You scored as The Joker. You’re the Clown Prince of Crime, the Harlequin of Hate. You’re THE JOKER! You’re intelligent, twisted, dark, and a bit of a prankster. Electric hand-buzzers of doom, razor-sharp playing cards, and laughing gas all make up your comical inventory of weapons. You’re the infamous villain, the stalker of Gotham! The Joker 85% Scarecrow 80% Two Face 75% The Riddler 65% Catwoman 60% Penguin 45% Poison Ivy 40% Mr. Freeze 40% Which Batman Villain Are You Most Like? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Transformers. It’s a car! It’s a bus! It’s a McDonald’s! Well, kinda. . but who wants to choose just one novelty when you can have 50 in 1? Thundercats 67% Transformers 67% Voltron 50% Heman 42% Smurf 42% Shera 17% Strawberry Shortcake 17% Which 1980’s Cartoon Character are you? created with QuizFarm.com

And so I’ve found the writing geek joy of a fountain pen. And the ink flows and flows.

Between that and wax seals for letters, I keep to some pretty anachronistic stationary tastes.

But I don’t get to use wax seals nearly as often as I’d like to.

So I have to write with the fountain pen I guess…

I’m on a steady diet of epic poems, angel lore, and comics in order to stay in trim fighting form for my modern epic writing.

I went to see Constantine tonight. When I compare it to the comic book…I don’t like it much. When I take it as a supernatural action movie staring Keanu “Whoooooa” Reeves, I like it a bit better. The Constantine of the graphic novels is British working class, more clever, much more of a bastard, and more likeable (somehow).

I found out that my Artist’s Statement (posted below) and my Project Description will are now part of the Writing Program’s project proposal samples. I’m about the last of the gini-pigs of the new writing program…and now, I shall have insidious, if slight, influence over rotation after rotation of future writing students. =) Plus…it’ll be the website somewhere, so I’ll have one more hit when I Google myself (Googling oneself is a form of ego masturbation).

Oh…and Superman is a dick. Click HERE to find out why.

List of more pratical uses Superboy can make of a machine that can see through time:
1. Betting on the outcomes of sporting events.
2. Forseeing natural diasters and catastrophhe.
3. Letting Bruce Wayne know that his parents are going to be gunned down in front of his very eyes in a filthy alley, you dick.

Mary Shelley, died on this day in 1851

Yesterday, Nick, my brother, was shot, point blank, five times, till the gun was empty…on the silver screen. That’s how his character goes in the Michael Urnikis, indi flick, BLACK DAYS.

On a more serious note, Hunter S. Thompson shot himself dead, yesterday.

I think the movie turned out well. It was neat seeing the cast again. And…and, I’ve got the official movie t-shirt to boot.

Most of my work on the film, was behind the scenes, but I did get to make an appearance in the “stripper scene” as a drug dealer. This involved a costume of…well…pretty much my normal cloths (plus couple bits of scary jewelry).

Oh…and, assuming I get this thesis done in time for the semester, my public reading will be on April 20th at 6:00 pm.

Thursday day went well. I had my meeting with my thesis committee and we adressed my epic poem, what needs to be done, time tables for it to be done, and the necessary paperwork. They liked what they saw and heard. Their comments and guidance ended up being only minimal, taking up only half the designated meeting time. One professor mentioned her concern, “It feels like we should be doing more.”

Another prof. replied, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

They then told me I was entering cool experimental waters, dabbling in several genres as the academic, something different from the other projects they had been parts of. Uncharted waters – here there be monsters. I’m sure I smiled. It was encouraging. Enough so to make me want to push further, to keep going until the monsters are scared into servitude. Here there be Josh.

Thursday night was an emotional train wreck – the worst thing I’ve ever had to do (I don’t have the strength to write about that).

This Sunday Nick and I will get to see the product of a lot of hours of free labor…Mike Urniki’s movie, Black Days, will premier in Chicago.

