…and another pin stuck into my resolve. There are times, when I don’t want to do anything, i just want to go back to sleep. I hate it when I don’t have the energy to do much of anything, to even think hard, to write or read. Luckily I’ve gotten a bit of a second wind here at around 8:30, did some writing. The last two days have been decent from a conceptual, creative standpoint, I hashed out a premise for a short story and something a bit longer yesterday and today respectively. I wrote a bit of flash fiction tonight that grew out of an idea I had a few weeks back when it merged with and twisted with this [Russian Nuclear powered lighthouses in the Arctic Circle, what if you had to be there, to watch it, and to watch it decay, to watch the platting flake off, to watch your radio malfunction, perhaps to die or to be drowned in the static of decaying particles...I'm surprised it hasn't come up at BLDGBLOG yet, which should be amended now that I've tipped him off.] The idea grew from a passage in Stross’ Glasshouse about when the protagonist get himself turned into a tank, he’s described as invisible in everything up to UV, i think. It’s a great passage and all the more interesting because of how Stross skirts the line in really telling you about the war experiences of the protagonists. It seems to me to be the best work by him, the most coherent, the most thematically focused. I recommend it highly. I still have to read Halting State. There is so much to read, almost as much to write.
Archive for the ‘Navel-gazing’ Category
another day
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009Resolved: 2009
Monday, January 5th, 2009My new Year’s Resolutions:
- Find a new job [preferably a higher paying one wiht more benefits.]
- Publish here consistently
- get 12 things published. [2 in the pipe with editors as of 1/2/09]
- Read 52 books or ~25,000 pages.
- Take more photos, a few a week at the very least, put them up here.
- Take GREs, make other Graduate School Preperatoins
- Attend SFRA 2009: Atlanta and present a paper (or two?) there.
I think there are ones I’m forgetting, will ammend when I recall them.
A day like Elephants Grazing
Friday, September 19th, 2008David Foster Wallace is dead.
As you know, he died a week ago. It’s been a long, gray week here. Nothing has gone well, some things have gone badly. A man considered one of the greatest writers of our time hung himself. I’ve never read him and a great light has gone out of the world, leaving ash where once there’d been a furnace with innumerable pipes, drawing out the hot air of wisdom and truth and putting back in the cooler air of fandom and admiration and awe. In all the air floated affection and caring. I’ve been reading McSweeney’s postings by readers and others about Foster Wallace and it’s brought me nearly or completely to tears at every turn. In reading Wil Lobko’s entry I found myself simultaneously laughing and crying and wholly unsure which was the foremost in me. This is the kind of thing that seems only to happen when you’re observing the emotions of others not when you mind in seated just above the hands you press to your face and you shake a little, unsure if it is joy or sorrow but a little in awe that a man, now dead, and those who loved him could invoke in me such a perfect balance between the two.
I bought a hardcover copy of Oblivion, some of his stories at work today. I’m making an exception in this special case for my only one book a month rule.
I just can’t quite figure out to do in a world where someone so monumentally talented, so successful could decide it wasn’t worth doing anymore. I had a friend from high school who also committed suicide, but that like so many other suicides I could hear about have the great weight of the tragedy there (and suicides for me may be perhaps one of the greatest tragedies, because they’re so very much preventable, you could just have not done it, have continued, had you just had an iota of strength to bring you back from that brink.) because I could understand somehow, I could look at the situation and extrapolate how tat situation had so mercilessly whittled down the options you saw as tenable, the things you could live with until there was just, nothing.
Here though, we have Wallace, a man who seems to have loved being genuine and good and truthful and who we all have to live without. A world where good, truthful and talented people cannot stand to live is not a comforting one.
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