Coming Back for More

I have not been in the habit of re-reading books -- outside of books assigned for college courses, the only books I have re-read have been written by Kurt Vonnegut. I read Breakfast of Champions twice in high school, and I just recently finished A Man Without a Country for the second time. Much to my surprise, I found that I enjoyed it even more this time around than I did on the first read-through. This has convinced me that I need to give more than a few of my books a second reading.

If you are a bibliophile enraged at my ignorance, I must ask you to kindly put down that revolver before you do something you will regret later. Hindsight has made it quite clear to me that my erstwhile reading habits sprang from precisely the wrong attitude. Literature is art, and a work of art is not a merit badge to be earned and promptly forgotten. This is a long-standing  objection I have had to the "1001 Maguffins you must Kerfuffle before you Die" series of books -- to experience something merely for the sake of experiencing it cheapens its value, and dimishes whatever reward you might hope to get out of it. It was only recently that I realized that I was falling prey to the same attitude.

You may be wondering why I haven't read the majority of my  books more than once, especially considering that I have watched the same movies multiple times, have listened to the same albums over and over again and have played through many games more times than I care to remember. To be perfectly honest, I have no real answer -- it just never felt necessary to read a book over again. That reading a book -- especially a sizeable novel -- necessitates a considerable investment in time might have been part of the problem, but that really isn't an excuse. The time it takes to experience a work of art really hasn't much bearing on what I get out of it. This is especially true given that I have kept the majority of the books I have enjoyed.

Perhaps it's time to revisit the old favorites after all.

Holy Hell, I've Been at This for Three Years

It just dawned on me that my last post marked three years to the day that I started this blog. It was initially just meant to be something to play around with, but through the march of time it has become something a bit more important than that. Although it's been sparse here as of late, I have no intention of quitting or going on any sort of hiatus (you'll be greatly relieved to know, I'm sure). I've been grappling with that damned book I'm trying to write, which has been something of a black hole from which none of my attention can escape (that, plus all those damned computer games).

In the meantime, I'm going to try to recommit myself to posting some more meaningful musings for you passers-by to read. Thanks for taking moments of your life to read my scribblings -- it's good to know that there's someone out there in the blackness of space.

What a Manuscript Looks Like

I realize that it's been somewhat sparse around here for the last month or so, and for that I do apologize. However, I do have what I hope is a reasonable excuse -- I've been trying to write a book (emphasis on the trying bit). And when I say write, I do mean write. For whatever reason, I find that the words just flow more readily with pen and paper than with keyboard and word processor (many of the longer posts here were handwritten as drafts, in fact). Besides, I still have a New Year's Resolution which remains unfulfilled. 

We'll see where this leads me. Probably nowhere, but hey.

New Year's Dissolutions, Revisited

Way back in January, I made a post outlining my aspirations for this year. To briefly recapitulate, my primary new year's resolutions were:

1. Start a collection of classic movie swag
2. Get a new job
3. Get something published somehow

The year is not quite half over, but I've managed to accomplish two of these. Paying off my credit card has left me with a bit of financial wiggle room -- no bailouts from the IMF for me, I can assure you! -- which has allowed to collect a few DVDs and books of interest. In the former category, I am now the proud owner of the Busby Berkeley Collection and the Myrna Loy and William Powell Collection. Where books are concerned, I secured copies of Lulu in Hollywood (which I am currently reading and rather enjoying) and Being and Becoming (Myrna Loy's autobiography). The latter is a first edition hardcover, a particular point of pride for me.

More importantly, perhaps, I start a new job at a local law firm two weeks from tomorrow. I have no idea how this happened -- it's almost as though I just stumbled into it. My daily commute has been slashed to all of fifteen minutes, since the office is essentially right down the street. The work promises to be much more demanding than that which my current job entails, but I expect it to be a welcome change of pace from soul-deadening boredom.

