wildcat

All the lousy bums
coming in, drumming
on their hum-drum-drums,
or that low-like whistle they give,
in the background, from the rear,
when they know you ain't looking
but that you can hear, those bums
with candy corn stuck in their teeth
and ready to give wallops as they please.

While firing a podcast of Definitely Not the Opera from a CBC electron-gun directly into my brain, I futz about with various pieces and baubles of the novel, which sits in a state of half-finished first-draftness. I wrote and rewrote a paragraph over the past couple days but otherwise I haven't really produced anything, mostly because Real Life continues to intrude, which isn't a terribly good excuse as they go but it certain has some weight. This is my task for tonight: start work on the second part. This is still the first draft but I'm writing the second part with the second draft in mind, having some ideas about what I want to do with the story.

It still doesn't have a title. Maybe "Nameless" would do, but probably not. I can't quite visualize it as a complete novel with cover and cover art and such. "Luanne" is what the file's called.

Naming things is weird.

Well, actually,
I did the dishes.
And I ate.
And I did the dishes.
And then there was Frank and he said: "Yes, sir."
And I said "Sir."
And I didn't drink champagne but I could have.
If I had any.
And I ran out of zen bullets.
And the apartment was clean.
And then I said: "Huh."
I fixed a comma that was supposed to be a period.
And I started again.

Possibly, I am a monster, and this should in no way be seen as procrastination (this is a lie).

1. Frank O'Hara

Pictured here on the left with John Ashbury, who is an all-right bloke on his own but probably couldn't get away with argyle socks like Mister O'Hara over there. He's smoking hot. Also: "She wipes herself off and walks, smiling, back to her/ hotel. She is pale and the wind frees her hair,/ full of cries and smoke and bloody medicines. The/ lift is very old and open as it sags to her floor./ Inside her room she switches on the fan and wipes/ her wig off, dark, dark, the glamorous insurgence/ of pain and a feeling/ almost, of defeat." (from "Aggression.")

2. Anne Sexton

I mean, look at that! All poets should be required to have legs like that. This is how I imagine Joy will age. I looked about for that book of love poems I have by her but it seems to have gone missing. Probably ran off to Cancun with some torrid little Pablo Neruda number. And you know, the kiss: "My mouth blooms like a cut./ I've been wronged all year, tedious/ nights, nothing but rough elbows in them/ and delicate boxes calling crybaby/ crybaby, you fool!" (from "The Kiss.")

3. Arthur Rimbaud

Okay, admittedly he's rocking the "teen heartthrob" vibe a little too much and trying to, you know, out-James-Dean James Dean, except with fewer drag races and more gun-running, and I've pointedly avoided seeing the biopic they made way back with Leonardo DiCaprio so as not to contaminate my brain, but. But. But. "I should have my hell for anger, my hell for pride,-- and the hell of laziness; a symphony of hells." (from "A Season in Hell") What a drama queen.

4. Louise Glück

Wow! Just wow. Looking like that it'd be hard not to use a vanity shot for your book cover. The woman was, apparently, designed for author photos. The tinge of longing and sexful despair. That forehead. "Think of the body's loneliness./ At night pacing the sheared field,/ its shadow buckled tightly around./ Such a long journey./ And already the remote, trembling lights of the village/ not pausing for it as they scan the rows./ How far away they seem,/ the wooden doors, the bread and milk/ laid like weights upon the table." (from "The Garden")

5. Federico Garcia Lorca

Possibly, it's the talk of lobsters falling on heads and the unexpected death caused. Garcia Lorca - Allen Ginsberg cruised him in a supermarket, once - is the kind of poet you end up with on a drunken night and have awkward and highly entertaining sex. Afterwards, there's always this unsettling tension between you, especially when he wears that tie and you can remember in a rush the sexual frenzy the pair of you were driven into, and dear Federico manages to slip in all kind of bitter comments about that night you had. He thought Dali hated him and that Un Chien Andalou was a vicious attack. "The still pool of your mouth/ under a thicket of kisses."

