Friday, January 28, 2005

Today's Word is Ocean

From One Word (you really should go there)

The deepest, most primal fear I ever had was the autumn night, standing on the receded beach at low tide. Pitch black. The water is invisible in the dark, and all I could think is, it's out there and if I was here 12 hours from now, I would be a bloated, drowned corpse.

In other writing news, I'm working on rewriting my submission for a writing contest. Deadline is late February. I'm sure I'll make the deadline. Just not sure how my precious little prose will be loved and adored by the judges. I also have to finish the synopsis for the writing program I'm in now. It's mostly done, but I need to make revisions, since I'm using an old synopsis and some things have changed in Act Three between then and now.

And for you people who watch the news, does it seem a bit surreal to you all the coverage given to ex-pat Iraqis voting for a new government in Iraq, voting for change while being halfway around the world? Meanwhile, E-day in Iraq is going to look like the lost reel to "Road Warrior" between people dodging car bombings, roving gangs trying to intimidate voters, and people trying to get out of the country. The election could very well be decided by votes cast overseas. And yet, there are some in Washington D.C. that'll consider this a victory because, you know, there were ballot boxes (at polling sites revealed at the last minute) and candidates (albeit unable to admit their names under fear of death) and stuff. It's a democracy by sheer force of child-like faith, as if clapping for Tinkerbell.

Anyway. Enough grumbling. Go check out this running street-level blog about the Iraqi election courtesy the BBC.


Thursday, January 27, 2005

Open Source Atrocity


(photo from AP/Jan Bauer)

Writing about something as horrific and far-reaching and anti-soul as Auschwitz is a tricky business. You can wing off into purple prosevania, deadening the event with overwrought verse until you become an unfortunate practitioner Hannah Arnedt's phrase "banality of evil." Yet, on grim milestones such as the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp, there's some prudent, well-meaning push by your soul to say something about it, setting you up for another trick: The vacuum of meaning.

There's little to be said that hasn't been said already by thousands of writers, captured by hundreds of photographers, imagined and reinvented by directors. The Holocaust is a cash cow for the contemplative and creative, not unlike Mel Brooks' sly yet grim comment: "Hitler's been great for my career." You fall back on "Never Again" and then the freshly minted ghosts of Rwanda mock you for your idealism. You can't understand how a nation can methodically round up people and detain them for who they are, and then Abu Ghraib slaps you for your arrogance, thinking racism and abuse of power can't meet again.

This is all American-centric, of course, because it's the most reliable filter I see through when it comes to history. The Holocaust, to me, belongs in the same column as the rounding up and detainment of Japanese Americans during World War II: items from the dark side of the Greatest Generation. Evidence existed in both cases supporting the claims that Jews were being rushed into camps for death as well as making plain that Japanese Americans weren't a threat to American national security after Pearl Harbor. Nagging little facts like those quash the "Greatest Generation" myth, so we don't think about it, don't dwell on the idea that we could have done more to preserve life in the face of tyranny...Janus-like in its foreign and domestic consumption. There was a war on. We had to spread freedom. Sound familiar?

Never Again. Really? Do we understand what those words mean? Can we fathom the organized infrastructure of the death camps? More than million methodically killed by thinking men, whose descendents crafted the engineering in my new Beetle. Are we afraid to see that there was a civilized and organized nation spiritually behind the roundup and disappearance of the Jews, the homosexuals, the intellectuals, the outsiders? Are we afraid to see it because, well, it might happen again? The hardest thing for Americans to understand about Auschwitz and the Nazis is that it's not unique. We view World War II as some mythological battle between good and evil, and we Yanks were the tops in the Good department, never to be infected with the poisons that make nations turn into butchers. That's not us. We have diversity, the Statue of Liberty, the melting pot. We are that shining light.

And yet we forget the lesson of Auschwitz: Once you make your enemies sub-human, you can do anything you want to them. For decades after World War II, the rest of the world watched Germany, making sure she didn't rise up to some sort of default pogrom mode. But instead, we got arrogant. We believed we would always be righteous. And if we had to break the rules, well, it was for a good cause.

We have to search for the meaning again, that terrifying definition of organized bloodshed through systematic means. But I don't think we as a nation know how. In the past 10 years, we were slow on Rwanda, Bosnia and, recently, the Sudan. We have access to satellites and instant news media, but we treat genocide as if it was just a terrible documentary. We are fat in a media-gluttony age...awash images yet unsure how to help. We reduce tragedy to blips on the news networks or Web video feeds. We strip them of flavor and context. We butt disaster footage next to celebrity interviews. Survivors of a tsunami get their footage on Larry King, interview underneath sounding like DVD commentary. Death has become too media-friendly.

Days from now, the tributes at the gates of Auschwitz will fade into that frequency that only ghosts hear. We'll go back to our lives, and the 60th anniversary becomes another event, interchangeable and mutable. There is a war halfway around the world where people are dying for a parade of lies. We accept that. We accept lies and the propaganda that tells us we're fine. Nothing to worry about. Just a slight adjustment of the Constitution here, just a little media-driven scare there. We don't have that sense of outrage to stop it, any of it. And in the end, that scurvy of the soul leads us to the gates of Auschwitz again. Not as tourists, not as victims, but as likely proprietors.



Exit points

I've added a few more links for you.

Mrs. P is another blogger. She's in the Philippines and has been very supportive of me as I sally forth into the murky reaches of Blogdom, which I find mostly riddled with American voices so it's refreshing to have a voice from the other side of world to show you just show different yet discomfortingly similar we upright mortals be. She's an elegant writer, intertwining the personal with the more profound and obtuse. Go tease her about her haircut.