The third resolution, on the other hand, remains unfulfilled. Nevertheless, I'm working on it -- you've hopefully noticed that the posts here have been increasing in length and quality (if not quantity). I used to want to be a fiction writer -- and to a certain degree I still do -- but it seems that nonfiction is much more my forte. In addition to providing an avenue by which I can pursue my geeky obsessions, writing these posts has also allowed to my keep my writing skills up to snuff. Even if I don't managed to get something published this year, writing reviews and such here is really a pleasure in and of itself. It's also a treat, by the way, to have a readership at all. Minuscule as my audience might be, it's nice to know that someone out there is listening. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Oh, and I've switched to a new template (as you might have noticed). The old one was getting a little stale.

Brain Droppings: Bored at Work Edition

Another installment of everyone's favorite series! There's a gimmick this time around, though: these particular fragments are taken from notes I have scribbled down while bored at work (I keep a notebook in my cubicle specifically for this purpose. As you might have imagined, it sees some fairly heavy use). Here's a few choice cuts:

• I've read that writing must be a job rather than a hobby if one is to truly succeed at it. It's nice work -- if you can get it. But even if you try, can you get it at all?

• Related: why is it that I find it easier to write with a pen than with a word processor? Something about a pen and paper just seems more personal, more honest. The permanence of it also makes it more difficult (and therefore much less tempting) to second-guess myself. Yet, at the same time, it also seems less official, less concrete, less likely to ever be read by anyone.

• Still no good ideas as to what my next subject ought to be. It would be best, I think, if it didn't involve me -- I spend entirely too much time talking about myself. Unfortunately, myself is really the only thing I can discuss with any expertise. Far too many of my posts revolve around why I like this album (excellent guitar work!) or why I like that actress (she has a hot ass!).
  

• Bohemianism is a perfectly reasonable and respectable manner of living, just so long as one remembers to bathe regularly. The pursuit of material wealth is not the purpose of human existence -- despite what some would have you believe -- nor is it the most admirable manner of living (far from it, in fact).

• One of my life goals is to someday be the kind of disaffected old curmudgeon that disaffected young curmudgeons aspire to someday be like. Similar, I will admit to George Carlin, but ideally with a touch of Gore Vidal mixed in (if only to balance out the venom and griping with a bit of profundity).

Congratulations, you've made it to the end.

New Year's Dissolutions

I can't say I'm sad to see 2009 go -- it was a year when not many things worked out the way I wanted them to, the marquee disaster being the ignominy of having to move back in with my parents after a unsuccessful year-long job search in Washington. Although I did manage to eventually find a job, it's strictly a just-here-for-the-paycheck affair (to be perfectly frank, the work bores me to tears). Yet in times such as these we hardy survivors can do naught but but look for the silver lining, and there is one I managed to move into my own apartment once more, and in one of the few interesting part of Kansas City, no less. It is now 2010, and in keeping in that spirit of positive thinking I'm planning to make 2010 a better year than it's predecessor.

The first thing I'd like to do is find a new job. Even it's just another office job, it's difficult to believe that it could be any more menial and unfulfilling than the one I have now. Besides, the prospect of merely having a different boss is rather appealing, as is the prospect of not having to drive all the way to Lenexa every morning (Lenexa being a commuter town that is so thoroughly white-bread and boring that it makes Overland Park seem interesting by comparison). In any case, I've been thinking about getting into the health care industry. I've even kicked around the idea of trying to become a paramedic.

Next on the list is to build a collection of classic movie swag (and if possible, swag from the twenties and thirties in general). I've gotten off to a pretty good start over the holidays -- as is apparent in the last post -- but I don't think a nerdy obsession can carry much street cred until you have at least a dozen or so books on one's chosen subject matter (by my last count, I have ten such volumes. Looks like I'll need to step it up a bit). If nothing else, this will let me say that I have a genuinely interesting hobby (besides playing Castlevania until four in the morning, that is).

