| Manifest Destiny? |
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| 10:08am 15/07/2008 |
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So it's been a while since most of you have heard about my plans. I finish my last class in mid-August and will be busting the hell out of Boston. This winter Laura and I decided we'd move back to the Bay Area, then changed course to NYC for several months, and now how changed course back to the Bay.
A couple of the reasons are on the personal side, but one of the biggest ones is that we think the job market will be easier to penetrate for both of us--and hopefully that turns out to be true (if any one knows anyone in publishing in SF or the east bay, let me know! [or nursing, for Laura]).
And of course, I'll be happy to be surrounded by friends and family again, though disappointed to not be near those friends and family members on the eastern seaboard.
Long story short, come the end of August, my charming fiancee and I will be in SF, Oakland, or Berkeley. Look forward to seeing you again, old friends. |
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| H8-2 LUV |
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| 12:57pm 28/05/2008 |
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At the request of a reader (also, for the hell of it), I am posting the short story I'm working on. This is a first draft with no editing, and it's only about 70% complete. So beware. Also, I'm no html whiz, and so the paragraphs will not be indented.
Also, due to my own past issues with writing, compliments, ego, etc, I'm instituting a strict no-praise policy. Please be as blunt and as critical as you want. I appreciate abrasive criticism. But no compliments. I mean it.
So without further ado: ( H8-2 LUV ) |
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| Issues that need to be resolved before my writing is worthwhile. |
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| 02:40pm 08/05/2008 |
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1) I write without a plot in mind, without an outline, and end up with ten pages of writing in which nothing has really happened.
2) Writing about my own life. A lot writer's get stuck in this trap. Characters similar to themselves. Situation's like ones from their own lives. Well, newsflash, neither their lives nor mine are actually interesting. So I need to learn about and write about worlds, people, and happenings that I don't actually know.
3) I overwrite the ending of just about everything. Short stories, columns, non-fiction, blog entries, poems, academic papers. Always ending on a note I haven't quite earned.
4) Scenes that aren't really scenes. In most of my scenes, talking happens. If (on an outside chance) some important action takes place, it is shown by the characters talking about it. A scene, like an overall plot, should have a narrative arc. My scene arc is shaped like this: __________
5) Dialog. While not completely stilted, mine is still a few steps away from that magical median of natural and compelling.
6) Not enough characters to make the plot complex. And/or, too many characters unimportant to the plot.
To be continued... probably |
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| 12:48pm 28/04/2008 |
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When Norman Mailer headbutted Gore Vidal backstage at the Dick Cavett Show, Vidal quipped, still on the floor: "Words fail Norman Mailer yet again."
Who is the better man here? A year ago, I would have gone straight for Vidal, clever and composed even when confronted with violence. But recently I've been thinking about Mailer, Charlton Heston, and William F. Buckley, Jr. Beyond recently dying, the three share an appearance of an idealizable generation of man's men, smart, political, aggressive. They were shy about calling out hacks and morons.
I've got political quibbles with each of these guys, but lately I've been taken by that quality of fearlessness and assurance over analysis and carefully neutered opinion. And I feel like I'm living less under the umbrella of safe reason and more in the world hard truths ready to be expressed plainly. Still a little uncomfortable in those shoes, but getting there. |
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| 02:23pm 24/04/2008 |
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I swore off fiction for a year to force myself to read more nonfiction, but the first thing I picked up, now that the semester is cooling down, was Neuromancer. SciFi (yes, I'm still loathe to even touch the terrible genre name *cyberpunk*) is still largely a dark territory for me, but hardly the realm of real things I was intending to school myself on.
I made up a wide-ranging list, with Kurlansky, Mailer, Foucalt, Hofstadter, Boswell, and a bunch of others I can't remember since I lost the list. But my mind is tired from the long semester and I needed something light. Kurlansky's Salt is probably the lightest book from the list, but I'm waiting for my triumphant return to CA so I can just read my dad's copy.
The resolution's seed lies in this quote attributed (probably apocryphally) to Thomas Pynchon: “[Pynchon] told me it was sad that Raven died before his time and said he was starting to really write and was destined to become a great writer because a writer is great when he stops writing about himself.”
