A War Poem

This tree is fed
by the brain of a boy
who never saw the bullet.

He wasn’t bright, but
even his untutored, patriotic gray mass
could bloom flowers on this cherry tree.

-09/xx/09

The Happy Couple

Here is a photo of Office star Jenna Fischer and her husband, James Gunn, at the 2006 premiere of his film Slither.

Shockingly, they split in 2007.

-

If someone wants to make a blog which collects photos of couples just prior to their divorce, it could be bigger than What White People Like.

Clouds

I just “finished” my first full-length book, weighing in at 117,527. I say “finished” because there’s no accompanying sense of accomplishment – maybe because I know how much editing needs to be done. But, I got to the End and there’s something to be said for completion. So here’s a word cloud for Stones from Heaven, and another one for this year’s Nano, as a comparison.

Stones From Heaven

Snow in the Desert

Not much overlap, though clearly I overuse “eyes.” What? They’re the window to the soul.

Nano 08, Post Mortem

Nano 08 is done, and all over the world writers are sitting back, taking stock of what they just wrote, and wondering: was that any good? That kind of reflection is indulgent right now in the terrifying atmosphere you get in the last three weeks of a semester, where If You’re Awake, You’re Working, but here’s some data about the November push.

I’m a big fan of stats. As much as I respect words, sometimes a set of X and Y values can say it better. With that in mind, a set of charts:

Stats for this blog. Notice the leap in the November weeks. As for the months readout, my previous best month (August, when I was maybe the only person recapping JFC) is eclipsed by November.

The thirty days of November. I stayed consistent for the first three week, building a nice lead, which allowed me to overcome the 218 day. Finished with a 3000+ word day, which is a record

My writing year so far. This starts May 10, so you can see my work over the summer - the empty stretches are due to vacations. See how the average starts to decline around day 109? That's when school started. In this chart, Nov. looks like Himalayas, Day 21 crevasse and all. I closed the month with a Sears Tower type spike.

Honestly, some days these graphs are what gets me to the keyboard. I hate those valleys. Now with Nano behind me, it’s all about getting to the quarter million mark; so I’ll go do that.

Braid

Videogames have reached the postmodern era. Jonathan Blow’s Braid is an artgame hiding in a Mario shell. Much has been made of the puzzler/platformer’s bold time-manipulating mechanics, as well as a rewarding storyline. While the game mechanics might be a treat, this critical darling isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be.

Yes, it’s impossible to die. With a simple press of the X button, the protagonist, Tim, will travel back in time, so no matter how many fireballs you take to the face or how many carnivorous plants chomp you, you can always do it again. On the face of it, this makes for a very forgiving game – I believe Blow once talked about how he wanted to move past the very punitive “You died so redo the entire level” set up of earlier platformers. But this rewind feature is not designed to forgive the player, it’s an excuse for Blow to introduce diabolical puzzles.

Let’s say you’re playing Mario, and you’re zipping through the level with ease. But right before you reach the end, you accidentally run into a Goomba and die. Now you have to replay the whole level, which might take you another two minutes.

In Braid, this error would be corrected in two seconds flat, saving you a bunch of time. But Braid has some puzzles and jumps that demand exact positioning and perfect jumping, forcing you to rewind what feels like a thousand times. I’d much rather replay a two minute segment of game once than replay a two second segment upwards of fifty times.

Blow’s taken a lot of care with his level design, so much so that there’s just not much wriggle room for less accomplished platformers. I grew up with SNES like any other 20 year old, and my hand-eye is still pretty sharp, but there are some needlessly complex jumps you have to hit, especially at the end of the game. In World 6, I came across an apparently simple puzzle involving fireballs that you have to outrace. So I tried to solve it, but each time I came one microsecond short of success, condemning poor Tim to a hundred fiery deaths. I blamed this failure on my own shoddy skills, so I reran it again and again. Finally, I went to a walkthrough and discovered that I was approaching the puzzle all wrong.

I’ve got no problem with that. But I had no way of knowing whether the issue was my execution or my approach, and the game is impassive, offering no helpful tips or nudges in the right direction.

