December Wolves: Avarice Wolf

I don't know what happened. I thought I had a weekend to catch up and even get ahead on this promise and I couldn't find anything I wanted to write about. There's something about Jersey Shore in the archive, but it feels kind of toothless and it wasn't really begging to be written. I came back to a couple paragraphs I wrote after playing Borderlands with a very important friend of mine and it ended up going to an interesting place.

I mean, okay, self-flagellation on here isn't really a surprise. But I'd like to think I'm actually learning and this is proof of it. Anyway, have you heard of Courage Wolf? The title is a reverent nod of the head.

I'd like to confirm that Borderlands has reached Diablo 2 levels of addictiveness. A good friend of mine and I started playing at about 9:30 p.m. and didn't stop until 4:30 a.m. a couple weeks ago and that's an invigorating feeling that I haven't had in a very long time.

The alcohol didn't hurt. I've written a lot about my feelings around alcohol, but it felt right here. Here the alcohol was used as celebrating something, my friend being back from another college semester.

Borderlands is very, very addictive. Very, very fun. I don't care what the metacritic score is. It does what it does very well and even miles removed from the ability to play it, I'm still jonesing for the "shoot enemies and guns come out" mechanic, as popularized by Diablo 2. But I don't think I'll play it any time soon.

My computer can't run it and the cheapest console that can run it costs $200. Which means, I'm looking at $250 (at the very least, and that's not including the 10% tax that brings the purchase up to $275 , which means it's closer to $300 than I'd like.) Now all that said, I could ask for a PS3 for Christmas, but what's holding me back is the backlog of PS2 games I still haven't gotten through. Looking back on what I wrote around consumable media last Christmas, I think I'm in danger of losing that important "I've got what I've got and I'll get around to new stuff when I'm done with the old stuff" perspective that I had before.

Let me go down the list of things I haven't finished or gotten to that I wrote about in that post last year:

Videogames:

+Killzone and Odin Sphere (right) have been beaten. Odin Sphere I made sure I beat in the true ending way so there was no bullshit and I could say I was finished and didn't have to replay the game. In Killzone, I don't think there's different endings, so I feel like I got the core message of that game. The core message being shoot things that are hard to kill.

+Dragon Quest 8 and God of War 2 haven't been beaten. The difference between then and now is that I'm starting to play God of War 2 again and am a couple hours further than I was at the end of the school year.

Books:

+The War Within and But Is It Art have been finished. The War Within was pretty much devoured and imbibed in January, and But Is It Art was gifted to a friend's girlfriend who is currently a

n art major. So they're consumed and thought about and dispensed with, until I come back to them. (Which I don't, but that's another subject for writing. Do I really go through my "library"? I've got shelves of books, but I don't really pick through them, I look for something new.)

+The End of Faith, The Mystery of Capital and The Arab Predicament are all cluttering up a "I SWEAR I WILL GET TO THESE" shelf. The End Of Faith is one of those books that I feel uncomfortable even picking up since apparently atheism is getting pretty douchebaggy and I am nominally Catholic. But I bought it, so I ought to read it. The Mystery of Capital I haven't even seriously started. I'm maybe 10 pages into it. It's very far down on the list, behind oh God everything else. The Arab Predicament, I think I'm half finished with but have put down and now can't find in the web of music, other books and games that I need to finish.

+The Essential Rumi, however, is in my work satchel, so I'm three quarters finished with that and it's a peculiar book with wonderful poems about getting drunk and loving God and loving women and are you going to drink that wine, because if you're not, I will. It's a breath of fresh air. Hella refreshing.

(Yes, I used the phrase hella refreshing. I make squishy noises with the English language.)

Phew.

After all that, I'm still very far behind and that's from this time last year.

I have all these things to get through before I even begin to think about new games and books. My parents don't know what to get me for Christmas, and guess what I want: More books! I have lots of them and I am slowly finding the time to read them. But what I really want for Christmas is the ability to look forward in my life without losing sight of the great things I have in front of me.

Borderlands, then, is representative of all the things that are new and shiny in front of me and (as Visa and Chase are trying to point out) I can totally kind of afford them. I recognize that there is something inside me, whether native or not, I don't know, but certainly cultivated, that I want new things. Because the old things won't do. The graphics on the PS2 aren't as good as the PS3 graphics. I like David Aja's art more than I like Mike Mignola's on Hellboy, even in the library form, or whatever the excuse this week is.

