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| Saturday, September 23rd, 2006 | | 12:29 pm |
We Met Jasper Fforde We um, met Jasper Fforde.Oh yeah and I reviewed Donald Barthelme and shit. And the j-music keeps on coming. We're fucking wota or some shit. Peace. | | Tuesday, September 5th, 2006 | | 2:08 pm |
| | Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 | | 2:49 pm |
On the Bourgeois Novel (original quote that started the discussion) J.G. Ballard:"The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented. It's a vast, sentimentalizing structure that reassures the reader, and at every point, offers the comfort of secure moral frameworks and recognizable characters. This whole notion was advanced by Mary McCarthy and many others years ago, that the main function of the novel was to carry out a kind of moral criticism of life. But the writer has no business making moral judgments or trying to set himself up as a one-man or one-woman magistrate's court."
( My response to charges of this limiting it to confessional modes ) | | Friday, August 11th, 2006 | | 12:22 am |
Important News Matters of great import are discussed over at Swifty Site, Here. If you have any interest in remaining involved in contemporary life, it behooves you to go and read and watch everything discussed. The content of these reviews is of a more serious and urgent character than my usual posts, and I trust that, after reviewing the relevant material, its true import will soon be understood. If you have never listened to me before, take heed now and thank me later for changing your life with goodness. | | Monday, August 7th, 2006 | | 11:05 pm |
Verse
In the palm flowers, among the bamboo,
Buddha long went fast asleep
With the withered fig tree by the roadside,
Christ, too, is already dead.
But we all need our rest-
Even in front of the stage set.
When you look behind the set,
You find only patched canvas.
-Akutagawa Ryunosuke, 'Kappa' | | Saturday, August 5th, 2006 | | 2:50 pm |
MOBU NORIO "The members of the selection committee devoted most of their comments on the story to its social message and its colloquial style. Furui Yoshikichi held it up as a something of an exemplary tale for contemporary youth, while Kôno Taeko found the characters to be mere puppets operating at the whim of the author. Ishihara Shintarô, deriding the lack of a complicating irony in the guidelines formulated by the narrator, also complained of a mismatch between the seriousness of the theme and the narrator's hip-hop stylistic affectations, particularly the constant use of "Yo, nigger!" (in Japanese the phrase is written " YO hôhai," with the reading nigâ attached to the kanji for hôhai). His concern over the story's style was shared by Miyamoto Teru. Takagi Nobuko, rather more tone-deaf than Ishihara to the phrase's racial implications, in contrast found the content and style to be well matched, and a similarly positive view was expressed by Kuroi Senji. Personally, the use of the phrase struck me as the work of a hip-hop wannabe (inauthentic, if you will), and Yamada Eimi was naturally the one to point this out most clearly, chiding Mobu for his pseudo-rap style and calling him inaka-kusai for using nigâ as the furigana for hôhai. The story appears to have won the prize largely on the basis of two or three strong recommendations and the lack of strong support for any single rival (it may also have benefitted from the absence of two regular members of the selection committee, including Murakami Ryû). It was rightly recognized as being, below its faux-contemporary surface, a "serious" story about a pressing contemporary issue. But one also suspects that the doubts expressed by some committee members about Mobu's future potential are also on target." - http://www.f.waseda.jp/mjewel/jlit/reviews/akutagawa/akutagawa_2004.htmlYO NIGGER | | Friday, August 4th, 2006 | | 2:01 am |
GUITARS
Nothing, nothing can beat the consolation of guitars. It's all there is. | | Wednesday, July 19th, 2006 | | 5:10 pm |
Returned I had to return to Australia for business reasons unfortunately, and some other things. I have the new Utada Hikaru CD, Ultra Blue. I'll probably write about it at the other site soon. I also have the new Gothic & Lolita Bible. I also found a phenomenal and insane article about Morning Musume, which I will probably be putting up here soon. | | Tuesday, July 4th, 2006 | | 3:07 pm |
My Problem with the new Doctor Who
They don't take shit seriously enough.
