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.
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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.
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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.
Not much overlap, though clearly I overuse “eyes.” What? They’re the window to the soul.
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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.
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Grinning and mud-bellied dogs scramble down the rocks, four legs and digging claws a boon on these slopes. The hikers greet each other as they pass, without fail, possessed with a courtesy precipitated by the smell of fallen leaves and the silence of trees. Greetings grow terser as they near the top, interrupted by panting and concentration.
They pass through different climates, whole worlds stacked atop each other and separated by just a hundred feet. In the low-lying areas, tufts of grass line the track carpeted by red yellow and brown leaves, and paler shades from their undersides, rarely touched by sunlight. They grasp beech trees smooth-barked as skin and haul themselves upwards, legs pistoning upwards, ever upwards.
Further on, the grass yields to mud which sucks at their boots and makes footing treacherous. The track is littered with boulders, perhaps transported here by ancient rivers now run dry. A trickle of water feeds these muddy patches, originating god knows where. The trees grow leaner, sparser. Some stands have died, and their roots, sapped of vitality, have loosened their grip on the earth and they lean against each other with bare branches, mourning their own deaths. Blue mountains in the distance, seen fleetingly through the shifting windows framed by boughs. The wind grows more insistent, here, hands grow stiff. No more children descending the path, these are harsher climes reserved for older men, cheeks stubbled with iron filings, and hardy women, cheeks pointed with blushing exertion forgotten since youth. They still say hello as they pass.
A first vista, afforded by a bare shoulder of rock, overlooks what feels like all of creation. It is only a panorama of a small portion of the Adirondacks National Park. Hikers pause to gawk. The dogs mingle freely, sniffing eagerly at snacks withdrawn from packs and more warily at other dogs. Below, the lakes are mirrors of sky and the trees are surprised in their metamorphosis, leaves a colorful confusion. Nearby mountains stand in uneasy relation to one another, perhaps desiring escape but frozen by their geological sluggishness. Their solidity is a convincing illusion, however, and great cloud-shadows sweep their flanks. In the distance they see snowcaps, a place so high it is perpetually winter. Summer can not climb far enough. Specks of hail touch their cheeks, melt in their hair.
They’ve looked enough, more climbing. The track grows muddier still, pits must be traversed with mincing steps and broad jumps. The trees now have needles and an alpine fragrance. Lichen clings to rocks. The wind is harsh. Descending climbers, in fugues of concentration as they wrestle with gravity and slick rocks, distractedly answer that the top isn’t too far off. They keep climbing, grimmer now that this is a conquest.
On the summit they quickly lose sensation in their hands. Stuffing numb fingers into pockets, they stand atop the very highest rock they can locate and gaze out over the terrain. One can feel an energy in this place, leylines thrumming beneath the stone skin of the mountain. Perhaps witches congregated here long ago when the light was fading. The lower view was better, but here they might entertain notions of godhood, brought on by thin air and the height. The perspective is certainly right. They fumblingly prepare sandwiches and eat them, sheltered by the stubborn trees but not enough. Further along the ridge of the summit the trees close in and footsteps are silenced by a carpet of leaves. Clumps of snow, small and diminished as they might be in March, huddle about tree trunks.
They’ve climbed the mountain and touched the soles of their boots to the highest stones. Nothing left to do, they descend, waggling warmth back into their abused fingers, now silent as they negotiate the downward climb. They nod and greet those not yet to the top, owning a secret knowledge. “A little farther on,” they say, “maybe fifteen minutes.”
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This post about the Celtics was written May 23, 2008. In an effort to publish what drafts are publishable as well as show how little I know about basketball, I present it to you. Also, I like the line about Sam Cassell at the end.
The problem with the Celtics is they’re like the Justice League.* If you don’t have the time to click that link, the Justice League is an all-star team of superheroes, comprised of some of the most powerful beings in the comics universe. Superman and Green Lantern are pretty close to godhead, and Batman represents the acme of mortal ingenuity and toughness. Wonder Woman has an invisible JET, the Flash can outrun a jet, etc. etc.
But for whatever reason, this super team struggles against some very ordinary threats. They struggle just as mightily no matter what the competition. Lex Luthor (apparently) gives the Justice League a run for their money every once in awhile, this being a guy that each superhero could thwart singlehandedly. All together, though, they just can’t get the job done.
Maybe these Celtics just don’t know how to dominate because struggle is all they’ve known – no victories have come easy for any of the Big Three, whereas a player like Kobe came into the league and got to win alongside Shaq, which showed him: hey, maybe this can be easy.
My feeling was that the Celtics lost their shot at the title during their seven game battle with the Hawks. If you can’t sweep an 8 seed in the East, good luck against the West’s toughest.
*In case you’re wondering: KG is Superman; Paul Pierce is Batman, with all the craftiness and gadgety spinmoves; and Ray Allen is Green Arrow, for deadly accuracy and at least one resurrection. Sam Cassell is Martian Manhunter, for obvious reasons.
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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).
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Tagged: braid
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.
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Spoilers for the last Wire. Ever.