After that…I will shut myself away in Springfield until March 9th (I HAVE to). I’m going to run the marathon and see if I can write this pesky epic in that time.

tired and hollow

A real long, real cool interview with a real cool writer (Alan Moore) over HERE. It’s a great interview for any writers or writers in training (who are really writers…but sometimes afraid to say so). Here’s a real interesting part of the interview. Words are the same as magic…they were in ancient times. Bards were feared. And then Alan says…

I’ll give a brief recap in case we feel we missed anything. Magic and language are practically the same thing, they would at least have been regarded as such in our distant past. I think it is wisest and safest to treat them as if they are the same thing. This stuff that you are dealing with – words, language, writing – this is dangerous, it is magical, treat it as if it was radioactive. Don’t doubt that for a moment. As far as I know, the last figures I heard quoted, nine out of every ten writers will have mental problems at some point during their life. Sixty percent of that ninety percent – which I think works out at roughly fifty percent of all writers – will have their lives altered and affected – seriously affected – by those mental problems. I think what that translates to is – nine out of ten crack up, five out of ten go mad. It’s like, miners get black lung, writers go bonkers. This is a real occupational hazard. There’s plenty of ways to go bonkers, some of them a lot quieter, some more insidious than others – drink, heroin, there’s lots of other sorts of things – but this is dangerous – we’re dealing with the unreal. You’re dealing right on the borderline of fact and fiction, which is where our entire world happens. We’re living in a world of fact and we’ve got out heads full of fiction, the characters that we’ve invented for ourselves – we’re all writers, we all invent characters for ourselves, roles in this little play that we’re running in our head that we call our lives. With a writer, you’re dealing with the actual stuff of existence, you’re playing the God game. All the things that you will have to consider before you write a story are exactly the things God had to consider before he created the universe – plot, characters (laughter) and what’s it mean, what’s it about, what’s the theme here…motifs. A lot of them suns, they’ll do, we’ll put them everywhere – hey, snakes! These are easy…(laughter).

OK.  A few months ago, when one of my would-be committee members looked through a draft of my thesis proposal, he said, “That’s it?”  He thought the ARTIST’S STATEMENT section needed to be “beefier.”  I was caught short.  I’d written past mock proposals in various writing class and thought I knew what they wanted.  Besides…this was just a formality…surely hot new writer (such as myself) need not waste his time with this when the real work is to be done.  Why spend anymore time describing what I was going to do when I needed to do it?  Tonight, I sat down to add more “beef.”  I guess it was something I needed to do.  The old, half paged statement seems a pretty poor thing, now.  So here is what I came up with…

Artist’s Statement

 “The next century’s task will be to rediscover its gods.”

-Andre Malraux

 

“We have the right, and the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our stories.”

-Neil Gaiman

 

I like revisiting old things.  Oftentimes, I refer to my creative research as “grave digging” – whether I’m shoveling through ancient mythology, dusty literature, or random thoughts in my journal.  My processes inevitably involves taking the motley collection of body parts exhumed, and sewing them together, regardless of how much they might seem to clash, with big, messy stitches.  Then, I throw the switch:

 

And sometimes the shambling amalgam wants to sing and dance and sometimes it lopes off to terrorize a village.  Revision involves re-grafting and making finer and finer stitches, until there are no visible seams.  Usually, I fall in love with my little monsters, despite some of their flaws, and have only, reluctantly, unmade a few (putting their parts back onto the laboratory shelves).

 

And so we have Souls Unsure.  I did a lot of digging, found a copious amount of appendages, heads, eyes, and wings (voodoo spells, angelic lore, pieces of scripture, classic rock lyrics, bits of Dante, animistic concepts of carrion birds, and ancient Hebrew concepts of the underworld).  I’m still sewing madly, still praying it will walk when I feed it lightening.

 

In my writing, I tend to talk to archaic gods and literary characters.  Sometimes it’s to retell a myth or take another look at a famed story from the point of view of an unsung character who did not get much of a chance to speak the first time around (and is still bitter about it).  Other times, the intention is a little more devious.  If one reaches back far enough, one can grab concepts or characters that seem fresh and new to readers.  Writers:  conmen aren’t we all?