BBC News. Because American news sucks. And I say that being a tiny cog in the American Media Machine.

Cursor. A news-ish blog-ish site. Think Drudge Report for adults. Lots of great stuff from media around the world. Plus it has saddled itself with perhaps the biggest pile of news links from around the world.

Adbusters. In my sporadic Noam Chomsky-ish moments of faux-revolutionary insight(usually when I have no media around to distract me), I reason that the 21st century is going to be one of resistance to physical, mental and spiritual colonization by governments, celebrities, radical religion, and advertising. Adbusters is a magazine that aims to disassemble the voluminous bullhorn that is media saturation. I don't always agree with what they come up with, but it shakes me and unnerves me more than anything that hits the magazine rack.

James Wolcott is a writer, a former pop culture critic for Village Voice, and now a contributing editor to the magazine Vanity Fair. His blog is a one-man's Algonquin Round Table, regularly not suffering fools lightly. He is the troll who eats alive the stupidity that comes across the skybridge that has welded the American media to George W. Bush and cronies. All he does is generate excellent words for insane times. I point you to him, dear reader, in lieu of my own amateur-grade swearing at the camera-ready fascists in Washington D.C.
Things You Didn't Know Until Now

1) The Pentagon (or as I like to call it, the TerrorDome) has a spokesman named Flex Plexico.(second from bottom graf).

2) How to pack and move a hippo, courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service.

How to pack and move a hippo
You'll need:
1,000-gallon tank per hippo
1,000 gallons of water
Crane
1-pound sedative
Soothing hippo music
2 Aspirin (for you)

How to pack:
1. Fill your tank with 800 gallons of water. Start yesterday. Remember, a medium-sized hippo takes up at least 200 gallons. (Just out of curiosity, why do you have a hippo, anyway?)
2. Apply sedative. Take two Aspirin.
3. Hold it, hold it - put the hippo in the tank, first. Start with soothing hippo music, followed by a large winch and crane.
4. Now go relax in a hot bath before the forklift arrives.

WAIVER: We in no way advocate moving a hippo or any animal without the express advice and consent of your local vet or zoo keeper. If you'd like advice from a veterinarian on moving with pets click here .


Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Window dressing

It appears since I've been gone, Blogger has opted for new templates without a carved-out niche for links. Apparently you are your own island.

So, I fiddled around, like a drunk with a scalpel, with the template code and have slapped together a crude patchwork to create a Links section. This is all a work in progress, so I'll be adding new diversions over time. For now, go play with 100 Words and One Word. Down there, on your right.

The sky in Seattle is this listless, monotone gray. Dry concrete. Imagine being inside of a giant pillow.

Writing class went well last night, or at least better than I thought. Don't have nearly as much homework, leaving me time to write up my contest entry for Pacific Northwest Writers Association. Much less stress and growling from Mission Control. Before class, I got to play with a sinfully righteous Macintosh outfitted with Bose speakers that look like unmanned landing probes sent to Mars. Massive screen, maybe 36 inches. Colors to shame nature. Opera music coming out of iTunes, making you feel as if you are in Heaven's computer lab as you step up to the transculent white keyboard. There's no way I'd ever need anything as big as that screen for writing, but it's kid-in-candy-store fun to put my mortal fingers against something so tech-decadent.

Tonight, we are having a friend come over. We're adultsitting her since her husband is out of town on business. Pizza and "Lost" (although I think it's a rerun).

Listening to: Radiohead's "OK Computer"
Reading: "Brass," "Voices, a People's History of the United States," "Fever," "What We Knew."
Playing: "Star Wars: Battlefront" for Xbox.

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

In an Interstellar Burst...

Hi.

I'm back.

It's been nearly 18 months since my last post, and much has transpired since I went away, but I'm not going to bore you all with that now. Let's stick with the present first, that translucent rascal that defies capture. I've been missing the action of the blogs, and slowly (since I've been getting back in touch with writing) have been feeling the urge to write alpha-drafts for the world again. I've changed the look of this blog, and I don't think it'll remain this way for long. It seemed fitting to make a new start with a fresh coat of paint. Everything is the first of a day, it seems. All opportunity and wonder, mixed with a little trepidation and bewilderment. I just need an avenue to write on, something public and fast where I can plod along and relax while in the throes of other, bigger projects. I want to keep my fingers to the keyboard, even when I'm downtiming here. Don't think I'm slumming you, baby. I just have a lot of words stored up in my fingers, and I want to come back here and emblazon them up here. I don't want to be political. I don't want to have a spotlight. I just want to have some sort of exo-station for my performance artist/exhibitionist (are there any other kind?) inside me.

I wrote once that blogs are strange creatures. You'd never stand up at an open mike and read your diary, but people will post very personal things here. I don't understand the physics myself, but I'm a nomad that's been gone for too long. I need to craft things for public consumption. I need a literary valve to crank. I need this little junk food of self-indulgence. I'm writing to have fun. And it's taken me a long time to get to a point where I can see writing as fun. I think I didn't enjoy the earlier versions of my blogs (here and SKOB), even though some of the stuff I zapped out wasn't that bad. Here and now (again with that quick wily rascal), I'm trying to write a novel and not get so stressed. There should be joy here, and it's been a long 18 months where I was coming to some painful truths, and among them is I should treasure this golden oscillation in my soul.

And here, of all places, is going to help develop that.

I have no idea what I'll write about or when. This will be spur of the moment. But I hope it's fun.