This may seem ridiculous in a show like this, but think about it, think about the reason the old show was so great and often so hilarious, because actors were performing nonsensical actions and delivering nonsensical dialogue with complete conviction. If they're in on the joke it ruins it completely. In the new show they are in on the joke so it's become ironic and so I don't like it as much. Watch a story like 'The Time Monster' from the old series which is completely avant-garde and deranged. The concepts used in that story are logically meaningless but sound entirely convincing; the new series does not do this and relies almost exclusively on fantasy elements. They are trying to make it like U.S. science fiction shows. The reason Doctor Who was originally good was because of this ability to apply severe logic to illogical situations, resulting in hilarity and a strange sense of daring.
Watch anything from the Troughton or Pertwee eras and everyone takes everything completely seriously. If you watch the story 'The War Games', when the Time Lords execute him at the end, Philip Madoc's acting is ridiculously over-qualified; he is a far better actor than he needs to be and he isn't aware that he's in a children's show or whatever it is classified as; in that story the actors take everything so seriously that it becomes awesome; in other stories the same thing happens or else it becomes ridiculous and deranged but daring. Russell T. Davies doesn't know how to do this; he always has irony and camp. Whenever the new show is in danger of becoming awesome or genuinely deranged he will pull back and prevent this from happening. If you watch the Hartnell and Troughton eras the show is often serious and makes you think 'Holy shit'. Then later with Pertwee or Tom Baker it still makes you think 'Holy shit' because they are doing logically daring stories. The McCoy era also became good with this. But the new show is neither serious nor funny/daring.
You might say that in the old show this only worked fifty percent of the time; from an objective standpoint fifty percent of the show is unwatchable. But that's still fifty percent good. Maybe ten percent of that fifty percent is genuinely 'Holy shit' awesome or deranged. The new show doesn't have this; although the second season is better than the first. The first season had maybe one or two moments that pushed or were awesome; the second has a few more. They still need to find their feet and get more deranged writing; they need to stop being generic with shit.
Example: Tom Baker was deranged; he was always in character and confused the show with real life, marrying Lalla Ward (now married to geneticist Richard Dawkins whom she met through Douglas Adams), walking into people's houses unannounced and watching the show with people's children, having sex while wearing the costume (mentioned in one of his autobiographies), etc. The writers they had in the 80's were also deranged; they actually thought that plots about recursive occlusion and molecular Buddhist crystals were scientifically accurate. Or in the Hartnell era; the producers thought the show was supposed to be educational. They thought this show with dancing butterfly men and time travel was supposed to be educational. But the new writers and personnel are not deranged so the show is not good. If you handed the show over to me and my friends it would become deranged and good again. I should be writing the new Doctor Who. | | 2:50 pm |
Japan I have been in Japan for the past week. Regular updates and photos of my progress are available here: http://www.swiftywriting.blogspot.comMostly I am just trying to buy music and take photos of kogaru. If anyone wants anything bought or otherwise investigated let me know. | | Tuesday, June 13th, 2006 | | 11:49 pm |
Why I don't use pop-cultural references in my writing:
Because if I mention a band like Orange 9MM, if you haven't heard of them you feel left out, if you've heard of them you think "This guy must also like ___" and then the reader's conception of me is automatically limited, and if you know them and don't like them you feel vaguely bored and your connection to me is even more limited or even destroyed.
The same goes for all television shows, movies, books, comic books, and brand names.
They will not always exist, but testicles will probably always exist as long as there is human life and the mind will probably also exist. I can't understand why anyone would write something and put in pop-cultural references but not refer to testicles or the mind. But then my favorite book of all time (Akutagawa - A Fool's Life) isn't even in print, so what I think means fuck all.
I challenge anyone to explain how pop-cultural references make for better writing
"It has more verisimilitude"
Yeah, for about two months. Then it becomes dated.
The reason pop-cultural references in writing always detract from the work is because culture is no longer unitary; we do not live in a world in which you can reference the Oddyssey or something and everyone will get it; there are instead subcultures, and therefore any kind of pop-cultural reference automatically limits the work to one of them. I have never seen pop-cultural references make anything better; but have often seen them detract from the work. | | Thursday, June 8th, 2006 | | 3:12 am |
I am writing my most beautiful and terrible story
It shows you that you can live, you can be a Libra, you can live according to the world and still exist, you can tie cords around your beliefs until they wither and fall off; you don't have to die, you can be two people, as many people as you want
You can subsist off of torture.