6. Diane Di Prima

Diane totally reminds me of Debra Winger playing Drusilla slash Wonder Girl on Lynda Carter's Wonder Woman. Those sandals? Total Amazon gear. Continues the Sexton Tradition of Sexy Poet Legs. Didn't she date Ginsberg during his "institutional heterosexuality" period? Or was that somebody else? I can't remember, but Diane's got that expert toe-tilt going on, knows exactly how to hold her legs while she's up there in front of the audience with her poems because mystique is part of a poet's sensual arsenal. "You are my bread/ and the hairline noise/ of my bones/ you are almost/ the sea..."

7. William Carlos Williams

William here has a good grasp on the suit, and the importance of being dapper. He's probably want to do it standing up, regardless of the red wheelbarrow over there which could be perfect, because he's an imagist and doesn't really want to interfere with the image. That said, he's an imagist and an objectivist at the same time. You know: multiple positions held at the same time, in a sexy way. I'm not a fan of Ayn Rand and Objectivism, but William's so very, very pretty. He's like a couth version of Rimbaud, and I imagine he talks a lot while making love. Tight, terse statements, but talking nonetheless-- "I have eaten/ the plums/ that were in/ the icebox/ and which/ you were probably/ saving/ for breakfast/ Forgive me/ they were delicious/ so sweet/ and so cold"

8. Kathy Acker

Fuck me! It's all hyperporn with Kathy, oh yes, it's all transforming sex romps. Mega-sex and mega-death, she can fire off every single forbidden, dirty little thought you might have back at you as sex-bullets. She's that foxy poet you want but you can't have, mostly because how would you even bring it up? Where do you begin? Kathy's sexy because of the questions and the crush would be unbearable, but she'd have to make the first move. And you'd be waiting, oh so willing, until she feels like it. She's scary for some boys because she can make you a girl - not cut off your dick, castrate you, fuck you with your own phallus - but whisper until you're a girl and you like it and there's something deeper and dirtier than plain genderfuck. She did it to Toulouse Lautrec and she'll do it to you. "I have to decide whether I'm an SLA agent or a woman transvestite who's wildly in love with the most gorgeous fag in town."

Twenty to five (ish) and I'm about to start work and the day's already been pretty busy.

1. 7:55 - wake up, shower, tuck Michael back into bed and reset his alarm.

2. 8:30 - board bus while listening to Sook-Yin Lee talk about manifestos on a Definitely Not the Opera podcast. Question Lee's skill as an host in comparison with Nora Jones a few years back. Look favourably on Jones, less favourably on Lee -- her chosen persona seems too superficial and glossy.

3. 9:00 - get to Moka House, contemplate why exactly I'm at Moka House, order a hot chocolate and spend an hour or so writing bits for the novel which will probably end up dumped in the long run.

4. 10:00 - Jenny arrives, we head out to Dallas Road for a good long walk in the brisk Autumnal air. We sit for a while on a bench and stare at a lighthouse we've never noticed before.

5. 11:25 - End up at Cafe Mulatta and eat lunch.

6. 12:30 - Part ways, I head home while listening to the Veronica Mars soundtrack. Some good, poppish tracks and a couple less interesting ones. Tegan & Sara continue to impress with their vocals (but, sadly, not their lyrics).

7. 12:45 - Take a couple loads of laundry over to the Sparklebright Laundromat and dump them into machines for cleaning. Write a letter to Joy while I sit on a big plastic counter thing, legs crossed, observing the various ins-and-outs of laundromat customers. There are no children fidgeting with the change machine. There are no children. Finish the letter, stare at the dryer until it stops, load up everything and take it home with Sarah McLachlan.

8. 2:35 - Once I'm home again, dump the laundry, sort it, shove reading materials back into my backpack, make sure the pen's there too, sit on my ass and stare at the screen for a while, fingers flying. No writing is accomplished.