And hot damn if a light bulb didn't go off. I had just finished Gravity's Rainbow and could instantly see the difference between those who wrote about the world and other writers to lazy, weak, or boring to find something more interesting than themselves.
And now, my nascent reading philosophy develops: 1)Read lots of novels before you really set out on your own life. 2) When you do set out [and this usually happens around age 20-25, or not at all], put novels behind you and read only nonfiction. 3) In the autumn years, toss all the rest and read poetry. If you start step 3 before step one, go directly to jail, do not pass go, yadda. |
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| Can I be a parabola, please? |
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| 09:13am 18/01/2008 |
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mood:  contemplative
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From, yes, Wikipedia:
The technological singularity is a hypothesized point in the future variously characterized by the technological creation of self-improving intelligence, unprecedentedly rapid technological progress, or some combination of the two.
Statistician I. J. Good first wrote of an "intelligence explosion", suggesting that if machines could even slightly surpass human intellect, they could improve their own designs in ways unseen by their designers, and thus recursively augment themselves into far greater intelligences.
And when that program makes a smarter generation of itself, the new program will be smart enough to create a yet smarter version, ad infinitum.
This is much like what I want to be. Using my intelligence to constantly make myself better, smarter. I've always attacked my major flaws, and much overcome the first two: reticence and arrogance. Now I'm on to what I fear will be the most difficult. Laziness. Not in the layabout sense (though that could use a little work as well), but more an intellectual laziness of starting a thing and mastering it 85%.
I was a very smart kid growing up, usually in the the 95th percentile on tests, if not the 99th. And starting in fifth grade, I almost completely stopped doing my homework. I didn't need to. The math concepts and whatnot were understood from the initial lecture. I didn't need the practice and the reinforcement.
This was a bitter ongoing argument between my mother (a middle-school teacher, btw) and I. Whether she was right that the busywork was good for me, in a higher sense than keeping my grades buoyant, I can't say, but as the tale goes, I over the years began turning in higher and higher percentages of my homework.
But though it gets turned in, and made a decent show of, I don't know that there's a single assignment I've given a hundred percent on. In fact, it's usually closer to fifty or sixty.
I shy away from struggle. Getting by--doing well, even--is easy, so why put in the hard fight? If I can get past this, I can be more like that singular program, evolving more exponentially than directly. Regret, perhaps, shall be my fuel. If I has sorted this out five years ago, I could be multilingual, have programming skills, know my way around a physics equation, and have written something worth reading.
So here's to keeping an eye on the me five years from now. May he see more improvement than the me today. |
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| Viva la Bro; or, Can I Go Back to Being Tortured? |
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| 04:33pm 10/01/2008 |
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I've been rolling an entry around in my head lamenting the appropriation of the word 'party' by three-sheets-to-the-wind fratboys with an aim, like Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, to fuck anything that moves, and their bunny-tailed counterparts over at Sigma Tao Delta.
A shame because my core philosophy these days is celebration. Rejoice in God, ye Christians. I rejoice in life. The existential query answered: if you can choose to be anything, be happy to be alive. And so I seek out conviviality--those words that have been in this journal for four years: sensual pleasures. Food. Drink. Friends old and new. To hell with the zinger 'escapist,' it's condescension toward good times.
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That's roughly the entry I was going to write. It took more reflection to see that eating, drinking and hanging out is the core trinity of bro culture, just my tastes are more sophisticated. So, I thought, maybe I'm a fratboy at heart.
Cue the vomit. Can I get back to being tortured? Can I want to be more than ordinary again? Sitting in front of Smoothies in Clayton, way back in high school, I asked young Linda her biggest fear. Her answer I've forgotten but young Ethan's terror: mediocrity.
Now I feel doomed to it--or is the word resigned?--by laziness, or fear, or fear dressed up as laziness, just as bravado once covered low self-esteem. Did I realize how hard it was then, all of 17, to not be ordinary? Not then, not for four more years. I anticipated the difficulty, of course. What I failed to anticipate was how easily I'd give that up.
