fine whine

So as I toiled today on my web-work for hire, I was jotting notes in an old notebook. I flipped through many a page of calculus figures and other artifacts of my "ersatz" education (pay attention to the fourth one, I suppose). They're not really funny, informative or even interesting, but if I type them up I can recycle that piece of paper. One down, several thousand to go, I suppose.

• You know the problem with Democrats is these days? There aren't enough Republicans making fun of them.
• Idea for a new TV show: Laugh at the everyday foibles of a group of five 20-something Canadian lumberjacks! It's a show about friendship, life, flannel and cutting down trees. Call it Chops.
• Idea for a new TV show: Persistence. A young teenage woman lies about her age and sex and gets into military academy to follow a hunky guy who enlosted before they could get to know each other. Plenty of soul-searching, drill-instructing drama!
• I think we need placebo schools -- that way we can really gauge how well we're doing. The placebo students would be the same as the real students except that they'd be learning complete nonsense. I'd like to be a teacher at one of those schools.
• Soon, every sport will have a corresponding computer game. They're pretty close--I'm still waiting for Virtual Yo-yo.

I will admit to liking that penultimate one about placebo schools, so much that I threw it onto my thots page. The rest are pretty bad, and I can only guess from the third one that the list was compiled sometime around the fall of 1998. Either I wasn't really funny then or I was trying too hard. Looking at the last one there, I think it was almost all the latter (but still a little of the former). Make of that what you will.

I'm tired of this whole 24 hour schedule. I don't think it works for me. Last night, or rather this morning, I was awake until 7:30am. Subsequent to that I "overslept" until 9:22, at which time I called my boss to lament my "running late" and ETA of "9:30 to 10ish". After my shower I checked my own voicemail and discovered that she too was out for the morning with a doctor's appointment (I hesitate to put it in quotes, but the idea does tempt me).

So with a maximum of two hours under my belt I'm still not so exhausted as to be dropping off to sleep. Hell, we walked over to the library tonight (about a three mile round trip) and lugged around a battered cedar chest (well, I walked back quickly and got the car. It took me seventeen minutes to walk the mile and a half and then four to drive it) and yet I am not sleepy.

So I play around with the web and am watching American splendor. Last night I ended up finishing out the translation of Koji Suzuki's Ring--it took me a whole day to read. I'm sure Suzuki would be tickled to think that his horrific material was that which snatched the sleep from me; I however blame the heat.

The book's quite good, really. I was awake enough to not be skimming too much of it and by the end was so impressed as to have reserved the next in the trilogy from the library (that said, I think I'll reserve something if the cover has nice colors). Reading it has given me more insight into my thoughts of both film adaptations. I maintain my opinion that the English one is better, though it is less faithful to the source material than Ringu. The stuff that Ringu keeps isn't done so well and takes what the book takes pains to root in (admittedly fringe) science and reality and turns it into a beating about the head with a blunt object. Or maybe just one of the translations was not as good as the other.
For a horror book, though, it was pretty decent. Not scary, per se, but defintely eerie. Well-written, too.

November's less than four months away, I should point out.

So this whole haiku
thing is getting kind of old
should I do lim'ricks?

Bah. That was horrible. I want to do limericks, but they're considerably more difficult. I know there are people out there who can rattle them off with little more than a moment's thought, but not me.

I was stuck on "So my boss went on vacation..." and meant to rhyme it with "consternation" or "frustration" but just couldn't get it to work.

Once again I could not fall asleep easily last night. I cannot be sure if it was thinking that kept me awake or being awake that kept me thinking, but I think I had a neat idea for a book. It's a mystery novel, quite possibly in the first person/bankrupt financially and morally/rooftop confrontation/etc. mold. The crime is a string of murders over almost a decade that get stumbled upon and ultimately halted. I'm considering doing it in third person and opening it up to the killer's POV as well (a la John Sandford) but probably won't; I've always had reservations about that style of writing though Sandford pulls it off with a certain finesse I can't hope to achieve. Anyway, the quirk about the book is that everybody in it is named Edgar, to a man (or woman). Naturally I'd provide other details and mannerisms to differentiate the Edgars, but if I can pull it off I don't even want to give them last names. So the killer's Edgar, all of the victims are Edgars as well as any potential suspects. As a bit of absurdity, I'd have the detective wonder "But who is the killer? What is his name?" or something like that that can only be idiotic in light of everybody being named Edgar. I'd picked that name previously for a quick ditty slash character study when an idea occurred to me that had no obvious use—so I made a page for it. It was only after an extra sleepless half hour that I remembered that the award given for particularly good mystery fiction is the Edgar, and to use that name so many times in a given novel could be considered name dropping or fishing. But I don't care. Silly books don't often win serious awards, after all.