9. 3:56 - Chug out to the bus stop in time for the #6 with Annie Lennox followed by Basement Jaxx. Then Handsome Boy Modelling School. The bus is crowded, slow, disjointed, with the usual assortment of smells and poorly-lit ambience. Michael calls, I miss it, I text him that I'll call him back; he was supposed to go shopping with his mother today. The bridge is down, things go smoothly.

10. 4:30 - Arrive at work early, leave a message on Michael's voicemail, decide to write pointlessly detailed blog entry accounting my day, answer work phone on my own time, massage my neck, consider the next four hours, the fact that I haven't had time to buy groceries this week, et cetera. No music, just the roiling murmur of library patrons.

1. Frank Sinatra walks into a nightspot in Vegas, maybe over by the Bellagio, probably just off the set of Ocean's Eleven and in desperate neat of a nice, well-put-together martini. And a pretty girl. He sits down at the bar and jaws with the bartender for a while until this looker comes in looking like a showgirl from the Crusades; Joan of Arc sidles up for some water and a crust of bread and Frank naturally tries to put the moves on her. Especially when he finds out she's a French chick! Joan talks about her boyfriend, God, too much and doesn't appreciate Frank's impertinence. Frank spends a good five minutes wondering what his buddy Dean would do. Ends with a jazzy dance tune as the credits roll and Joan walks in silhouette through Vegas, against those lights, with a bouffant hairdo and her head down.

2. Guy ends up possessed by the disembodied spirit of a serial killer named the Finger-Snatcher, who forces him to perpetrate further crimes with precise attention paid to style, because she's got a reputation to uphold and doesn't want him to be written off as a copycat. Eventually they reach an understanding and end up living as a kind of odd couple in a little apartment in Ohio, bickering all the time. She causes all kinds of trouble when his parents come to visit, you can be sure!

3. Lonely baker sits in the bakery at five in the morning, preparing the loaves of bread and cakes for the day, only he accidentally falls madly in love with one of his own birthday cakes. Some mildly disturbing scenes of frosting debauchery; the whole things is lamented by the critics as a "Tawdry Remake of American Pie as French farce."

I wanted to talk about James Bond, because we went to see Casino Royale last night, but I'm proving to have a big writer's block about it and I'm not sure what to say. I enjoyed it, big thumbs up, but in last act the plot becomes decidedly predictable and many of the plot twists were telegraphed. The opening and the first half in general is where the best stuff lies, with Daniel Craig's James Bond as a government thug trying to construct a suitably flexible persona to compartmentalize his own brutish tendencies.

Maybe more later, but for now, here's a Doom Patrol cover by Jamie Hewlett:

The Brotherhood of Dada, mark 2. The fifth volume of Doom Patrol reprints is scheduled for January 3 and I'm eager with anticipation.

Let me speak now, once and for all, against the horrors of the Backspace Key. So innocent and beautiful, you think, with the promise of reduction - less clutter, fewer words, unwieldy syllables removed before they grow and, perhaps, spawn trouble. Syllables cluster together, they spore, they usually carry with them a bassline and a fucking rhythm section. BUT DO NOT BE FOOLED. The Backspace offers absolution from the sin of production, construction, creation, inflation (like the cock, baby, or vaginal fluids flowing on, on, on to facilitate production), the Backspace will take away those pages before you have to look at them again. Select all and click. Backspace.

I speak out against the Backspace: less is not more. More is more. Less is something else. The Backspace Key should be registered with the government and allowed after a nine day waiting period (between writing and revision) because it's a murder weapon first and foremost. It murders entire days of work; spend a day writing ten or twenty pages and what does it do? It takes them away from you. You don't get to show anybody the beautiful work you produced, you can't justify your lifestyle if all you've got is a blank Word document with the underline icon clicked for the purposes of a title.

(Cover art for the tradepaperback by Mike Mignola)

This week, on a whim, I picked up the ten-buck (cheap!) first collection of Pat McEown and Mike Mignola's Zombie World comic book, "Champion of the Worms." At the time, it was very much a random purchase but geez! How thrilling! How gorgeous! How fun and entertaining and well-written in a world where comic book singles are devoid of momentum. Stuff happens! Bad stuff, too, gross icky stuff like primordial tree monsters being grown from the fat, sweating bodies of museum curators.

