Talking to my mama the other night and she asked if the road construction outside our house was done yet. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. So here’s three thousand words worth:

Or to answer in three words, “No, not yet.”

In addition to retooling the website, I’m also slushing at UW-Milwaukee’s literary magazine The Cream City Review. This is the first time I’ve ever read slush before. It’s a strange experience being on this side of the fence.

I have to read 40 submissions before the end of the year or I get a slap on the wrist. No problem. Dudes like the Slushgod and Slushmaster do this in an afternoon. So I went through the first ten. Right off the bat, there were only a couple that used standard manuscript format, by that I mean Times New Roman, one-inch margins, page numbered, and SASE for response. One had no SASE. One submitted three stories in one packet and used A11 paper. All of the cover letters save one were far too long; there’s something about talking up a story in the cover letter that inspires pity. I cringe when I look at the cover letters I sent out when I first started writing. They looked like a lot of these.

The writing, however, was far better than I expected. Only one didn’t make it past the first page because of the writing. What I saw most often was waffling in the storytelling. Too much meandering or repeating an idea, only saying it slightly differently, and otherwise being dull “slice of life” scenes. And for the two that avoided all of these pitfalls within the first third of the story, they were just too damn long and not interesting enough. One was 8K words. I jotted the dreaded “Nice writing here but failed to hold my interest” note on the form rejection. Because it was true.

The other lesson I’m learning is the utter crapshoot nature of winging a story off to a literary market. There’s something like a dozen fiction slushers who pass stories up to the main editorial trio. They make the final call, buying about six (!) stories for our bi-annual magazine. One of the stories that I rejected but sorta liked had to do with a girl finding a froggy-mermaid thing. Why that one? Because I generally like fantasy-ish stories. The other slushers may hate that stuff, so it’s a 1-in-12 chance for writers with speculative inclinations to get me as their favorable first reader. And it still has to get past two of the three main editors before it would be published.

As a writer, this makes me want to save my stamp money and buy lottery tickets instead.

I told my buddy the other day that I’ve finally hit the pinnacle of my writing career: I’m broke and I’m writing overly-complicated stories that no one seems to understand.

Rare is the rejection letter that makes me laugh, but I got one this weekend. The editor (who I like and respect) took the time to point out parts of my story that were confusing or didn’t seem to make sense, and mentioned that the story was somewhat repetitive and unresolved. That doesn’t sound so funny, now does it? The funny part is that I used this story for part of my final project for my Masters exam. One of my professors said it was his favorite story of the bunch because of its heavily “modernist” tendencies. The positives he mentioned? How the confusing parts lacked any explanation and how the story itself was cyclical and unresolved, just like the plight of the protagonists.

Which in all honesty was exactly what I was going for. I didn’t think it would fly at the spec fic markets I usually send to, and so far it hasn’t (and there’s only one “major” market left). And that’s a-okay. This all speaks to how the story isn’t broken, it just has to find the appropriate market, and that may be in the literary magazine realm rather than the speculative one.

Current Mood: Okay |
Currently Listening To - Oasis - “Standing On the Shoulders of Giants”

…I’ve mastered the English language.

/
I’ve spent the morning reading essays from the following:
Narrative Con/Texts in Dubliners
Names and Naming in Joyce
ReJoycing: New Readings of Dubliners
James Joyce: The Augmented Ninth
European Joyce Studies 7
James Joyce’s Dubliners:Critical Essays
James Joyce’s Dubliners:A Critical Handbook
Critical Essays on James Joyce
James Joyce: New Perspectives
James Joyce: A Study of the Short Fiction
James Joyce & the Craft of Fiction
James Joyce and Modern Literature
20th Century Interpretations of Dubliners

I’m pretty damn certain that’s enough Joyce for today. The good news is that the central idea of my paper is shaping up nicely so hopefully it will be fast in the writing.

Oops. Brazil 4, US 0 in the Women’s World Cup. Ouch.

I don’t watch much women’s soccer, mostly because much of it lousy. This is also the reason I don’t watch much college soccer, A-League soccer, and soccer from second-tier leagues (except for MLS, which is often pretty good). I have strong opinions about player development and I think the US is going about it all wrong. Players are being over-coached from a very young age to fit into a certain tactical system, one that’s based on a northern European style of play. I think this is a lousy idea.