Clearly this is intentional. Blow wants to make you earn it. Imagine you’re a frustrated gamer who has spent half an hour struggling in vain to collect a puzzle piece. Downtrodden and emasculated, you go skulking to the internet in order to get a little help. Hey, look! There’s an official walkthrough! Go ahead and click through to the second page and see what it tells you:

“… once you get into the actual puzzles, solve them for yourself and do not use a walkthrough!”

Great, an admonishing finger from the designer on high. I feel bad enough having to consult a walkthrough, man, why you got to rub it in my face? Blow claims “All puzzles are reasonable,” and that “They don’t require you to do anything random; they don’t require guessing. They don’t require trial and error.” Eh. That’s not quite true. I tripped over the solution a handful of times, and all of the platform heavy puzzles will require trial and error.

What’s most distasteful about this “walkthrough” is the fact that Blow is trying to set terms for your enjoyment of the game. Blow built this game himself, aided only by artist Dave Hellman, so I understand that he’s probably an auteur who wants maximal control over his work. The problem being that once the game hits the market, it’s not your baby anymore. You necessarily have to engage your audience if you want them to enjoy your game, so telling the impatient among us that we’ll just have to figure it out for ourselves in order to build, fuck, moral fiber or something, is ludicrous. People love sandbox games like GTA for a reason, because they can play it however they like without anyone trying to constrain their experience. Now on the other hand, sometimes a lack of structure can make a game feel aimless and random. In platformers we like being lead by the nose all the way to the final boss. Both approaches work – the problem with Braid is that it occupies the uneasy middle ground between the two.

Much like the princess that Tim pursues, Braid wants to keep you at a distance, taunting you with sparse paragraphs detailing episodes from Tim’s life. You’re not sure what’s quite happening, but that’s fine, you’re willing to chase after it. But the problem is once you scale the tower and rescue the princess, you realize she’s not all that pretty after all.

Braid’s story is, simply, a mess. A lot of this can be attributed to Blow’s mediocre prose – he writes just like you’d imagine a videogame developer would. Obviously he’s a bright guy, and he’s trying to grapple with some weighty stuff, but line by line the writing lacks any kind of poetry or grace. Style aside, Blow never places us in a moment. We leap around from moment to moment, and you could contend that this discombobulation is the point. I don’t buy it.

Spoilers from here on out.

In one story, Tim’s walking through the streets of Manhattan with his girlfriend. In the next, he’s in a “cinema” alongside farm-workers and sailors. What? You’ve got talk of castles right next to airports. The only way these can be understood is metaphorically, and at this point it’s clear Blow doesn’t want to ground us anywhere, but rather present game mechanics textually. That’d be a great bit of dovetailing assuming the story had any structural integrity.

A blurb on the game’s website from Gamer Hate describes the end level as “fucking ingenious.” It is – Blow uses his game mechanics to take what we thought we knew and flip it onto its ear. That’s very cool. But then you’ve got this epilogue, where suddenly there’s mention of the A-Bomb. Nuh uh. That’s not going to work. At no point prior to this do we receive any allusions to the Manhattan Project, either through story or art or anything. And suddenly this is about the Pandora’s box that is fission? It’s a laughable tack-on.

The final moments of the game aren’t much better, making a rather bland point about memory. I think the experience would have been more satisfying if Blow had cut the epilogue altogether, and leave the player watching as the Princess flees from Tim.

All that said, Dave Hellman’s art is a triumph, and many of the puzzles satisfy, dazzle, and even astound (my favorite being the platform within the puzzle).

Your heart’s still beating

Our readings today will be from The Echo Maker, so please have your copy ready to reference during the course of the homily. Thank you.

*

When I was little, say 9, I got anxious whenever I thought about marriage. Not because of the enormous commitment it represents, or the uncertainty about whether or not you’ve picked the right person at the right time, but because when you stood at that altar, you had to kiss a girl. In front of people.

Point being that all the difficulties and complications you envision outside of a thing are going to be non-issues when you face up to it. How freeing is that?