I've chosen the easier of the two paths, and it's nice. Can I go back now? |
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| Who likes Tofurkey? |
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| 05:45pm 26/12/2007 |
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Though Laura and I both called it quits after a few bites of Tofurkey, that unappetizing, dense loaf, Yumi, our cat, was quite the fan. But 1 of 3 is no majority, and though we love the cat, this experiment will not be repeated. |
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| 09:21pm 24/12/2007 |
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A good cure for loneliness is to not be alone so damn much, as I found over the past few years as I ceased being a sad person. Bullshit surrounds loneliness. That it is innately artistic. People say they're lonelier surrounded by people, but it's just a holdover, a hanging on to the habit of sadness.
And here I sit on Christmas Eve, alone. Laura is at work until the morning; my family is 3,000 miles away; and making friends here in Boston has been harder than it should be. I can't say I'm not.
It's a cruel force. The more you fear it, the worse it hits you. Tonight it isn't crippling, just there. I did look ahead to this the past couple weeks, when I realized I had nowhere to be tonight, and Laura would be gone. In the morning, she'll be back, the loneliness gone. Followed by a trip to New York this weekend, my cousin Joanne, a New Years Eve party in the city. A few weeks later, a week back in California, where I have family, where I have friends.
I watched Paris, Je T'aime tonight, and perhaps the most poignant, though the least stylish, vignette was the last, . A middle-aged woman, an unmarried postal carrier from Denver, has saved and studied to take a tourists trip to Paris. Her narration is what you heard in your high school French class: unaccented, phrases devoid of complexity, word-pause-word, sentence-pause-sentence, none of the beautiful flow that makes French French,.
This is obviously a lonely woman, further removed to a foreign city, on the trip that is supposed to be the highlight of her life. She is not a sad person, she says looking over paris from a skyscraper, she just wishes she had someone to share it with. To say "isn't this beautiful" to.
It sad for the people who've lost the war with loneliness, as it usually only takes one to stop it. One good friend, one close family member, one loved one, to stave off the waves. But it's certainly worth the fight against it, which is really the fight against shyness. A measure of extroversion can make all the difference in the world. |
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| Sidelines |
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| 03:26pm 14/12/2007 |
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A few months ago I began reading Awakening the Buddha Within by Lama Surya Das. I've been interested in Buddhism since high school but had never done more than a surface study.
Buddhism is beautiful to me for two reasons: it is very secularizable; and, it's tenets run directly counter to many of the underlying values of western (any?) civilization.
Unless my life is a Russian novel, I'll never believe in a God again--theism, well, just doesn't taste right. But still I remember Christ as my earliest role model, imparting mainly benevolent character traits on me. My empathy and my desire to forgive are still with me today.
An atheist who shuns wisdom because it's wrapped in a religious bow has some agenda problems. And so Buddhism's applicability is not cut off by disbelief in karma amd rebirth. It remains an instruction manual to turn off greed, ill will, disatisfaction.
Anyways, that was mainly preface to what I thought at the beginning this study of Buddhism: "I'll take what I can of the philosophy, but I'm not going to believe in this rebirth crap." And the truth is, I probably never will. But the thought was a bit of a shock and made for a revelation.
My first instinct was to cut down any nonscientific idea. To take a thousands-of-years-old tradition and break it into pieces.
The strongest muscle in my brain, perhaps because I excercise it so much, is skepticism. From a very young age I was able to deconstruct social groups--the goths, the jocks, the bandies, theater kids, punks--by their motivations, their values, their strategic positioning of themselves just so away from the norm.
I couldn't much figure that those with this same eye would position themselves knowing, say, the immaturity of punk sensibility, the cheesiness and hypocrisy of gothdom. Those in strange dress don't often see the full spectrum.
So though I flirted, unintentionally hilarious, with the world of ghetto, and once (I blush) longed to be indie, for the most part I've walked a safe line and bent little from the norm. To avoid the labels placed on small crowds, I've walked in the big one.
For example, I wear mostly sweaters. Not much social positioning to be had here. Nothing in my dress to say I have one unusual thought in my head.