The US Women used to be fun to watch, primarily because of Mia Hamm and Michelle Akers. Akers brought a crazy, adrenaline-fueled passion to the team and Hamm brought also sorts of stupid skills. They were natural footie players who invented the modern women’s game. The most recent incarnations of the team have been composed of natural athletes. While it may seem counter-intuitive, this strikes me as a bad thing.

Here’s why: natural athletic ability results in false positives for a long, long time during player development. Players who can run faster and jump higher tend to excel at the youth levels, which works well for the northern European grind-it-out kind of game, which valorizes stiff tackles, long-balls, and goals off of set pieces. However, genuine football skill wins out over the long term. The result is a match like this 4-0 drubbing by Brazil. The US lumped long ball after long ball into the box which the Brazilians neatly cut out; Brazil tore apart the US midfield with one-touch passing and beating players one-on-one.

Not everyone can play like Brazil, I know this. But the fact of the matter is that teams that produce the most attractive football— Brazil, Argentina, Spain, many of the African teams— have very little infrastructure for developing youth players. The best policy, in my mind, is to encourage as many kids to play as humanly possible, and let them go at it with little instruction until they’re 15 or 16. Once they’re in their teens, coaches can develop tactics around the kinds of players that have been produced.

On the men’s team, the only genuinely creative players are Dempsey and Beasley, maybe Donovan at a push—but I think he relies way too much on his speed. This is bad. This makes the team horribly one-dimensional. And the funny thing is that the two coaching systems that are the most prevalent in the US are taken from the English and the Dutch. Quick, when’s the last time either of these teams won a major competition? Right. 1966 for England in the World Cup, 1988 for Holland in the European Championship. A bit of a barren spell for both you might say.

Some of the theories are good. Playing 3 v 3 and 4 v 4 for the little kids is genius as it eliminates herd-ball. The problem is that “select” teams begin way too young and results are of far too much importance. The whole process should be far more organic. To this day, after playing soccer for coming on thirty years, I’m a pretty one-dimensional player. I was a fast kid so for most of my teen years I was put up top to chase the long balls lumped over the defenders. In my late teens, I was pushed to the outside midfield because I was a good crosser of the ball and could beat defenders with speed. To this day, I can still cross and shoot fairly well but I’m lousy when it comes to beating players one-on-one. Why? Because that was never a skill I was taught. Lots of trapping, lots of crossing, lots of shooting. I attribute the little bits of creativity I can muster today to screwing around in the backyard with my brothers and watching a lot of soccer over the years. In many ways, I’m much more skillful now that I’m old, fat, and slow but as a kid it was faster, faster, faster. I wasn’t subjected to a sterile coaching “system” like the kids are today, but the little coaching I did get stunted my ability, I think.

Anyway, point is that the US Women’s team looks like a team where every player was over-coached from a young age. The lack of flair is breathtaking and, what’s worse, it’s not very fun to watch. The US used to be the team in the women’s game; now they’ve got some catching up to do.

Current Mood: Bored |

Los Angeles Galaxy’s Glut of Injured Players
David Beckham and Landon Donovan are among a glut of players whose injuries have decimated the Los Angeles Galaxy’s roster heading into Wednesday’s SuperLiga final…

#9 Badgers Squeak Past Iowa
Tyler Donovan finished 12-of-23 passing for 138 yards with a touchdown and an interception and Travis Beckum caught a touchdown for the Badgers (4-0, 1-0 Big Ten), who extended their winning streak to 13, the longest in major college football…

In July, I watched MMA fighter Jon Fitch destroy Roan Carneiro at UFC Fight Night 10. Last November, I watched writer John League destroy a barbecued chicken at the World Fantasy Convention. Alter egos or disturbing lookalikes?

I’ve been slacking on my Spanish for a week or so since I’ve been overloaded with school and lately I’ve been feeling like the language is slipping away from me. But then yesterday I had two separate events that made me perk up. One was overhearing a group of Hispanics in a store talking and I would say I understood about 60% only half paying attention. The second was listening to some Spanish woven into Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian on audio, and I understood all of it, 100%, without even really trying.

(sigh) I’ll take six weeks in Guatemala, please.