Fatalist in the audience: Couldn’t you just reformulate that to say that you’ll never be able to anticipate any of the terrible mishaps that will befall you on this dismal tour through life?

Possibly, but fuck you, guy.

page 29: “The body could survive any isolation. Then there was the mind.”

I’m purportedly on a spring break, but I ought take another look at the bill of goods. Says here Spring Break should be warm and rejuvenating. Miss and Miss. Hinsdale was pretty warm today, something like 50, and my shoulders were overheated beneath my coat, which I take for a promising sign. But there’s not much to do here, and nobody’s around except these entitled rich folk in their luxury cars. They seem so much more offensive this time around, with their reckless driving, obvious entitlement, and garish neo-colonials rising up too high against the flat gry sky. No salt stains on their Beamers, no dull paint on their Lexi.

At least their kids aren’t yet corrupted: passing through the park I heard one small girl rattling a bush, performing an unintentional homage to this:

Only with vegetation.

Ah, the fair Midwest. The snow melted, grudgingly, but holy hell how raw and gray can one day be?’

84: “They say it’s April, but one confused April, doing a pretty good January imitation.”

As I age, some spots on the calendar (Christmas, Halloween, February 26th) lose importance, and others gain it (New Years, Spring).

I’m thinking about thaw -> regrowth so much that I’ve already got the title for a short story collection: Songs of Spring. I never come up with titles, and I certainly don’t write short story collections. What’s the matter with me? I’ve got a perfectly serviceable potboiler, heavy on the plot and spectacle, with a dash of comedy, stalled at 30,000 words, and all I think about writing is morose little stories about people making decisions and caring about each other and not knowing how to go about either. But if you’re going to major in english, you might as well abandon all tendencies towards marketability and intelligibility, right?

Same audience member: Like these last few posts?

I said fuck you, guy.

Alright, I’m off to Be Legendary, running windsprints in half-lit gyms and shit.

“They left you half dead in the street/

But that just means you’re half alive… and”

–>TITLE

FOOTNOTE:

1: hulu.com, it’s full of stars.

There’s so little here between us.

All forward progress seems to have ground to a halt – this whole school thing can be a damned inconvenience, huh? 52 in 08, such a robust little baby, looks pretty sickly, with my WW2 class requiring sheaves of reading (but lord is Catch 22 good) and so little time for the towering monolith that is Tree of Smoke. That goldenrod cover promises: You will remember me. If only I had time to read you.

My creative writing class has been interesting. I’m generally skeptical of the idea, since a lot of the kids in it are smarter than me and haven’t wasted hours and hours writing stories about people who don’t exist. In that respect, I’ve only seen a few pieces of writing that made me think, there’s something to be gleaned here – but then again, I’m getting plenty of that from Denis Johnson and Joseph Heller at the moment, so what the hell. And on the other hand, it is very refreshing to get people in a room who have a passing interest in telling stories and take them seriously.

A nice bit I saw over at The Elegant Variation, which I’ve finally added to the sidebar because this Sarvas guy has nothing but good book recommendations:

“That’s crazy,” says Wood. “It’s a strikingly anti-formalist thing to say.” Yet, it’s a criticism that seems to speak to a deep, and peculiarly American, suspicion of style – as if “fine” writing were somehow effeminate. “I do think a lot of this is about American masculinity,” says Wood. “The realists from Hemingway onwards retained for themselves a strikingly anti-intellectual stance which had to do with the preservation of a male idea of what writing is – you roll up your sleeves and get on with it. It was also tied in with the whole artisanal aspect of creative writing workshops: it’s about planing a table and making it four square; it’s about drinking a lot; but it’s not about philosophy, it’s not about ideas or aesthetics.”

But any inspiration I draw from these classes (the sun is always just setting as we leave at 5:20, leaving Skidmore in cool blue darkness) fizzles when I realize there’s Work to be done. And not the fun work.

So here I am a 2:42 writing a few hundred words just for myself, because the scope and complexity of Stones from Heaven is getting a little bit staggering, and I want to feel like I accomplished something before I went to bed.

Birthday next Tuesday – what kind of a day is Tuesday for a birthday?