*
5 long, phenomenal seasons of television came to an end tonight. The Wire is a darling to both the critics and the people it portrays – apparently too white boys from the suburbs. This last episode was the denouement after the previous’s big bust. In true Wire fashion, all that work adds up to precisely nothing, life for Chris (enjoy hanging out with Wee-Bey) and a couple 20s for lieutenants.
If you want justice, however, don’t worry about Marlo. Like Prop Joe observed, there’s no way you can take the savage out of that man. Funny how “square one” for Marlo means a nice suit and millions of dollars. But you have to take that first corner.
There were a lot of characters taking on the spirits of some that have fallen by the wayside. I thought Marlo might realize Stringer’s dream of becoming a legit businessman, but he doesn’t want to escape the game. He wants to die wearing that crown.
Marlo might not be Stringer, but it looks like Mike’s carrying the spirit of Omar – shotgun, duster, flip comments after you blow out a man’s kneecap. Dukie, sadly, is following Bub’s down his dark path. Who knows if he’ll follow him out – Bubble’s was probably the greatest triumph of this entire series. Enjoy that place at the table.
Slim Charles dropping Cheese was perfect – I was getting ready to protest. Were they really going to give METHOD MAN the crown? As good a monologue as that was, Slim’s rebuttal let Cheese know that maybe there is nostalgia in the game.
Saint Daniels, after swallowing every lie he had to in order to get that job, refused to once he had it. Admirable, but kinda pointless. At least he got to promote Carver.
Herc is still an asshole. Ditto Carcetti.
Templeton’s downfall-that-wasn’t didn’t even grate me that much. He’s the system’s boy, and he’s playing it the way it wants him to. No way Gus can take him down with something so trivial as the Truth. At least he knows what he did, with a little help from McNulty.
Ah, noble McNulty. Did our favorite recidivist finally and truly turn the corner this time? I’m willing to believe it. The anger in his eyes when Rawl’s told him to pin the murders on the business card hobo, the relief when Kima told them what she’d done – he looked to me like a changed man. And then his trip to the shelter to pick up Larry showed some heart and reminded us all what this show actually is.
It’s a love letter to the city of Baltimore, and I mean real love, the kind that acknowledges each ugliness and doesn’t care. The always enjoyable montage was good not because it showed us where every character landed, but for those shots of real Baltimore residents, real places. David Simon (who put himself into one newsroom scene, writing furiously with a pen bobbing in his mouth) and the rest of the crew did something remarkable here. They did a cops and robbers show with a social conscience, one with moral outrage and an unflinching eye. They did grit for real, and they gave us a window into a new and strange world. Most of all – and Gus would appreciate this if he were real – they made something that felt absolutely true.
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Tagged: The Wire
Snow comes swirling skirling off the rooftops like white smoke. Second month, two-faced Janus doesn’t want to look forward or back, cold in either direction. Bright bright bright bright, everything gleaming reflected sunlight, the sky lively with it. Clumps of snow sway on branches, bare and brown and insensate.
They don’t know you’re looking, but they’ll dance for you all the same.
Hey, happy March.
Learning about Personalities in class and elsewhere. Business tycoons, presidents and orators in history, rich white men with peculiar talents or a certain brand of genius (Teddy Roosevelt read 4-5 books a day, Garfield could write greek with his left and latin with his right, simultaneously), enormously forceful and obviously charismatic with big shoulders and bellies. Power rests easy on their shoulders, a crown you can’t see.
Documentaries and articles outside of school, Joe Strummer’s biopic, a Bob Dylan documentary, skinny white boys who can’t sing with pinched faces but daily visitations from the demiurges, thrumming dynamos of creative potential energy loosed at intervals, storms of drugs and brilliance and apotheosis. Whole greek cycles shown with pictures and interviews.
Talent in the arts is a slippery thing. It’s obvious who’s good, clear at a glance, but how did they get that way. Can you be born sensitive to such things? Read Joyce, recognize he’s a genius. Fine. Not all of us are. What then? What to do about it? Can you get better?
I’ve been told I’m a naturally gifted writer. That’s not true, never will be. My mind runs down tracks too well-worn, linearities and the obvious. How’s that for a definition of genius? Turns left when told to turn right?
Writing’s craft, people keep saying, but I don’t know if I want craft. I think I want ugly and inelegant truths, blistering babbling pages of it. I’ve got no right to claim this voice, but I’m bored with my own.
That’s what you’re told: write what you know. I don’t know anything, and if I do, it’s not something I’m interested in. I know solipsism and self-obsession and mediocrity and left foot right foot all the way to suburbia, the place I come from and must return. We’ve been living for ourselves too long. Young kids don’t have a consciousness of the self. It’s part of your cognitive development when you can look in the mirror and see yourself and not an charming stranger. It’s time to return to that, to turn the gaze outward and engage what we find.
To collapse, as subjects, into the world. Subsumed in existence so we can write our own songs of experience, and let somebody else do the etchings.
What’s it mean? It’s missing the placard.
The curator said that’s all part of it.
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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?
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: dear diary, february, school