I mentioned earlier that my independent study has changed quite a bit, transforming from a hodge-podge of sci-fi books loosely grouped into issues of fictional communities, the human and non-human, and American dystopia to a far more focused study centralized around a single issue: California as utopia and dystopia, and the migration of utopian dreaming northward to the Pacific Northwest.

I scored huge today, picking up a ton of used books (mostly) relating to this project. They included Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat, Philip K Dick’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said and A Scanner Darkly, and Jack London’s The Iron Heel. (I also bought Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, which has no relation to the others whatsoever.) None of them have any marks, notes, or underlining in them, which is a real score.

Unfortunately, I also checked out twelve books of essays on Joyce’s Dubliners at the library. I look at writing this paper as I do taking off a band-aid: do it as quickly as possible and maybe it won’t sting as much. On the bright side, I think I have a pretty sound thesis which makes things better from the beginning.

I come to music late. I started listening to the Clash in 1995, about a decade after they broke up. I tuned in to Bob Dylan in 1998, after he’d released his 30th studio album. Just this year I was pointed to Elliott Smith, who has been dead for four years.

So I guess it’s only fitting that I’m really starting to dig Oasis, about ten years after their hey-day. The big songs actually stand the test of time rather well, but it’s discovering gems like “Fade Away” that have really gotten my attention. That may be the best song ever. Full stop. Want the lyrics? Here you go:

When I was young
I thought I had my own key
I knew exactly what I wanted to be
Now I’m sure
You’ve boarded up every door

While we’re living
The dreams we have as children
Fade away
(repeat)

Current Mood: Happy About My Good Day |

/
I finished both The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling and Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler in the last 48 hours. I enjoyed them both, I would recommend both, but I had problems with both.

I’ve read some interesting criticism of cyberpunk in general and Neuromancer in particular, and it’s no great surprise that those complaints are also present in The Difference Engine. Swap out the futuristic Sprawl of Chiba City for Victorian London and switch all the futuristic cybergadgetry for steam-powered technology. Like Neuromancer, all of this is very cool and the authors do a great job hitting the right notes but there’s something disturbing about the larger story. The main criticism of cyberpunk is that the protagonists are far too complicit with the state of the world; that they grift and hustle in a macho way in order to create a niche for themselves rather than undercut the social structure as a whole; by not opposing the status quo, the characters are accepting it by default. I think this criticism applies here as well, as the culture of surveillance is tolerated even as it is rued.

The Victorian political incorrectness of the novel also made me squirm at times. Yes, I know the disparaging remarks made about everyone who is not lily white, male, and English are historically accurate but Gibson and Sterling almost seem to revel in this escape clause. Sure, the appalling arrogance is tongue-in-cheek but it made me ask the question of who is the target audience. The racism and sexism often border on the gratuitous—but hey, we’re all white guys here, right?

Allow me to do a 180 and talk a bit about Butler’s Parable of the Sower. This book is horrific in its description of social breakdown of southern California and the nation in the early 21st century, but never seems all that far-fetched. How many African villages are controlled by warlords with the most guns as the government sits idly by picking its teeth? The decline of the United States into a Hobbesian “state of nature” is frightening and Butler doesn’t shy away from the grisly bits. There’s all sorts of good stuff about racism and sexism here, both the pronounced and subtle kinds, and the difficulty in establishing trust and community amongst a group of individuals regardless of their race and gender.

But I also have complaints. Lauren, the protagonist and prophetess of a new religion, is too unflappable and secure in her knowledge. I liked her more in the beginning of the novel when her father puts her back in her place; it’s not that Lauren is wrong in these sections per se, but her youthful enthusiasm and impatience (a perfect depiction of an intelligent and motivated teenager, by the way) show her lack of experience in the adult world. But when she gets out on her own, she’s pretty much right about everything all the time on the journey north. She rarely wavers in her convictions. While this is still somewhat believable, it makes Lauren a less interesting and less sympathetic character. Nobody likes I know-it-all (I should know!)