I didn't expect the ending at all, was surprised, and then realized: there will be more. Or there is more, probably, at least one more trade available for me to track on down. It unsettles, actually, and the tone is so wildly out of sync with the clean-lined Tintin-esque artwork provided by McEown that it adds a decent extra layer. The characters seem, initially, to be stock adventure strip characters but they show potential for some growth in their adventures ahead. It was fun but it didn't feel quite like fluff. I felt like I had spent my time wisely in reading this comic, which is becoming increasingly rare.

Like most weird and senseless writers, I am an avid consumer of the "foreword" and "afterword" sections of books. I'm a sicko, obsessed with them, as they offer seeds of information about the background process to the creation of the item of art in question. Pat McEown wrote the foreword in this case and reveals how he met Mignola in Victoria, BC and was suitably strange to read at nine in the morning while I hung around downtown, reading and writing. Mignola's afterword was less satisfying, revealing as it does that he more or less tossed off the concept of Zombie World without expecting to do anything with it, and that the whole thing was ultimately McEown's baby, ultimately - Mignola does the plotting, or did for the story in this particular volume.

Altogether a good buy and my god did the ending unsettle me...

Mostly the foot is kept on the floor
and the floor is kept on the ground
and the ground, well, it doesn't stay still at all
and the apartment is a crumpled paper, or
there are too many things inside. Inside:
contents, ingredients, prognostications,
lamps (there is a startling amount of light),
containers, words, words, words, words,
radio, my mouth is open and my foot is on the ground,
toes curled under, under. There may be a tricycle.

Finishing up watching Mike Mills's Thumbsucker, another in the increasing genre of films about waifish boys with long hair undergoing Coming-of-Age rituals against a muted colour scheme while everybody delivers their lines with muted emotion and oddly detached camera work. Well, the genre's a bit more than that, but it includes things like Junebug and A Whole New Thing and even Little Miss Sunshine. They feel, on the whole, like someone watched the entire run of Wes Anderson's movies but didn't pick up on his desperate flourishes of Tableau or High Artifice.

Okay, maybe "Faux Indie Flick" works better. You want to believe it's independent but really Sony Pictures made it and Keanu Reeves wanders around delivering painfully satirized dollops of "zen wisdom" and indie pop plays in the background.

I like a few of these films. Little Miss Sunshine obviously, was highly enjoyable and managed to get out from under the potential meteor strike by being thoroughly antic in places. Junebug focuses on a big city woman unable to connect with her new husband's family on any kind of a real level, and it had some fairly solid acting and decent cinematography; it had an interesting effect of all these characters operating inside their own worlds which can not in any way connect, try as they do.

Thumbsucker's okay. I'm not sure why they continue to cast Vincent D'Onfrio and Vince Vaughn in the same movies, given that they appear to be parallel universe dopplegangers of each other. The movie failed to evoke the complexity of the Little Miss Sunshine characters and Justin came across as a bit two-dimensional at times, as much as they tried to flesh him out - he was a boring Max Fischer without any depth. "In my professional opinion," states Vaughn's debate teacher character, "You've become a monster." And Justin is, yes, he's a monster, an insufferable boy who is, of course, just deep down longing for something, as we all are, only I couldn't bring myself to care about whatever he was longing for. The movie trumps Little Miss, though, by actively giving Tilda Swinton's mother character depth, personality, and a fleshed out character that were denied to Toni Colette's character in LMS. Justin's female counterpart, Rebecca, his on-and-off stoner girlfriend seemed like a poor substitute for Jena Malone who offered only the blank-faced equivalent of chemistry with Justin (or, perhaps, it was the other way round). The movie was all right but it didn't move mountains. The tropes were a little tired - Vincent D'Onfrio as the football hero who broke his leg and could never play again, unable to connect with his waifish intellectual son who is clearly smarter than he is. The neglected little brother who's just a dickhead because no one will actually pay attention to him for very long and occasionally we even forget that Justin has a brother, between scenes.