Another one.

5 dead at NIU, another dozen plus injured. The New York Times reports the gunman had a shotgun and a pair of handguns – thank God for that second amendment, huh?

These keep happening, at a disturbing pace. The Columbine kids triggered a hysteria, but now nobody seems to notice. Virginia Tech shook us, but how about the other six that have happened since? And now NIU?

What is it about our cohort that makes these things keep happening? What about the idea of a school shooting is so appealing? It was obvious with the Columbine kids that their highschool was their torture chamber, and they had to go to it every day. They were maladjusted and confused teenagers, lacking some fundamental equipment to sublimate their anger. But what about this guy?

I wonder what kind of outlet these sorts of individuals sought in the time before the school shooting had cachet.

Anyway, I’m sure the old arguments will be hashed out all over again, but for now let’s remember the victims of NIU.

A Thousand Returns

The blogging output has dipped precipitously, and that’s my bad. Danielewski’s gimmickry has gotten the better of me, and I’ve shelved Only Revolutions for the time being. If I ever get in the mood for some more, I’ll haul it down – for now, looks like The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna is up to bat. And now, fast takes:

Destiny Wears Pin Stripes

I’m pretty sure you’ll find the name Christ, Jesus, somewhere on the Rockies’ batting order. Just look into the eyes of their manager, Clint Hurdle. He has the invincible confidence of a man who speaks to God. At the very least, he’s forged an unholy compact with some archfiend. Either way, the Rockies are playing out of their minds. I think this 8 day layoff will absolutely kill them – this team is a meteor shining brightest at exactly the right time, and suddenly their brightest light is spent watching the Indians and Sox battle it out. The flareout must be in the offing.

Hurdle ought to request of God in his next communique that the Red Sox lose ignominiously – I don’t think I could bear it if the Red Sox and the Pats enjoy so much success in one year.

Imminence

As the Skidmore 07 intramural 3v3 basketball season grinds into its playoffs, the NBA wakens after a summer of disturbed dreams and troubling scandals. Dispel all trade talks and predictions – the real edition will be here soon enough. And really, what good is talk in the face of

Regular season preview to follow

November

Waiting for this year’s NaNoWriMo to begin. I’ve got my plot already, half a dozen scenes, and not a single mention of the fantastic. This year looks to be a good one – I’ve been lazing so long that I’m ready to bury myself in a story, just dissolve into its arcs and paragraphs, and most of all its words.

I’m considering some kind of daily updates on the progress as I go through the month, perhaps for its instructional value to new NaNoers or perhaps just to remember what this year’s challenge felt like.

Winter is Leaving…

I have now upgraded shower from “amenity” to “activity essential to sustaining existence”. Our hot water tank broke yesterday, and so we residents of Wiecking had to do without our daily showers. I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal – there are stretches in the summer where you can completely forget about the whole process for days at a time. Turns out I was wrong, and that being unable to shower after basketball is a Bad Thing.

But heat has been restored – and not only to our plumbing. Yes, it appears that Saratoga Springs is finally prepared to emerge from its annual ice age. The snow has largely melted, leaving only those depressing patches still clinging to the dull grass. The sun has returned, and so has the rain. The wind has gone toothless, and it is actually pleasant to walk to class (the journey is pleasant, rather than the destination).

There are 40-some-odd days left in the semester, and we are losing our minds in stages, some quicker than the rest. I’ve achieved my customary springtime equilibrium, still riding that post-February high. Others… not so much.

But like Avon Barskdale said: “You come in here, you get your mind right, you only do two days. The day you come in and the day you get out.”" Of course, he was talking about high-security lockdown, but the principle still applies to a liberal-arts college, I feel.

Anyway, to avoid this sounding like a diary entry (I couldn’t figure out a way to doodle unicorns in the margins, unfortunately), some bits of the internet:

• The Little Kicks Dance (harder to imitate than the moonwalk)
• Peyton Manning is dead set on being likeable
• I am excited for Blades of Glory, and here’s why

Next up, I’m going to shamelessly steal from another blogger.