 

And so we have Souls Unsure.  I sing the song of a sad neutral angel who only received a few sentences in Dante’s Inferno.  I have summoned the Three Beasts of the Dark Wood, who still yowl and growl and howl that they are evil enough to deserve the role of lead villain.  I visit and revisit the land of Sheol, an underworld older than Heaven and Hell, a place post death not done to death in literature.  It gives me latitude to write what I want and its longitude lies somewhere past Pluto, in an icy vacuum bereft of the dead horses I don’t want to beat.

 

People often give epic poems a wide berth.  Sometimes they think the epic is snooty or pretentious and stroll away.  Sometimes they are intimidated by the big bad epic and walk on the other side of the street, trying not to make eye contact.  It’s funny, because people still like epic poems, they just renamed them, gave them new masks.  Audiences devour three-part movie trilogies faster than their popcorn, eat up multi-part Sci-Fi legends, gorge on comic books telling decade spanning stories (a medium getting better and better as the collective conscious slowly realizes the silly notion, that commingling images with words cheapens art, is false).  Readers pore over Tolkien’s mythology and a Lovecraftian mythos that has grown larger than its original author.

 

And so we have Souls Unsure.  I want to reintroduce epic poetry to readers, an old friend removing her mask.  I want to tell an epic story in a modern mode, like a desiccated mummy strutting by in a cool leather jacket.

 

When vodou practitioners want history, they contact the loa, Papa Ghedi (a jovial spirit of the graves).  Ghedi tells them many little stories, from many different perspectives, for he has access to the voice of all fathers and song of all mothers.  The story circles back on itself.  To the Haitians (and vodou folk the world over) history is not a line of facts, but a repetition of events from different sets of eyes – to hear a story enough times from enough sources, is to understand it.  History is a spiral, not a line.

 

And so we have Souls Unsure.  The main plot is told, in poetic form, by a voodoo priestess and a dark muse named Crow, but the story deviates into tiny prose interludes, told by all sorts of souls unsure, and the story curves back in on itself, making a spiral, the shape of a snail’s shell, the shape of the universe, the flight path of a scavenger bird circling over death.

 

The spiral of small stories is more congenial with my writing style.  While I like my myths, I don’t often paint stories in epic brush strokes.  I like small windows, quick glimpses of unsung heroes, microcosms brought to focus.  And so we enter an epic poem that is not of epic scope, but told in tiny windows.  This is not about the great heroes or legendary wars.  Archangel Michael’s flaming sword is nowhere in sight and the Devil only gets a 666 word footnote.  Rather this is a story made up of fleeting glimpses of those who fell through the cracks of creation.  Souls Unsure is one of those composite photos, a large picture made up of carefully placed, tiny pictures.  Squint your eyes and the little pictures disappear and a face manifests and peers back.

 

If it winks…then I’ve succeeded.

 

Hopefully that’s beefed up enough. What am I saying, they’re going to be so fucking astounded by it! 🙂 I mean…just look at that sentence about the beating dead horses in space. I use the mother of all clichés in a sentence about not using clichés. It’s genius! And, and, in the act of imagining space, without dead horses, you must first imagine space with horses. So I got you to think of a bunch of horse corpses floating through outer space (with any luck, the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey was playing in the background in your head).

Gosh…I should get back to work while I’m still full of myself.

Ride the highs and laugh through the lows (if you can).

Right now I’m getting my thesis proposal together for my first committee meeting tomorrow…even though I’m not all that sure that the thesis in question is going to be done in the time my proposal says it will be. We shall see…

Then about tomorrow night…fears and worries drifted away, novacane killing the nerves. It’s just a dull dread now.

Everyone is sick. I took a tally. I’ve visited a few of them. So last night I knocked myself out, early, with a cocktail (a double dose of NiQuil and a load of vitamins) in order to aquire ten hours of sleep (that is tremendous for me), to try and cheat the sickness I thought I might be feeling at the edge of my health. I think I beat it. Fuck you, germs! 😉

Tonight, in my SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND class (half lit. – half history), I learned about the terribly complex and death filled War of the Roses (like a Soap Opera…with lots of blood). Got to read and hear about a funny, if dangerous game, the nobles played called “Who’s Got Henry?” Viciously funny and deliciously evil stuff. Those nobles…

After class, I was given a very genuine apology by a Pepsi bottle cap. It did, however, encourage me to PLAY AGAIN.