Lately though, I think I've been breaking out of the coma of nonexpression. I'm wanting a few new piercings, perhaps because I like the way they look, perhaps because I like that they say I'm young, a little restless, and I wan't a sense of identity not controverted by an office dress code. Most likely, it's a bit of both.
Anyway, I have little practice turning off analysis for instinct, but it feels nice to, finally. So perhaps this analytical entry is a nice slice of irony. |
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| 10:46am 19/11/2006 |
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mood:  awake music: Red - Okkervil River
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To get this paper done, I'm going to need the Internet surgically removed from my body. |
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| 02:03am 18/11/2006 |
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Further to the last post: all my entries are inward facing. More interesting blogs demonstrate the author's opinion, their outward life. Some people post about what they think, post pictures of where they live, etc.; others post about themselves. Is this an important distinction? |
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| 01:58am 18/11/2006 |
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mood:  tired music: Pink Floyd - Have a Cigar
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Insomnia--does it mean I'm getting older? And if I'm getting older, am I getting cooler.
I still long to be hip. To walk down the street and be noticed. To bob my head on the subway, and pull it off. But I suppose that's the curse of introversion (in the long run, I think, a lighter curse than extroversion).
Still there's the feeling like the McMurphys and all the other sociopaths are the most real among us, although they are the most limited, the most narrowly defined. And that's another of my fears: defining myself. It's easier, certainly, to be amorphous. To watch.
If we don't define ourselves outwardly, do we define ourselves at all? |
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| Ethan's Razor |
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| 11:53pm 17/11/2006 |
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music: John Coltrane - I Wish I Knew
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Discounting impossible explanations, the most flattering one is most likely to be true. |
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| No-Shave November |
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| 06:38pm 28/10/2006 |
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So next week I begin an internship with Perseus Books Group, which will hopefully lead to a job there.
My plan had been to eschew the traditional No-Shave November so as to make a good impression. Imagine my excitement when I spotted one of my interviewers sporting a new mustache/chinder combination. The men of the office were on the last day of a mustache contest.
"Not only will it not count against you," he said, when I explained No-Shave November. "It might just get you the job."
The beard begins next week. |
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| 01:26am 13/10/2006 |
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Post an anonymous secret. IP logging is turned off. |
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| 01:11am 23/09/2006 |
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Hi, everybody. I live in Boston now. |
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| 01:05pm 17/12/2005 |
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I'm trying to share Brian Regan's brilliant comedy routine "You too and stuff" ... the one in which he discusses saying things like take luck.
Does anybody have it and can send it to me?
Thanks everybody. Take luck and care.
Ethan |
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| 04:14pm 13/11/2005 |
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I could use some help from everyone who has the time. I'm applying to grad school for creative writing and I'm trying to decide on what to submit as a writing sample. Most of the contenders were written recently, and so I haven't received much feedback on them.
I'd like to have you read some of those stories and give me feedback on which you like the most, as well as any other commentary you may have.
If you're interested, comment with your e-mail address and whether you'd like to read two stories, three stories or four stories. |
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| 10:20pm 26/09/2005 |
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Today was gray and rainy without warning. I don't know why waking to rain-damp streets is so refreshing, but it really feels like a new season is upon Fresno.
I've been doing what I can to set a new season on myself. I stumbled through a few jobs this summer, getting my foot stuck finally in a call center for State Farm. Insurance is the worst industry to my mind, and playing lackey to insurance agents kills me softly every day.
So I am job hunting again. Hopefully, will be writing freelance for Fresno Magazine. We'll see. I've never been one for resume peddling, but I've got to get myself off the telephone.
( Reading much again, ) including Tolstoy, Murakami, Eggers and Ovid. It's good to be back.
In other it's-good-to-be-backs, it's good to be writing again. I finished a short story last week for the first time in a year and a half. And now, on to novel beginnings. Scary, but like the rain today, refreshing. A windfall sent from me to me.
One of the best blessings of living on my own for the first time: ( having a kitchen. )
Cooking my own food keeps me going.
My plant is sad because I'm a bad mom.
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