I couldn't have written this without having read Jun'ichiro Tanizaki.
Tanizaki showed me that you could do this
He wrote Naomi, The Key, and Diary of a Mad Old Man.
Nabokov is a coward compared to Tanizaki.
Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Kawabata, Mishima
I've learned from these men.
I feel like I know what I can do, now. | | Sunday, June 4th, 2006 | | 10:36 pm |
Shin'ichi Hoshi
I have discovered the ULTIMATE writer. His name is Shin'ichi Hoshi.
I could talk about Hoshi's work, his place in the 60's Japanese SF scene, or his (scant) English language publication history. Instead, I will allow his work to speak for itself. This is his story, "The Negotiations."
"The Negotiations"
The devil appeared silently in a puff of smoke. His mission was to visit the world from time to time and sow evil among men.
He looked around. It was a quiet night, and there was a small house nearby where a man lived on his own. Hiding his tail, the devil knocked on the front door.
"Good evening," he said in as gentle a voice as possible to avoid alarm, which would have defeated his purpose. The occupant came to the doorway.
"What do you want? I'm just the night watchman." he said.
"I've come to give you a wonderful present."
"If that's what you've come for, I think you're wasting your time. I don't want anything."
So the offer was declined, but the devil carried on politely.
"You're the retiring sort, aren't you? You're just the sort of person for the present I want to give."
"What is it?"
"The power to win any game or contest you enter."
"I don't want that sort of power."
"But you have nothing to lose by it. Please accept it."
"If that's an order, I'll do as you say."
"It is. Right, then..."
The devil pointed a finger at the watchman's chest and mumbled some sort of spell.
"That's it. It's done. Just try throwing a dice. If you want the number one, you'll get it."
"Certainly. I'll try."
He rolled the dice ten times in succession and got the one every time.
"How's that? Are you pleased?"
"Not particularly."
"You'll be thankful soon enough. If you make good use of your power you'll be able to make as much money as you want..."
The devil beamed. No matter how serious a man might be, he would want to use this sort of power, and money easily earned is money easily spent. And when other people saw this they would come to regard honest toil as foolish. In other words, evil would spread.
"Now that I've given you something as good as this, " the devil continued, "I want you to grant me a request."
"What is it? Say what you want."
"I want you to promise me your soul when you die."
"I haven't got a soul," replied the watchman sorrowfully.
"You only think you haven't. Please, promise me."
"Since you say so, I'll do what pleases you."
"Then it's agreed. I'll see you later."
The devil disappeared in a flash and returned to his kingdom before the man could change his mind.
The next morning Dr. F returned to the house with a friend.
""This is the robot I've made. It obeys all my instructions and it makes a good watchman."
"It looks just like a human." replied the friend in admiration.
"Would you like a game of cards with it?" suggested the doctor.
"No. I'd be sure to lose if I played against a robot with such a fine electronic brain. Nobody would want to take it on."
The devil would have been chagrined had he known. No evil would be spread by the robot's winning its games. And what was more, no matter how long the devil waited to take possession of its soul, it would not die. And even if it did, it had no soul to give.
USING ROBOTS TO TRICK SATAN. | | Thursday, June 1st, 2006 | | 9:35 pm |
Osamu Dazai - "The Setting Sun"
Osamu Dazai Osamu Dazai Osamu Dazai
"The older and wiser heads of the world have always described revolution and love to us as the two most foolish and loathsome of human activities. Before the war, even during the war, we were convinced of it. Since the defeat, however, we no longer trust the older and wiser heads and have come to feel that the opposite of whatever they say is the real truth about life...this I want to believe implicitly: man was born for love and revolution."
Osamu...Dazai
"Any man who criticizes my suicide and passes judgment on me with an expression of superiority, declaring (without offering the least help) that I should have gone on living my full complement of days, is assuredly a prodigy among men quite capable of tranquilly urging the Emperor to open a fruit shop."
Osamu fucking Dazai | | Sunday, May 28th, 2006 | | 8:50 pm |
Synchronicity
Earlier today I was planning on writing one of my final essays now for Critical Metaphysics, and one of the topics I was considering was a comparison between the ideas of George Berkeley (believes matter does not exist) and G.W. Leibniz.