Rocking to my 64 Crazy Janes playlist with a hoodie on, hood drawn, trawling the interspaces for story ideas. I need a couple rapid fire little buggers to start up my brain for a couple hours, later tonight. Furthermore, I have to be a human being connected to physical concerns, primarily the sink full of dishes, which must be washed. Including the pan, cutting board, et cetera.

Oh, Liza Radley - the way you hop through loneliness like it was a hula-hoop. You're a lion, girl. You're a lion.

Please note that Tara has a bopping new baby bloggy, certainly barely out of the womb but spanking, yes, it is spanking.

I need to throw together more weird playlists.

Well, it's two in the afternoon and what have I accomplished? A big fat zip-zero. I successfully cooked and fed myself. Wow, I'm a credit to my species. I have, yes, successfully mastered the art of boiling noodles. I have not, in the hours since I grimaced at the world and pulled myself out of bed, engineered dalmatian mice or won a tennis match or written ten hit plays. I haven't faked a terminal illness today.

Fucking Tenenbaums.

I'm going to put on pants now, and I'm going to collect my things and wander out to acquire other food that other people make for me (because I'm taxed or something) while I sit around scribbling poems before I find a bus to take me to the Outlands to work for four hours.

God, I feel like Eli Cash today. It's all going to be press conferences and people questioning me about my failure of a first novel and me getting up and walking out of interviews for no reason.

1. For fuck's sake, it doesn't matter if I start in present tense or past tense, I always end up staggering into the other tense halfway through and then I've got to go back over each-and-every sentence to make sure it all parses as being in the same fucking time frame, or the proper one or whatever. There's been a break in the continuum.

2. Why is that if I try to write my character when she's, oh, eighteen - which used to be pretty easy when I was writing this character - it doesn't click anymore? And why does it click when I write her in her forties when she's all exhausted and bitter?

3. It's weird to write characters from different stories into things, and they don't quite match up but it's like a parallel world version of them or some shit. Or it is, almost explicitly, just that.

4. Joy isn't here to play the damnable quotes game with even if Matt always got mad at us when we did play it in front of him, which was sort of endearing.

Screaming children, painful Christmas music, monkeys hanging from the rafters and flinging - yes - poo. You know. Average day. I spent an hour before work in a coffee shop working on a bible rather than doing anything, you know, objectively useful. Basic plotting and character design work so that I have some concrete things to put into the story when I get to the actual writing. Too much functional, high pressure, work/social/family stuff at the moment, feeling a bit strained and in need of some sit-down-shut-up artistic time. Don't know when that will be. New Years Objective: more words.

Worked on the bible over lunch - listing off swathes of characters, chucking in notes (the ee cummings "birthproof safetysuits" made it in, possibly I'll get around to using it) and trying to build up the backstories. Threw together some plotting and basic arc type things but I need to be a bit more macro about that. Worked out a recurring thematic thing. Thing thing thing, it's all things. I looked up some images of the old Barbarella comic book (French), the one that inspired the movie, I might throw up some images in a few days when I'm actually at home on my own machine.

...girl geniuses with high-end diplomatic skills brokering deals with alien neurosurgeons to enhance their own brains...acquiring ultra-intelligence and designing strange technologies as a result...monsters. Spies or super-heroes or a mixture of both. Lots of neon colouring. I still haven't fully tackled the issue of the Setting -- I've invented a city but it is, as yet, still fairly barren in my mind beyond some place called Promethean Avenue. I like that street name.

Is Scarlett Johanssen the new Woody Allen It-Girl? Scoop just rustled past me over the course of work.

It's sort of tempting to acquire some wiki software for my machine so I can coordinate all the story notes and crossreference character biographies...

Grabbed CDs off the shelf at work for the Beatles, Petula Clark, David Bowie, Eartha Kitt, the Animals, and Bush (of all things) to fire in the cold and sexy recesses of the iPod and make strange playlist soundtracks with.