Borderlands is indicative of moving towards the altar of moar (if I can blaspheme to have religious and 4chan imagery working side by side) and I'm ashamed to admit, I thought I wrote pretty definitively about that last year. I will get to Borderlands when I get to Borderlands. I will get to the Immortal Iron Fist Omnibus over Christmas, because that's at least one indulgence I'm allowing myself. But I'm taking everything else slow. No rest for the wicked, remember?

Demos: In A Million Pieces

The title is a bit of a double entendre. In A Million Pieces is a record by the Draft, which I heartily endorse, but the name still might ring a different bell. A Million Little Pieces is a book that lots of people read, only to find out the author lied, fabricated or distorted much of his own life in the book. In a piece about reading and literacy, it's fun to echo a book that many people have read and been excited about only to be disappointed.

Plus, there's been a post...three out of the last five days. Can we keep it going?

In 2003 the BBC (the British Broadcasting Corporation) put out a list of 100 of England's favorite books, based on a poll of their viewers. Now, in 2009, it is getting reborn as a Facebook meme.

The Facebook-spread meme heading states that the BBC believes people will read only six out of the 100 books. A quick Google search yields nothing from the BBC's perspective, so this heading sounds fictitious. (I think I saw this float around Livejournal once back in the earlier part of this decade. What's old is new again.) But that's not the real issue. The real issue in my mind is that this seems to be interpreted by otherwise intelligent people as a sign that we are living in illiterate times.

They might be right, but not for the reasons they think.

One, they're just going along with something they saw on the internet, but more importantly, that list isn't the arbiter of who or what is literate. (There are reading comprehension problems because until recently United States schools were not promised a lot of money—especially those that did not teach white kids.)
The list wasn't meant to be definitive, but even if it was trying to be, it never could be. There is always going to be something important left out. The list is written from one perspective, which privileges one form of expression over another.

White people writing in a traditional manner are overly represented and graphic novels are non-existent. But what's important to me is the reactions.
Many of the responses on Facebook I see appear to be a variation of the following: "I haven't read enough of these" or "based on the fact that more people haven't read these books, we live in illiterate times and that's depressing" and "I've read this many!"

That second response infuriates me. First, it's narcissistic and self-centered. It privileges the social class that has the time and energy to read these books by assuming that the list is definitive and applicable for everyone, everywhere else. They decide what is on that list. Mastery of it constitutes literacy. They ignore other forms of the written word, whether in newspapers, ads or printed on the internet.

What makes someone literate is how deeply they can read into the material, not how far they've gotten on some viral reading list, using the BBC’s coattails as a shield. Reading half or none of these books at age 22 (or 88) doesn't make you literate. It just shows you different ways to use language. Put me in a Staten Island high school and (if I’m lucky) I might recognize half of what's being said or expressed. The language of “Pride and Prejudice” isn't going to help me there. For that matter, neither will “Dune” by Frank Herbert.

Language is about expressing yourself with the written word regardless of what form you choose. All of the BBC’s books will help you, but what will help you more is knowing what to use and where and how to make connections between people and ideas that would otherwise remain distant from each other, lessons which doesn’t have to come from that list.

That experience and that knowledge doesn’t have to come from books. Illiteracy isn’t when people aren’t reading classics. Illiteracy is when people aren’t reading at all.

A Chirstmas gift to our readers.

A brief note: If you celebrate another holiday, then consider the title to be a seasonally appropriate salutation, since, well, I and Thomas are Catholic, myself, if only fashionably and it feels a bit too off the mark to say a holiday gift. So, as you probably figured, no offense is meant.

Shopping at Borders shouldn't give me an existential dilemma. It, however, did. As I passed the clearance books (after picking up a copy of Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick and Common's Universal Mind Control for my brother's Christmas gift), I saw something that was so value packed it defies my best attempts at an explanation as to even begin to chart or map it. On sale for eight dollars was the complete works of Edgar Allen Poe. Eight bucks for his complete works?

You could spend hours looking at the Raven and still never truly suck all the meaning out of it, and you know what? There's about forty-odd other poems there, not to mention the seventy something stories. It's so massive, I don't know where to begin. I didn't buy it, (Zach might shoot me, but to do that, he'd first have to read this, which I'm pretty sure doesn't happen.) because I already bought two other books from Borders just yesterday, The War Within by Bob Woodward and a book of Islamic poetry by a man called Rumi. (As is my want, I've gotten 12 chapters deep in Woodward's book by now, and haven't started Rumi.)