Anyway one of Leibniz's major ideas is that the world is a kind of program unfolded by monads or 'spiritual atoms' which are set in motion by God, in a system called 'pre-established harmony'.
While I was considering this, I was reading a book at the same time. I looked down again at the book I was reading, 'Innocent World' by Ami Sakurai and read this paragraph:
"Stepping on dry, yellow leaves, Takuya and I walked down Omotesando along a row of gingko trees that stuck their sad, thin naked branches high into the sky. I wouldn't be seventeen much longer. I'd completely annihilated the world of pre-established harmony that I'd been living in. A month before, I'd send my parents a short letter." | | Saturday, May 27th, 2006 | | 3:22 pm |
More excerpts from my correspondence
...to me manipulating text is bullshit; I can manipulate text; I could write an essay that logically demonstrated that Hitler was the best German leader of all time and all his political moves were awesome and that the Axis should have won; it is easy to provide 'logical principles' and 'theses' for this...if someone said "Research and write an essay demonstrating why Hitler was good and the Axis should have won," that, to me, is no different than writing an essay on colonial themes in the work of Chinua Achebe or the metaphysical beliefs of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz or something like that...when Ai was here I would steal her assignments and write essays she was supposed to write; I wrote essays for classes I wasn't even enrolled in and knew nothing about; I wrote essays about tourism and business management and received high distinctions even though I know nothing about tourism or business management. Essays are mechanical; a computer could be programmed to structure, rearrange, and rephrase information in essay format, so essays are meaningless, the manipulation of text is mainly used to gain power; example all the speeches given by presidents now, are not actually written by presidents...they are just manipulating text to deceive people; I examined this in my earlier articles I sent you, this is the same with capitalism, religion, the media, etc; there is a reason the publishing industry for example is structured the way it is, capitalism has absorbed this, it is to reinforce what exists...if you want to get more freedom in this area consider any book and attach "This is a work of fiction" before it. If you read the Koran, which is the word of God handed to Mohammed, keep "This is a work of fiction" in mind while reading it. If you read the Constitution of the United States of America, repeat "This is a work of fiction" after each passage. If you read an autobiography repeat "This is a work of fiction." If you read your own birth certificate repeat "This is a work of fiction."
I am not fundamentally different from a priest or a lawyer. James Joyce says this; if you read James Joyce he understands in "Portrait of the Artist" that a priest and a poet are not different.
What if I told you that God had spoken to me...or the Virgin Mary had appeared to me and imparted a message. This is not generally considered to happen, but it has been reported before. What if I told you this with complete conviction, all of my facial expressions and voice modulations connoted "truth" and "sincerity" to you, and I continued to behave normally in every other respect except insisting on the factual occurrence of the Virgin Mary appearing to me, objectively. Would you then believe this? What if people profited from this or claimed to be healed? What if instead of the Virgin Mary it was the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, and people were still healed? What if it was someone mentioning flying saucers instead? I am trying to show that we do not live in a world where 'objective truth' and 'fiction' or 'belief' are separate; they are not separate. Language and magic and law are not separate. So by saying that things are fictional I am NOT saying they are not "real".
This is why I tried to learn Japanese; I realized the world hates magicians because it is run by magicians; if you are a magician that wants power you will try to destroy other magicians, or prevent them from doing anything, prevent them from reaching anyone.
I used to not understand this; I used to live with a strong distinction between "fiction" and "nonfiction" and I could categorize or classify or criticize things with great sincerity; personal experience has changed that. Those distinctions are the result of magic, very successful magic. Civilization cannot exist without this kind of magic.
Artistically, all I am interested in now is insincerity. If I can recommend anything to writers in the future it is that they be more insincere. As Oscar Wilde said "All bad poetry is sincere."
Whatever you want to call this, priest/poet/lawyer/artist/magician, I don't want to use this to gain power, I used to, but that will not help, Tung-shan said:
"How could it be permissible to form a cult, gather followers and cronies, dash off writings, and toil in pursuit of objects for love of honor and advantage?"
This is a great temptation; it is a great temptation, but the first person you must affect with this is yourself; the first person a conman convinces is himself; sooner or later you will become a victim of your own magick.
About love:
Jean Renoir: "Love is the exchange of two fantasies"
Love is the same thing as this; it is behavioral magic; people that have a great capacity for love are this same kind of magician.