But finally, and perhaps most importantly, I want to write something and get it published. In a strictly technical sense, I am a published author -- you'll find my name in the byline of a few thoroughly uninteresting articles in my High School Yearbook, but in all honesty, who gives a toss about High School Yearbooks? I don't even have mine anymore, and I'll bet that at least half of you out there don't, either. I've mentioned in previous posts my hopes being a proper writer, but I have yet to make good on that aspiration. To get anything published at all -- even a brief article in an obscure online journal -- would be huge step forward, and a significant personal victory (of which I have had precious few over the years).

I haven't much of a conclusion for this bit, so I'll leave it at that. Whatever your plans are for this new year, here's hoping they come to fruition.

P.S. I might have added "make some new friends" to my list of resolutions, but I really suck at that sort of thing. And besides, there's no substitute for the crew I ran with way back when.

Ten Years On

There's a fairly interesting article in the New York Times about the rapidly-approaching end of the decade and how this decade will be remembered. One perspective that isn't represented in the article, however, is that of one who came of age in the 2000s. These last ten years were an interesting time to be alive, fraught with political intrigue, full of social upheaval. I expect that years from now the 2000s will be remembered in much the same way that the 1960s are remembered--if there's a television show about life in the 2000s, it's going to be a lot more like The Wonder Years than That 70s Show.

While the 1990s were a time of optimism and prosperity, the 2000s were a time of strife and unease. The decade began with the scandalous presidential election of 2000 which delivered George W. Bush into the White House (for better or worse). Maybe there was a bit of flotsam and jetsam in the corridors of power, but that much, I figured, was to be expected. After all, anyone raised in a post-Watergate America was brought up in the common knowledge that all politicians are liars and cheaters. Perhaps it didn't matter who was pulling the strings--one politician was the same as any other (or so I thought, anyway).

Then, not even a year later, that day came. On that day, the decade began in earnest. Everyone will remember where they were and what they were doing when the world changed on the morning of September 11, 2001. The nation went to war that day, fueled by outrage and a berserk lust for revenge. Two years later, the United States invaded Iraq. Why? Nobody really seems to know why, even all these years later. Maybe we got tired of Afghanistan and decided to try something different. Whatever the reason we decided to start the war, it certainly doesn't seem to have made things any better for us. As we waged wars overseas, our economy began to fall into a shambles, until the whole thing very nearly collapsed in 2008.

This was the world in which I came of age. In the last ten years, I have seen that the omnipotence, invulnerability and moral infallibility of my country--convictions which, when the decade began, I held very dear--were simply illusions. That is how I will remember the 2000s: a decade of disillusionment.

On Being an Aspiring Writer

Like so many other bloggers, I suspect, I aspire to be a "true" writer. I feel as though I have a tentative plan for my first attempt at a proper book outlined in my head, but I just can't seem to get it down on paper (and I do hope to produce a proper manuscript, not a simple word document). The problem, as it has always seemed to be, is that I just don't know where to begin. And even if I should manage to get started, I will still be plagued by myriad nagging doubts, primary among these the question of why anyone would ever want to read what I've written in the first place.

There are rather a lot of ideas swirling about the primordial soup of my mind, from grandiose scenarios to brief scenes to assorted paragraphs, scentences and fragments. Thousands of middles, a few ends, but--as ever--no beginnings; no means of getting to the middles and ends, let alone making them meaningful and interesting to an audience. So many themes, but no way of placing them in context nor of making them meaningful to anyone other than myself.

Yet in spite of all my doubts, I nevertheless feel as though I have to write. I have to secure some sort of legacy; I have to secure my share of immortality, no matter how minuscule it might be. It is highly doubtful that I will find a place in the literary pantheon, but if I can touch the lives of even a few people--that is, if just a few people are moved by and find pleasure in what I might create--it will all have been worth the effort.

Madness

It's been a pretty hectic few weeks here in Sigmaville. I left Tacoma at the end of March, and the odds are that I probably won't ever return. I'm back in Kansas City, where I spent a painfully awkward adolescence and where I will probably be living for the next couple years. I know I'm going to miss the Northwest quite a lot--the four years I spent there were probably the best I'll ever see. Nevertheless they are gone, and it accomplishes naught to pine for the past. On the plus side, I finally managed to land a job, where I will start working tomorrow. After nearly a year of joblessness, it's both a relief and a source of trepidation to be going back to work.