In other news, I've targeted my GeoURL information as closely as possible. I believe the coordinates now pinpoint my fridge.

Two observations from the drive home today:

• A van in front of me with a small B&W TV on the dashboard, playing what looked like the news, though I didn't get too close.; Drivers like that scare me and he was obviously the one watching it—the other six seats were empty.
• A personalized license plate TSTGOD: what could this be?
  • Trust God?
  • Taste God?
  • Test God?
  • Toast God?
  • ...Gourd?
  • ...Garamond?
• I'm still stumped. Why did the guy keep the Ohio clipart instead of getting an extra letter for clarity? We may never know.

Chuck Palahniuk is a really cool guy. According to some marketing copy on Diary he's a nihilist, but that's nothing to hold against him, ha ha ha. I finished reading Diary tonight, having also started it tonight. There is a lot to be said about a book that can be read cover to cover in one evening; take notes here Clancy and Ludlum and all your word-heavy ilk. I enjoyed as thoroughly as I would've any longer book by a good author, because that's the key: Chuck's a good author and Diary's a good book.

Having finished reading it, I also feel purged of my earlier reading today, Bernard Levy's Who killed Danny Pearl? which is one of those self-important novels about writing a novel that hides the actual material in with page after page of filler about that tiny bit of actual writing. I hate those books, and I've even written a miniature version of one now just to prove a point or other. Levy's dust cover proclaims him to be France's finest philosopher and many other things, yadda yadda yadda. France's finest? Says who, asks I? Maybe it was the translation, but I didn't stumble across any great philosophy in the book I read, just a day by day account of what he did, where he went, and the events he may be imagining or fictionalizing but without separating them from the actual facts. That's not philosophizing, that's called bullshitting. And I slogged through that tome for several days for that revelation. Maybe I'm being hard on the guy but I wasn't engrossed in reading his book nearly to the degree he was engrossed in writing about writing it. How does a great philosopher and prominent author go about outlining such a book?

A self indulgent work of staggering banality

• Introduction
• write this a year later
• better yet, have a good friend write it and gush praise on with a trowel
• Chapter 1
• write about getting ready to write chapter 1
• drop lots of hints about what you will be writing about writing in subsequent chapters
• note for later: never write anything as promised
• Chapter 2
• write as though you're getting ready to start getting into the real meat of things
• write about how difficult something like chapter 2 is to write
• note for later: never get into the real meat of things
• Chapter 3
• ...

And so on? Or do they just keep writing and writing until deadline and ship it off to a publisher? I've gained a lot of respect for Jack Kerouac, who apparently (or better, supposedly) submitted the manuscript for On the road as a single piece of paper in a continuous stream of writing. Now that's cool, and I bet you he didn't have an outline planned out beforehand. Just as I had no plan for this rant before it started but it just started flowing, HTML syntax and all.

Now that I am a week out of it, I think I can say that doing the novel writing month might not have been a completely good idea. For one thing, I completely shirked my "learning Japanese" duties that whole month, as well as the vacuuming. Moreover and much more importantly it has changed the way I read books. Before I merely read the books, enjoying them as appropriate and then moved on with my life. Then November rolled around and I got this foolish notion into my head that I too could write a somewhat smaller version of my favorite pastime, and promptly went about said pastime with a gusto unseen in the previous months. The books I read in November were without hesitation the best I'd read in a while, at least taken as an aggregate. Some of them stand up on their own, too. Anyway, once I was "done" with my "novel", nothing has been the same since. Now when I am reading a book I not only read it but I size it up, in the manner mentioned in Fight club, and all the while think one of three things:

• Could I have written this?
• I could have written this.
• I never would have written this.

Seriously, though, now I am confronted nearly every time I read an amusing or interesting book with the thought, "This is how I would have written my novel!" Which is bad, because I am nowhere in the same league as any of these people, let alone Mil Millington, whose Things my girlfriend and I have argued about I am laughing my way through (and trying not to mentally revise into Things about which...). It's a very funny book—both funny and affectionate, if the pullquote on the cover is to be believed. I'll have let you know when I'm done with it (tomorrow).