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en route II
Spent some time yesterday hanging out on Penn's campus, a great place to kill some time in the afternoon. Sitting outdoors, I worked my way through the first eight Max/MSP tutorials: I haven't done anything that even resembles audio processing yet, but after doing the arithmetical operators tutorial and the metro [metronome] tutorial, I was able to apply those skills to build a crude stopwatch:
Only 45 more Max tutorials to go and then I get to move on to the MSP tutorials. Sigh.
In other news, Philadelphia seems surprisingly crowded with unsecured wireless networks: this is the first time I've toured with a wireless-enabled laptop and I seem to be able to sneak onto the Internet almost everywhere I've been. Thanks, strangers.
Last night wrapped up with Balkan food, a world cuisine with which I had previously been unacquainted. Tasty pork!
Final note: I haven't been able to arrange to either check my invisible-city e-mail remotely or to have it auto-forwarded to a different account, so those of you needing to get in touch may want to use the "projects" e-mail instead. |
Thursday, May 25, 2006
8:21 AM
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en route
Currently travelling around the East Coast for a couple of weeks, which means that updates to this blog may be sporadic.
Last night my all-boys team placed third in a Rock and Roll High School trivia challenge (second place went to the all-girl half of our posse, but at least I got a T-shirt). Afterwards I went out for a round of Yuenglings with a group of folks, including Anthony Miccio, sometimes Voice-writer, who, I learned, wrote this piece about the Ying Yang Twins' "Wait." I haven't heard the song but I was glancingly familiar with Miccio's piece on it cause about a year ago I'd read this response from Jessica Hopper. Read both if you get a chance: it's worth it, and the two pieces taken together open up a good half-dozen cans of worms: gender, power, race, privilege, sexuality, sexual violence, pop culture and its ramifications, etc. Good stuff to think about on a vacation. |
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
11:55 AM
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what i've been doing II
Those of you who have looked at this blog more than a couple of times know that I'm fond of complicated organizational schemes, so it won't surprise you to learn that this new piece of fiction I'm working on (outlined a bit in Thursday's post) deals with dozens of characters, multiple parallel narratives, flashbacks within flashbacks, that sort of thing. You also probably won't be surprised, given my weak spot for information visualization, to find out that I've started mapping out the book-in-progress in an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of its convolutions as I write.
Here's a screenshot of the first six chapters, with characters A-G showing:
This spreadsheet owes a debt to the geek-information-art of Danielle Aubert, particularly her inspirational 58 Days of Drawing Exercises in Microsoft Excel. |
Sunday, May 21, 2006
9:22 AM
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what i've been doing
There haven't been too many substantive posts on this blog lately, sorry about that. A lot of my online time has been spent doing research for an attempt to write the so-called "novel of adequacy" that I first started talking about back in October. At the time I was feeling pretty down about my ability to write such a thing, but in March, coming back from the East Coast microtour, something suddenly "clicked" in my head and I thought "I know how to do this."
We'll see if my intial confidence is borne out by the actual thing itself, once it comes into the world. I will say that the writing process is going remarkably speedily: I've been working on it for only about a month and I've finished six chapters, or what will be probably about a quarter of the book.
Anybody who wants to read it as a work-in-progress, don't be afraid to get in touch.
In other news, Chris and I have been working on finishing the new Number None release: the fifth "official" full-legth, to be entitled Edison | Orison. I'm not exactly sure when it will be released (we're thinking of shopping it around to other labels instead of self-producing it) but it's good to think of the thing as almost done. We're working on track order this week, and when we're done I'll post a listing: hopefully the track titles will seem appropriately provocative and cryptic. Labels: novel_of_adequacy, number_none, personal, writing |
Thursday, May 18, 2006
4:47 PM
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truth / fiction
So today in the Trib there's an article about AirTroductions, a personals service for airline travelers.
From a 2005 Business Week article on the service (archived on their press page):
"Airline flights are one of the few situations where you find yourself wedged against a total stranger for hours at a time. It might as well be someone you like. With that in mind ... AirTroductions.com aims to match like-minded fliers for business networking, book discussions, romance -- whatever it is you want from a seatmate."
It's kind of strange to see this idea appear in reality, because I had my fictional character Fletcher cook up this idea five years ago, in an Imaginary Year entry entitled "A Million-Dollar Idea."
I thought this idea was dumb at the time I wrote it, and still do, but somewhere, Fletcher is tearing what's left of his hair out.
Teeth-whitening mints, the other get-rich-quick idea that Fletcher pushes (in November 2002), still seems not quite to have made it to the market yet, although Confectionery Market Report 2006 has this to say: "The sugar confectionery sector has ... been struggling in the face of a falling under-15 population. However, suppliers have looked elsewhere for inspiration and have developed ranges that target demand for oral-health products, including teeth-whitening and breath-freshening in the mint and gum subsectors."
You heard it here first. |
Thursday, May 11, 2006
1:45 PM
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future of the book
I finished reading the Nichol / McCaffery collaboration Rational Geomancy: The Kids of the Book-Machine about a month ago, but I'm still picking it up and pulling good quotes out of it.
For instance, there's this 1831 gem by Alphonse de Lamartine: he's writing on journalism, but the quote seems even more trenchant when taken as an early prediction (and critique?) of the emergence of the "blogosphere":
"Before this century shall run out, journalism will be the whole press—the whole human thought. Since that prodigious multiplication which art has given to speech—multiplication to be multiplied a thousand-fold yet—mankind will write their books day by day, hour by hour, page by page. Thought will be spread abroad in the world with the rapidity of light; instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood at the extremities of the earth—it will spread from pole to pole. Sudden, instant, burning with the fervor of soul which made it burst forth, it will be the reign of the human soul in all its plentitude. It will not have time to ripen—to accumulate in a book; the book will arrive too late. The only book possible from today is a news paper."
To be fair, it seems like Lamartine was slightly off the mark—books still get written, after all—although Nichol and McCaffery couple the Lamartine quote from Lyotard, which seems to even more precisely (if cynically) predict the status of the book in the current state of the mediascape:
"[I]n the next century there will be no more books. It takes too long to read, when success comes from gaining time. What will be called a book will be a printed object whose 'message' (its information content) and name and title will first have been broadcast by the media, a film, a newspaper interview, a television program, and a cassette recording. It will be an object from whose sale the publisher (who will also have produced the film, the interview, the program, etc.) will obtain a certain profit margin, because people will think that they must 'have' it (and therefore buy it) so as not to be taken for idiots or to break (my goodness) the social bond! The book will be distributed at a premium, yielding a financial profit for the publisher and a symbolic one for the reader."
Less dire takes can maybe be found at if:book, the blog of the Insititute for the Future of the Book, although it's worth noting that the top post as I write this is a post about war documentaries, gamer theory, machinima, and Sony TV commercials: quite interesting, but not a book in sight. Labels: poetry_commentary, writing |
Friday, May 05, 2006
9:51 AM
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self-promotional IV
Oh, yeah, almost forgot to mention: Chicago-area readers of this blog might want to know that Number None (my band) will be playing tonight at the Empty Bottle. We'll be premiering a new piece entitled "Bilgewater and Nitrogen."
Actual content returning soon. Labels: number_none, personal |
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
5:39 PM
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