Is it acceptable to end a sentence with "with?"

Pirates of the Carribean 1 - good characters and acting, but the script was lamely appalling in some places and seriously - SPOILERS...

Last night, Michael and I ended up watching the second Pirates of the Carribean flick, Dead Man's Chest. It pretty much said the same things to me that the first one did. Jack Sparrow (Captain Jack Sparrow) is a conniving ne'er-do-well. Elizabeth Swan is a two-fisted woman who's supposed to be a lady, only she isn't very good at that because she's too busy trying to save the man she loves and she has a habit for breaking out of prisons. Will Turner is a pretty boy who ultimately serves as Sparrow's foil because he's so damned honest and hard-working. I like the characters. I liked the witch that Sparrow has had past dealings with, I liked the Abbot & Costello formerly undead bad pirates, I liked the Davy Jones mythology. But the movie? Too long, badly paced, and you can tell that they were doing the third movie at the same time, probably, because of how it ends. I find it so strange that I really like the characters but can't stand the story's structure...

Moderately more difficult than the first sentence is the second sentence.

The first sentence slips right out, more often than not. There's usually too many commas in mine, I like my first sentences to dribble and stumble and stop-start. A first sentence should be a telegram from the Front and as such awkward and preciptating disaster. A good first sentence has some whiff of catastrophe, and nothing says catastrophe like unbridled punctuation, although I'm trying to cut down on my colons and semi-colons and em-dashes spittle forth mostly because of that distant memory of Jack Kerouac (even though I'm a bit done with J.K., my dashes have never been the same) and then it all runs out and you're left with a period, dolloped on the end to suggest the dead stop of a car crash.

But where does that leave second sentence? How does one go on when one's words lie about, bones bleaching in the sun and meat hung from split carburators and flies around that spoiled spoiler? If you start the engine at this point all that spilled gasoline is going to go right up, and anyway, you can't really leave the scene of an accident like that, all those bodies in shocking positions and oh god, there's Jim face up in the ditch, head about a hundred yards from his body. Can you leave Jim like that? The second sentence ends up as this shuffle away from ground zero, trying not to look involved while the police and ambulances and fire engines roar past and the words are all bruised and probably in need of a trip to the hospital.

The second sentence starts with a soft footstep, although if you're allowing yourself a modern flourish you can get away with a sentence fragment. Soft footstep followed by a slightly jaunty gait, then dead on running to get from that damned crash site with haste, oh yes, with haste and possibly without looking back because there's going to be some extremely well trained professionals who might notice you leaving the scene you've just caused.

Made packages for Joy and Matt, mostly, I just have a couple more bits and bobs to compile and arrange and stuff inside. I have no idea how much they will cost to send, but life! Hilarious. I'm probably going to nip (nip!) down to the market in a minute for the purpose of buying dinner things. You know: food. Feed a body, brain, higher states of consciousness kind of thing. So: go forth and buy produce, return, construct meal and feed self, then pour over the last pieces to assemble the puzzles for my wayward children. They sing karaoke! I don't sing karaoke, but that's probably a good thing, and if I did it would probably be considered against the Geneva convention.

I swear, no matter how it sounds, I am not drunk, just a little looney-tunes from too much sugar and physical exertion. Work, work, work. I need to build myself a robot duplicate so that I could get things done.

(Cover art by Duncan Fegredo)

I swear that's what my apartment looks like, only with fewer clocks. Smoking books. They're watching The Pink Panther downstairs, the familiar bass is pouring up through the floorboards. It's been a day. There's definitely been a day's worth of time passed by.

I sat and worked on the character bible this morning for a while. I seem to be focused more on the antagonists at the moment, the villains, the wretches unfit for human society. There's one whose face has been worn away by makeup until she HAS NO FACE but the one she makes for herself. And some sort of insect thing. I don't know. Eartha Kitt's "I wanna be Evil" was playing at that point...