Also, I’m not quite sure Butler ever sufficiently gets a handle on the hyperempathy issue. I like the concept of sharing others’ pain, especially for a religious prophet, and I like how it’s more of an unwanted burden than a talent (like Deanna Troi of Star Trek: The Next Generation). [SIDEBAR] Ever notice how worthless Troi’s empathic abilities were? She sees someone crying and says “I sense your pain.” She sees someone punch a wall and says “I sense your anger.” She sees something pressing in Riker’s pants and says “I think you have intentions.” Empathic ability? They’re called eyes Deanna, and we all have them.[/SIDEBAR] Yet Lauren’s struggles with this condition don’t flare up until the very end and, like every situation, they’re something that she can more or less buck up and handle. It felt more tacked on than an integral part of the plot.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a great book. I’m steaming through to Parable of the Talents next and I’m quite looking forward to it, and hoping that some of the problems above are addressed in the sequel.

Current Mood: Eh |
Currently Listening To - Oasis - “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory?”

But first.

Another weekend gone by, and another refereeing debacle in a big game. Not sure how John Obi Mikel earned a straight red for a not-so-bad tackle, a decision which completely tipped the game in favor of Man Ure over the Russians. Sad that such a big fixture is marred by a bad call. Like Chelski vs. Liverpool. Like Chelski vs. Blackburn. Like Spurs vs. Man Ure. Seems to be a recurring problem, dunnit?

Packers 3-0, Badgers 3-0. Happy days. The Pack actually looked pretty damn good against a decent San Diego team. I love my Packers and it’s so much easier to breathe on Sundays when they’re playing well. The Badgers are a bit like watching paint dry. They’re a hard team to beat down and don’t flag much as the game wears on, but sheesh. Some scoring would be nice.

Thesis: the DVR makes watching football a pleasure and it ruins footie.

I love my Packers and Badger football teams but I can’t say I love the sport of football. In fact, it’s often quite boring because of the long delays between plays, time outs, and commercials. I can’t spend four hours watching a football game, which makes the DVR awfully handy. That skip-forward button can get you from play to play pretty damn fast. Most plays last what, five seconds? Followed by a half-minute of huddling and replays? The DVR is essential for watching football. Otherwise I find it almost excruciating.

Footie, on the other hand, isn’t the best on the DVR. The problem is that the game really boils down to goals. When you have the power to easily fast forward to search for them, it destroys the texture of the game. Footie is often about momentum and teams often get three, four, five great chances on goal before breaking through and scoring. Skipping ahead to the goal is sort of like skipping to the dessert first in a seven-course meal. There’s something to be said for the experience of everything that comes before it. It’s very unlike football in that way, since the touchdown is often not the most exciting play. I find it very hard on Saturdays and Sundays to watch a recorded footie match from beginning to end. My fingers get antsy on that FF button.

Current Mood: Tarred |

Is Rafa Benitez mad? Or does he just not want to win the Premier League? Why he doesn’t field an understrength team against European minnows in the more-forgiving Champions League as opposed to the intensely more competitive every-game-counts Premier League, I don’t know. Liverpool are in decent form. Why tinker?

Did anyone see Jose Mourinho’s demise at Chelski coming so early? I certainly didn’t. After he survived the summer I figured he was good for the season. Wrong-o. I can’t say that this is the best tactic. A number of the clubs key players are loyal to Mourinho and I would think that this move may have deep-sixed Cheski’s quest for a quadruple.

And we’re not even to October yet and I’m already sick of hearing about @#$@in’ Ars*nal. Yes, they’re playing well at the moment but it’s easy to ignore their cake schedule. Of their six games so far, four have been at home and one (Spurs) was in London. So the only travel game has been Blackburn. Now look at their upcoming fixtures: home to Newcastle (who just lost to Derby for christ’s sake) then away to West Ham (erm, still in London) then home again to both Sunderland and Bolton. So just to put this in perspective, for the first two months of the season (nine games), they’ve had to play one league game outside London, and in those six wins they faced four of the bottom six teams. In that same time, Liverpool has hosted Chelski, and Chelski will also be playing Man Ure tomorrow.

Recap: play lots of games at home, play one away game outside London, play crap teams, and avoid the other three Big Teams. Must be a nice way to ease into a season.

I had a meeting with my professor Friday to go over my novel and it went really, really well. He doesn’t shy away from (ahem) critical remarks, but he was overwhelming positive. Better yet, he had a lot of helpful suggestions to improve the novel. Overall, it made me excited to start revising it. When I get time. Whenever that is.