Looking again at the book, which appears now, to be about roughly three quarters the size of a throw pullow and twice as deep, could I ever have gotten to it? Also, my bag was bulging from the two books and CD I had already bought. I have enough books that I've started to finish, which include:

the Arab Predicament by Fouad Ajami
the End of Faith by Sam Harris
the Mystery of Capital by Hernando DeSoto
But Is It Art? by Cynthia Freeland

If I'm lucky, I'll finish three of the four by the middle of January.Thus, an upwards of seven hundred page book, most of it requiring in depth reading, I don't know if I'll ever get through just doesn't seem worth it, even as a complete discography, just to have purchased it once and be done with it once. That said, I'll almost certainly go back to Borders later on this week and pick it up then because it's everything Edgar Allen Poe ever wrote for eight bucks. I'll find something, I'm sure.

That's when I realized: There's far too much media, whether it's music, literature, TV shows, movies or games to sift through everything I want in one life. I've got lists and lines of games and records and books and almost everything else. Hell, I have Killzone in my PlayStation 2 right now, with Odin Sphere, Dragon Quest 8 and God of War 2 on deck. I have no idea if I'll be able to finish another one of those games within the time I return, and hundreds of CDs on my computer sent to me by PR people that I don't know when I'll get the time to listen to.

I guess now is a good a time as any for a huge pronouncement, it feels to me like there's always going to be something else to read, listen, watch or play before I die. But, beyond all that, now I have another goal, but hopefully this one encompasses many smaler ones: I just want to write something one day that's worth the investment of time.

So. We'll (Who am I kidding, I) will try to keep posting here when I have something to say that doesn't fit into the other writing projects I have. May your next week be without hassle and as little stress as possible.

Here's to never having enough time!

Secret Cartographies: Persia, Sri Lanka, Great Britain, and Rhode Island.

The old Persian name for Sri Lanka was Serendip. The name first met the English language in the form of a children's story, and the place became a word through the attentions of Horace Walpole. When I was young, I was told that it was the West that found Sri Lanka and called it Serendipity. They'd been looking for India, for spices and tea and exoticisms, and found this other place, instead.

Sri Lanka is not actually closer to Europe than India, of course, so I'd always been left to wonder exactly why these men in boats felt so lucky to have stumbled upon it, or, alternately, why Serendip, an island that had been charted by the outside world in the time of the ancients, would have developed the reputation for being a place in which one could stumble into luck. It has less, apparently, to do with our finding Sri Lanka than what clever Sri Lankans, and clever children, can manage to find.

Here's another: the founder of the colony of Rhode Island, when he died, was buried on his family's farm under an apple tree. In recent memory, the government of the state of Rhode Island decided that their founder deserved some sort of monument. The old maps were lined up with the new maps, and they found that his grave was in someone's back yard, which was far more convenient than its being under someone's house. As it happened, the apple tree was still there, ancient and thick. They began the exhumation in order to move the dirt that was once his body to some more prestigious spot.

Through the use of their science, they knew they were in the correct place, and they noted that the roots of the apple tree had grown through the place where the coffin once would have been. No matter; they'd dig around it. But the root had a form to it. It had an arm, in fact, and fingers. There was a torso, and legs, and even toes. The tree, finding the tasty dead thing, had eaten it, inch by inch, starting at the shoulder. Using their science once again, they found that the capillaries of the tree had borrowed the body's arteries, tracing a strange organic map.

I've always been terrifically jealous, of the tree, and the corpse, and those who found it. Alas, it seems that the root, cut away from its tree and exposed to the air for display, began to decay quickly. One can still tease out the shape, but it lacks the same majesty as finding a headless underground man made of wood.

If you require more tales of strange things that happen to the dead, I recommend After the Funeral, the funny little out of print, extremely cheap book from which my second story was stolen entirely. If you require more cartographies, sometimes secrets, always bizarre, I might recommend the often thoroughly delightful blogue, Strange Maps. If you want to increase the likelihood that you, too, will be eaten by a tree, I suggest that you look into the growing green burial movement.

So, like, hi, I post here!

REVENGE FANTASY OF THE DAY



Elevennames.com - the essence of professionalism.



I'm still alive somehow! I'm watching MTV, because I hate myself. The entire station appears to be populated by self-obsessed tools. But they're pretty good looking, so I guess I should keep watching. Hooray for teevee!