For a while I was thinking of my expulsion from the Northwest as the end, but in the last few days I've begun to think of it as a new beginning of sorts. In a few months I'll hopefully be living on my own again. Kansas City isn't perhaps as bad I sometimes make it sound--after all, it is the city that at various times was home to Wallace Beery, Ginger Rogers, Jean Harlow and Joan Crawford. There also exists a great deal of Jazz Age and Art Deco ephemera in Kansas City, as the years between the two World Wars was a sort of heyday for the city. And besides, it's not as though I'm trapped here forever. I've been kicking around the idea of moving to Upstate New York In a few years--after I've paid off my student debts, upgraded my computer and bought a new car. Syracuse seems appealing, if only for the Niagara-Mohawk Building.

In any event, I've rambled on long enough for now. So that this post has some redeeming value, here's a picture of Myrna Loy.

An Aside

My birthday is on Monday. In the unlikely event that anyone out there in TV Land should be wondering what to get me, please allow me to make a suggestion.

The Return...

Some of you might have noticed my conspicuous absence from the inter-blogo-net-sphere the past week or so. More of you, I bet, didn't. Either way, the reason was pretty simple--my motherboard decided it had had enough of life, and died. Two weeks and two hundred and fifty dollars later, I have returned to tell the tale. I don't really remember how I managed to pass the time--it's mostly a haze of bad zombie movies, football and telephone arguments (and that whole presidential election thing). Anyhow, everything is settled, and I am ready to resume filling your spare time with my obsessive nonsense.

"Oh Lord, this must be Heaven..."

My first conception of Heaven was a graveyard. When I was a child, I lived in the vicinity of several cemeteries, one of which was right next door to the playground where my classmates and I used to go for recess. All that separated the basketball court and the swing set from row after row of marble headstones was a chain-link fence that the more athletic among us would occasionally climb over to retrieve the odd lost basketball. My understanding of death and eschatology was considerably limited, but I figured out fairly early on that the cemetery was where the dead inevitably wound up. In retrospect, that curious arrangement seems a poignant reminder of the thin line that separates life here on Earth from the great beyond.

One of the earliest of my dreams that I can recall with any notable clarity was a dream wherein my parents decided that they wanted to be rid of me. Having been turned out of my home, I wandered outside. A great light now came from the sky, and as I looked up I saw the blue sky part like satin curtains, revealing an idyllic cemetery, the kind one might expect to find in a churchyard on an island off the coast of Britain. What I remember most of my vision-within-a-vision was a monolithic black headstone, in the shape of a cross. For all I knew, it might well have been my own headstone. As I beheld this sight, slack-jawed in wonder, I was overcome by a great sense of longing and, more poignantly, a desire to be there, in that cemetery.

Ever since I had that dream so many years ago, cemeteries have held a profound appeal for me. Whenever I pass one, I always feel an inexplicable desire to go inside and to wander among the headstones, reading the names inscribed upon them and wondering who these departed souls were. One of the more interesting twists of fate in my life is that my first lessons in driving took place in a cemetery.

My conception of Heaven (and indeed of the afterlife in general) has changed greatly over the years. I tend not to think of the afterlife so much as a material place as a state of mind. I think of death and the afterlife as an eternal sleep. If the soul is at peace, its dreams will be peaceful. Heaven, then, is a kingdom of sweet dreams--serene images either remembered from one's life experience or imagined. The comparison of sleep and death is as old as human life itself. Indeed, the connection is present in the very word cemetery, which derives from the Greek κοιμητήριον, meaning "sleeping place."

The only thing I want from life is for my soul to be at peace when I die. I can forgo all the material symbols of success and good life, so long as I can be die a truly peaceful death, and take my place in the cemetery to sleep the eternal sleep and dream eternal dreams.