Almost exciting is taking notes for my Joyce paper, which has consisted of circling proper nouns in Dubliners in red pencil and trying to make an argument about whether they appear as subjects or objects in the sentence, and why that’s significant. Exciting shit, this scholarship. Another professor referred to Joyce scholars as “aliens.”

In a vexing turn of events, it looks like I’m going to have to restructure my independent study. I had grouped my books into three basic categories: fictional societies; the human, inhuman, and post-human in sci-fi; and American dystopia. After kicking this around with my professor a bit, we mutually agreed that it the study should have a narrower focus. As structured, this is a breadth of work covering a lot of material shallowly; it would be more useful to read with more of a thesis in mind.

So what I’m toying with now is the (failed) utopian promise of California, and how the locus for utopian thinking slid northward to Oregon and California. “North is better than southern California” is a prominent theme in a lot of Philip K Dick’s work as well as in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Obviously, Kim Stanley Robinson’s California Trilogy will be central, too. The question is why the Pacific Northwest became the new hot spot for utopian thinking, and whether the problems of southern California (as presented in these novels) would be solved by moving north. This entails a lot more research, and is more utopian-based rather than sci-fi based. Which is okay. As long as I get something useful out of it.

Current Mood: Bored |

I went to the doctor to get a physical this week and, after we’d run through my history, she said “Well, the good news is you’re a hung man.”

She quickly corrected herself by saying, “you’re a healthy young man,” but I like to think it was a Freudian slip.

Current Mood: Fine |

/
Ah, a little room to breathe—for a week. My poetry class doesn’t meet this week so that gives me some rumination time, but I think I’ll enjoy this class. My professor expressed surprise that my poem “Witness at Xecul” was my first attempt ever, saying it was really quite good for someone who had never written poetry before. That was a nice confidence boost.

We’re talking about A Portrait of the Artist for two weeks in my Joyce class even though we had to read most of it for this week’s discussion, so that means some time to prepare for upcoming things in this class. I need to present a 10-minute presentation on the “Nestor” section of Ulysses, including dredging up additional criticism, which could be a bit of work. And I have a paper due in about month. I’ve already selected a title and theme: “Naming and Agency in Dubliners.” Are you asleep yet?

Despite Joyce not being my cuppa, I am learning quite a bit in this class. First off, I’ve learned that Joyce annoys me far less than the serious Joyce scholars. Joyce scholars are nerds who can’t get dates. If Joyce was still alive, they’d be his paparazzi and rooting through his garbage. They’ve analyzed and overanalzyed every word the man has ever written and wrung from each word every possible connotation, then assemble readings based on every possible of every possible connotation of every word ever written. They write far-fetched and myopic criticism—like the essay on Portrait that we read that seemed to rely heavily on a given (and not at all definitive) reading of Ulysses. It reminds me of Shakespeare scholarship; this stuff has been squeezed so dry that in order to write anything new, the argument must border on the silly or be so esoteric as to only make sense to other nuts who are just as overzealous as the author. It’s precisely the kind of thing that squashes the joy of reading literature out of students.

Secondly, I’m finding that I get more out of Joyce by discussing his work. It’s like poetry that way; I get way more out of poetry by talking about it with other people. Once I hear how others have read certain passages in Joyce, I buy in to the fact that it’s layered, multifaceted stuff. However, I still wouldn’t wish reading Joyce on anyone.

I also finished Iron Council by China Miéville and wasn’t completely sold on it. I read a piece by Carl Freedman that explains some of the Marxist content a little more clearly, but I got most of it as I read. The train is the central metaphor in the book, and there are two types of revolution happening simultaneously, one within the city and one without. I agree with Freedman that Miéville doesn’t cop out and offer easy or “right” answers for what a revolution would (or ought) to look like; but my problem is that the book just didn’t cohere like Perdido Street Station and The Scar and I felt myself struggling to stay interested. The weird is laid on just as thickly, but it felt less integral to the plot here. And the basic plot felt a lot like a D&D module as a core group of characters pick up allies as they move from (brief) encounter to encounter. So the premise is terrific but sadly I wasn’t convinced by the execution.

I’m reading The Difference Engine this week. Looking forward to it.

Current Mood: Sure |
Currently Listening To - The White Stripes - “Icky Thump”