Again animals cannot do this.
All of this, by the way, everything I say is completely apparent if you compare humans to animals. I sometimes think the purpose of animals is to demonstrate these things. Probably if human beings were the only species in existence these things would be harder to figure out. Maybe this is why many deeply religious people draw close to animals - although possibly not. But if you look at a cow or a horse you will see what life is like without fiction. All animals are automatically Buddhas already. This doesn't mean that is anything special.
But there is the troubling story:
Question: Does a dog have the buddha-nature?
Answer: Mu (meaning in Japanese: nothing/nonbeing)
If you answer yes or no to this you lose your own buddha-nature, according to Chao-chou. But respecting Chao-chou is pointless; if you obey things Chao-chou says in words he will probably try to kill you.
Don't worry about bodhisattvas or anything; no one is helped by them...anyone that 'becomes' a Buddhist is automatically making an ass of themselves; anyone that would identify themselves as such, probably Chao-chou would laugh at them. Chao-chou is nothing special; he was just a collection of atoms and fluid. In Islam they tell you not to depict images of Mohammed. But a child with a crayon can draw Mohammed, can draw pictures of Allah. So which is greater - Mohammed, or a child with a crayon?
Don't believe any of this, it's all fictional. | | Friday, May 26th, 2006 | | 10:57 pm |
Osamu Dazai
OSAMU DAZAI
"We began a guessing game of tragic and comic nouns. This game, which I myself had invented, was based on the proposition that just as nouns could be divided into masculine, feminine, and neuter, so there was a distinction between tragic and comic nouns. For example, this system decreed that steamship and steam engine were both tragic nouns, while streetcar and bus were comic. Persons who failed to see why this was true were obviously unqualified to discuss art, and a playwright who included even a single tragic noun in a comedy showed himself a failure if for no other reason. The same held equally true of comic nouns in tragedies.
I began the questioning. "Are you ready? What is tobacco?"
"Tragic," Horiki answered promptly.
"What about medicine?"
"Powder or pills?"
"Injection."
"Tragic."
"I wonder. Don't forget, there are hormone injections too."
"No, there's no question but it's tragic.First of all, there's a needle - what could be more tragic than a needle?"
"You win. But you know, medicines and doctors are, surprisingly enough, comic. What about death?"
"Comic. And that goes for Christian ministers and Buddhist priests, too."
"Bravo! Then life must be tragic?"
"Wrong. It's comic too."
"In that case everything becomes comic. Here's one more for you. What about cartoonist? You couldn't possibly call it a comic noun, could you?"
"Tragic. An extremely tragic noun."
-from his novel "Disqualified from Being Human" | | Wednesday, May 24th, 2006 | | 9:04 am |
Shimotsuma Monogatari is not an example "Nearly all of the (gosurori) kids I've met are serious students who attend school regularly. But the common thread in their characters is their inability to gain joy from real life. They may be good students, but they're only top students because they are forced to be," he tells Weekly Playboy. "Poor parental relationships stand out, but there's also something cold and barren about them. They can't find anything to be happy about in life, so they go off into their own world and then hang out with like-minded people who are doing the same." - here | | Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006 | | 4:30 pm |
All the Books I Like
Philip K. Dick – VALIS
Yukio Mishima – The Sea of Fertility
Yasunari Kawabata – Beauty and Sadness
Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary
Ryunosuke Akutagawa – A Fool’s Life
H.P. Lovecraft – all of his writing
John Bellairs – all of his writing
Bret Easton Ellis – American Psycho
Clive Barker – The Damnation Game
Haruki Murakami – Norwegian Wood
Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities
Daniel O’Mahony – The Man in the Velvet Mask
Italo Calvino – If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller…
Robert Anton Wilson + Robert Shea – The Illuminatus! Trilogy
These are the only books I really like. At least one of them is technically considered ‘fan fiction’; the Japanese stuff is not taken seriously either. (the science fiction is taken more seriously than it) | | Sunday, May 21st, 2006 | | 3:03 pm |
Ai: Im doing folding lundry now ne!!
Spike: Huh
Spike: I miss your folding
Spike: It was awesome
Ai: arigatou!! I want to fold your clothes!! |
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