Regardless, the theme of this week is The Howling of a Pack of Wolves. Which have a kind of strange beauty to them - you can understand how people can be inspired to wear a T-shirt with big wolves on them. Hell, I want to wear a T-shirt with a big wolf on it. But the important thing is that I'm imagining wolves tearing apart the people on Parental Control. I swear - what is going on with the West Coast? Are people really like that? Is there some kind of radiation west of the rockies that turns everyone into a douchebag? Wolves go rar! Tools say eeek and splork, and "oh no we is bein' eatin!"



A man can dream



SO I NEARLY DIED IN THE STRAND BOOKSTORE TODAY



My diet, since coming to new york, has faltered significantly, i.e. James told me I was anorexic. But it's working! I lost eleven pounds in two weeks! And I'm pretty sure that not all of it was muscle mass. Here's what I usually eat every day.



- 4-6 strawberries

- Sometimes a cracker with cheese.



SEE? Diet revolution! There are side effects, though. They consist of apparently never having to go to the bathroom, and not being able to stand up to fast. Case in point. I was at the Strand bookstore today (18 miles of books, and not a good-looking person in sight!), when I caught sight of a book I used to read a lot when I was but a lad (Irish Ghost Stories! OooOoooOooh!). Anyway, I hunches over and leaf through it, gingerly recalling my youth, re-reading bits and pieces of stories full of silly fake Irish words. Then a beglassess'd employee looks expectantly at me, one book clutched in her paw, and asks politely "Excuse me". I stand up immediately, and let the woman pass.



Insantly, a billion bursts of white light cloud my vision, the pixies of low blood pressure. They persist for about three solid seconds, and I slump against the opposite stack of shelves. I was transported, dizzily, to a land of pure radiance, and it was pretty scary. I'm waiting for New York's wonky banking laws to stop screwing me, and let me access my damn bank account - I miss food groups.

Interstitial

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to what is, with any luck, not at all a terrible idea. My name is Zach, and I hope to be one of your hosts for the foreseeable future. There are many things to be done and said, but I vanish off the face of the internet for the weekend in a few scant hours, so let me be brief, now, so that I can be longwinded later.

There are three of us here.

We are here to write, and support each other in our writing efforts.

We are here to write with as much talent and skill as we can muster.

We will write about whatever strikes our fancy, and we will do so in whatever fashion we wish. There may, and probably will, be theme weeks.

Right now, the theme is saying hello.

Hello.

And now, so that you don't feel like this was a complete and total waste of your time, let me talk to you a bit about William Gibson's Virtual Light, which I finished today as part of my ongoing effort to read his books in the least chronological order possible, providing you started with Neuromancer. (And didn't we all?)

As briefly as I can, because I can certainly use whatever sleep I can get:

The central image of Gibson's Virtual Light is not the augmented-reality eyewear that the title references--sunglasses which manipulate your optic nerves electromagnetically, allowing you to see things that aren't there at the native resolution of your brain, without any light striking your eyeballs: literal virtual light--but the abandoned and then repurposed San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which gives its name not to the book, but to the entire trilogy.

A trilogy I read in reverse order, and with other books of Gibson's mixed in between.

This is an approach that worked surprisingly well.

All Tomorrow's Parties hooked me with the richness and the weirdness of its language, the strange structure of its narrative, the way it seemed to twist and turn and cavort, and how little of the character's pasts were explained, and how little that mattered. I always knew enough to keep reading, feeling like I was assembling a puzzle.

When I got to the end, I found myself wondering about the beginning.

Idoru was next, and in it I found characters I thought I knew and characters I thought I didn't, and another winding tale where the protagonists came at a situation from all sides, met once, and spun off again in different directions, sometimes together, sometimes not. And the details of the vision and the immense skill of the writing drew me in deeper, but I was never sure which books belonged together.

So I read more Gibson, over the course of most of a year, picking up books and devouring them as I found them. But it wasn't until today that I finished Virtual Light, and traced the threads back as far as the author intended them to go, and caught a glimpse of the shape of the whole.

The bridge at the heart of the books is not so much an edifice as a space, a gap, an opportunity.
An interstice, to borrow the man's own terms. The world of the bridge is an interstitial community, as the book is a story that exists in the spaces between worldshattering events, and the characters are people between, always coming or going but never seeming to arrive.

A space outside of normal society, where a new society has been created. Characters that have been displaced from the normal context of their lives, moving in the spaces between other people's worlds, and changing.

In the spaces between monoliths, life flourishes.

Welcome aboard.