I'm going to talk about writing.

Well, that'd be easy, wouldn't it?

This from a guy who sounds like a 12 year old with turrets syndrome. It's easier to just write. I write everything in VI, or really, VIM. Real men do not use Emacs. Also: Real men do not use VI. Real men use ED. You show me a man who uses nothing but ED and I'll show you a man who's got more cajones than Chucky Cheese franchises have balls.

As the saying goes, I don't process words, I write them. When I need to write things out in some sort of printable fashion I use a simple world-readable cross-platform markup format called "HTML".

Anyway, I guess I'll just shoot shit out my flapping yapper for a while, like usual.

The way I see it The Problem With Fiction is that literature is inherently limited to analysis of the highschool english student's old maxim, "the human condition." Outside the realms of hard science and maybe math, and those are debatable, any book you pick up is going to be meaningful only in a human I'm-a-bipedal-creature-with-thumbs-who-disobeys-localized-thermodynamical-laws context. Its probably just whining, but any real direct experience of whatever really actually IS is constrained by a human perspective impossible to detangle from the mess of truth around us laying about like dead smelly fish. We're the odd mass out. Figuring an electron is probably everybit as self aware as we are, if not more so, our graces with anything extemporal is improbable, we can't directly experience God, we can't get on base with what is real, and the whole realm of human knowledge, philosophy, and religion are just weak attempts to rectify the problem. This sort of thinking inevitably breeds some sort of existentialist point of view, which is a big mistake once you think about it.

We could extrapolate on such redundant and really obvious ranting to just about everything else, really, but why waste time. I'm not much of a tea head.

Here's some advice, go find out about some good writers:

    RTVF's official "Misunderstood Genius," J Ryan Stradal, actually graduated. The shock of it all apalled me at the time. His homepage thus no longer exists, it was pretty damned funny when it did. He spent some time as a columnist for the student newspaper, and wrote a bunch of fucked up @!#$.

    George Winters once said about J Ryan, "Wasn't he a dadaist? I think I saw him hanging out with Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Maurcel Duchamp. The stapler guy, right?"

    Samuel Beckett is the goddam king. Joyce was pretty cool too, for what it's worth. By most means Beckett's short prose is the only thing that really turns my crank, or was, until I started reading Thomas Pynchon novels.

    Pynchon is rad, my mom disapproves of him highly. All the recluse and mystical isn't-he-a-curious-chap-let's-invent-shit-about-him and I'm-so-cool-because-I've-met-Thomas and other hard-on boneheaded fame-jerk reactions to the fact that the guy doesn't want to talk about it can get really fucking annoying, never mind the people that insist on reading into anything they read exactly what they want to read into it; I would disregard them if they didn't incite me to spread horse shit and dingo-sprinkles everywhere.

    Gravity's Rainbow is a great satire, which is why it's a good read, and it transcends satire, which is why you should read it.

    WCW was responsible for a great deal of the inovations in early 20th century American literature, primarily by applying principles from early 20th century painting to the poem. The legacy of Williams' work can be seen in the modern contours of pop-iconoclasm and media-hyped manufacture of celebrity that began with the beats, which made selling out possible, which made it possible for blind-albino-gay artists named Andy Worhol to become famous, which eventually leads to Michael Jackson, Bolton-Cahrey-G, MTV, and the concept of "Only 40 bands get to be popular at one time." Hi, America sucks now. But there's hope, maybe somebody like the kids in mp3 world will drag the music industry into what it should be: a populist extraveganza of half-assed and mediocre bands scrapped together in people's garages and basements.

    King of the beats, Jack Kerouac, was a groovy guy. I could get sufficiently pretenscious at this point and wax poetic about the beats, but suffice it to say that they wrote some groovy shit, then they died. Except for Burroughs, who just wrote some weird shit and then kept living. All put they did something akin to rewriting the American gothic, then set the stage for the next three Rip-Off Generations, till the Yuppies went retro and set us back five, and now my generation has set us back like seven or so. Just a big fat cycle. But anyway, yeah, Jack was our "hullo" to modern America, in a way, and goodbye to the old. It'll never be like that again, not unless it comes with a tour-guide.

    Oh, and if I hear one more person rip into "On the Road" for being a story about nothing, you know the people, "What? So they get in a car and keep going back and forth. What the fuck's the point?" I think I'll get into some serious throat rending, maybe jump from something high, "Let's go bub", yadda. Likely as it is folks react to the fad-worship involved with anything beat and thus deride the book. All weaknesses granted aside on Kerouac's part don't bother, deride the people instead.

    Junky godfather to the beats, William S. Burroughs. He's always wearing a smile.

    This is one my pal Matt Wambach pointed me to - he's excellent and stuff: Yehuda Amichai.

    Seamus Heaney, who is for lack of a better plug the modern voice of Ireland (like Yeats or something). He kicks ass. Lots of texture. Some of the best shit put out in years, in my opinion. I think its really only fair to say that Heaney is probably the best poet the western english speaking world has ever produced. Ever. Fuck Shakespeare man. Seamus is the shit.

There are, it is true, some activities in which wholly admirable work is desired by the powers that be; the chief of these is science, and the next is public architecture in America. But if a man's education has been literary, as is still too often the case, he finds himself at the age of twenty-two with a considerable skill that he cannot exercise in any manner that appears important to himself.