Dreaming of the Field of Glory

Over the past week or so, my sleep patterns have been rather out of the ordinary. I've been falling asleep much earlier than I usually do--around 10 PM or midnight, rather than the usual 2 AM or later. Concurrently, I've been waking up uncharacteristically early, usually before dawn, and I've been unable to get back to sleep. I'm less interested, however, in the the physical matters of sleep than I am with what happens in my unconscious mind during those few hours wherein I am asleep.

The past few months have seen a rather strange recurring theme in my dreams--not only am I back in High School, but I'm also specifically in Phys Ed class. Sometimes I'm aware of the abnormality of the situation, while other times I simply go along with the scenario as if it were perfectly ordinary. The finer details are lost in the murk of my subconscious, but I can recall that the dream always seems to take place during the preparations for the daily exercises, while I'm emerging out of the locker room into the gymnasium itself.

Last night I had a more vivid, larger scale version of the dream. Not content with the mundaneness of simple Physical Education, my subconscious saw fit to cast me as a member of my High School football team (i.e. the Shawnee Mission North Indians, whose games I made a point of never attending). Rather than preparing to run laps around the basketball court, I was preparing to take the field (or at least the sideline).

I'm no athlete, and I'll readily admit that (I just did, in fact). Outside of an early Halloween, I've never worn a football uniform--a fact of which I seemed oddly aware in my dream. I also couldn't find a helmet or a decent pair of shoes (the equipment manager was clearly asleep at the wheel). I finally did manage to get all my equipment in order, but I woke up before we actually went out onto the field. Kind of shame, really; I would have liked to have seen how I did. I probably would have looked a lot like this guy:

[Image sauce]

Nerdgasm

I'm all wound up and giddy, because I just got received in the mail the copy of Stars of the Photoplay (from 1930) that I ordered. At a little more than $20, it was a pretty serious steal.

Things I Have Learned in the Past 24 Hours

• It is possible to do the Charleston (or at least a modern approximation of it) to Drum and Bass music.
  
• Sometimes, another guy will buy you a drink for no other reason than the fact that he likes your hat
• Even if you don't actually have a job just yet, walking around downtown Seattle in a suit makes you look and feel important
• I am actually capable of city driving without bursting into flames
• I need a more fuel-efficient car
  
• I can, apparently, type fifty words per minute
• Microsoft Office can do a lot more than what I already knew it could
• How to tie a necktie
  

Everything New Is Old Again

Perhaps in reaction to the uncertainty of the future, I have spent the last few days wallowing in fond memories of the past. I've been playing a number of old Super Nintendo games that I haven't touched in years, and I've delved into my music collection to break out some Nine Inch Nails. NIN was one half of the musical yin-yang that made up my freshman year of college, the other being Pink Floyd. Those heady days of 2004 and 2005 are now in the distant past, and hardly a day goes by when I don't reminisce about the spring of my life.

When I was a freshman, I was every bit the young, liberal idealist one might expect to find on any university campus. At the same time, my social anxieties led me to feel more than a little isolated from my peers. Because its themes of isolation and distance resonated with me so profoundly, I found myself listening to Pink Floyd's The Wall on an almost nightly basis. At the same time, the dark and brooding atmosphere of Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile and The Downward Spiral also spoke to me.

Although the music I listened to at the time was melancholic--I wouldn't become familiar with the truly dark genres of Black and Death Metal until the spring of 2006--my day to day life was almost the opposite. I truly did love academics, and there were many times when I would leave class with a feeling of profound epiphany. Try as I might, I have never been able to recover that feeling of wonder.

These days, the music I listen to is quite dichotomous. There's the exuberance and epic heroism of Power Metal on the one end of the spectrum, and the despair and bitterness of Black Metal on the other. Various sweetly melancholic Folk and Ambient music lies in the more central regions of the spectrum.

