the next," he declares when confronted by the P.R.O.J.E.C.T.'s genetically engineered "g-types," each one designed to have a specialization and specific social role. Today he's the director of the P.R.O.J.E.C.T., yesterday he was "down and out in Medieval England," tomorrow he might end up as a gangster's moll (again). But searching for an identity isn't turned into a dismal, brooding struggle, no, it's fun! Hilarious! Every day is a ball for Jimmy Olsen, cub reporter for the Daily Planet. And that's fine by me.

I woke up this morning with a beautiful man and then spent the afternoon on the beach with a couple of beautiful women. And a fudgesicle. People were playing volleyball, there were dogs. Too much sun. I feel a bit burnt out, cells afizzle. Lit up; burning. I've got the window open and it sounds like the gulls are battling outside.

The media player is pumping out Morrisey, Moby, and Elliot Smith. One of those days.

I should unholster my poetry gun from the hiding place at the back of the closet and fire it off; sentence fragments with cheap line breaks for easy enjambment raining down on everything. I never understood people who fire guns directly into the air; what if gravity kicks back in and you have bullets accelerating toward you from above? Manna from Heaven into ammunition from Heaven.

Anyway: cock the gun, press the trigger, release streaming poems into the atmosphere at 180 miles an hour. What's the speed of poetry? What happens if you achieve superpoetic speeds? Is there a poetic boom (concrete poetry radiating outward in all directions, rendering prose enjambed)?

Bang bang, that awful sound. Bang bang, my baby shot me down.

Where is the appropriate place to keep your poetry gun? On a hat rack? Under the stairs? I seem to recall that poem I wrote - the "Renegade Poet's Manifesto" - had it hiding out in the vegetable crisper of a fridge.

Well, I just finished pumping out a first draft. Seven pages. Not particularly marvellous, but well - no first draft ever is. All the basic ideas are in there. The problem seems to be (primarily) a lack of specific scene. We're drawn to seven places at once. If I focus on a particular present moment and hold it there as a base, I can delve into memories and dip into the past as needed.

The question is: do I go with the common spelling or do I favour the one closest to the original Hebrew?

I've started Draft #2 and I'm trying to avoid naming names. I don't know if that's wise. We'll see when someone reads the damn thing.

"Ouy lliw etirw ruoy dnoces tfard."

No, seriously, I need some motivation. And I'm overrun with other ideas, as usual. I need to have a fucking notebook with me twenty-four hours a day, even when I'm at work. Stupid muses.