I had the good fortune today of stumbling across the following video. It is footage from the 1982 film version of The Wall, set to the music of Nine Inch Nails. Had I found this when I was a freshman, I would have thought it to be the greatest thing ever. Even today I rather like it. Enjoy!

Stagnation?

The universe seems content to place an unending series of obstacles in my path. I've been a college graduate for about a week and a half, but I still have no job to speak of. I have enough money saved up that I can live more or less comfortably for a month or two, but I'd rather have a job than have to live off of savings. I'm going to have to stay where I am for the time being, but so it goes. I really shouldn't complain too much; it could always be worse.

In the meantime, my job search continues. I'm not really any closer to knowing what I want to do with my life than I was four years ago, but I have to suppose that it will come to me eventually.

Out Of The (Animated) Past

I recently had an epiphany of sorts. I have been wondering as of late why I am so fascinated with Art Deco. Though I am three quarters of a century removed from the heyday of the Jazz Age, it has nevertheless always felt very familiar to me. I was watching a few cartoons on YouTube which I remember watching in the bygone days of my childhood. After a quick bit of research, I realized that a good number of these dated from the mid-to-late-1930s.

Like most American children--and a good many European children, I imagine--I grew up with the Warner Bros. pantheon of cartoon characters. Most of these, including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig, came into existence in the late 1930s, but did not take on their iconic forms until the 1940s and 1950s. As much as I liked the cartoons featuring those famous figures, it was always the older ones from which they were absent that captured my imagination. They always seemed so ancient--watching these cartoons was like looking into another world. And in many ways, it was. The Jazz Age was swept out of the popular subconscious by World War II, and was further buried by the newfound prosperity and technological progressiveness of the Atomic Age.

The Second World War was such a momentous event in the American mythos that we have become accustomed to thinking of the entire spectrum of Western history as part of two eras--before and after Pearl Harbor. In my younger years, I thought that way myself. Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment and the Jazz Age all fell into that largely homogenized morass of the before; American popular culture had become (and continues to be) so far removed from anything before December 7, 1941 that Cicero and Horace might as well be contemporaries of Abraham Lincoln and Douglas Fairbanks.

That is why I, as a young American, found those old cartoons so fascinating. It was a way of looking into that forgotten world, a way more real in my child's eyes than any history book I could have read.

Absentia Belli

You have probably noticed my somewhat protracted absence. Sadly, pressing real world concerns--such as finding a job and a place to live following my impending graduation from the University of Puget Sound--have occupied what little free time my end-of-semester workload currently affords me. The search for employment and housing has not been particularly fruitful, but something is bound to come up--here is one of the few situations in my life wherein I have been optimistic, if only because the grim reality is that I really can't afford not to be.

For someone like me, who has never been particularly good at networking, the process of writing cover letters and contacting potential employers is daunting, and in many ways downright intimidating. For many years now I've worried interminably about the way in which those around me perceive me. As the old adage goes, it is wise to make a good first impression, since you only have one chance to make one. The biggest cause of my apprehension and hesitance in my job search has been my worry about making a good impression and presenting myself in the best way possible.

I have also been struggling against my entrenched psychology. I am nothing if not a creature of habit; like paranoid schizophrenics, I like my routine. In this situation where there is no routine, I find myself rather stressed, perhaps more than I ought to be. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I don't always react to stress in a healthy manner. Owing to my disproportionate social anxiety, it's been hard for me to even begin writing the necessary letters, as I know that they will pass before the scrutinizing eyes of potential employers. To put it another way, I am mortified of being judged--especially without the comfortable anonymity which the internet affords me!--and I now find myself in a position where I am subject to the judgment of persons who have no knowledge of beyond my resume, which is not particularly impressive (not that anyone's resume is superb right out of college, save the ubiquitous overachievers, but I have never found much solace in the knowledge that my experiences are shared).

In any event, the search continues. I still believe that things will work out in the end, but getting to that end will be an uphill battle. I humbly beg--euchomai, o andres kai gunaikes Athenaoi!--that you will forgive my absence. I assure you that it is not permanent!