Penny Hero (dot) Net

So, in the first serious attempt I’ve made to keep myself from playing WoW for a day, I dusted off my guitar and tried to see how much I remember.

My fingers hurt like hell, but it’s a good hurt. :) I stumbled through a few of the Pumpkins songs I know, some Third Eye Blind, and the few original songs I wrote back in High School (still no lyrics for any of those).

Then I remembered I had a folder of songs and tablature somewhere. Dug it out. Unfortunately, it was full of base tabs from when I was in a band (for what, a month? haha). Most of the tabs were for songs I had wanted to play (Like Naveed), but never got brave enough to actually suggest them.

Anyway, in the back of the folder, I’d stuck a 3-ring notebook with half the pages already torn out. What was left was a bunch of poetry, maybe attempts at song lyrics actually–I barely remember writing any of it.

I found this little snippet though, and I think it’s brilliant. I have a sneaky suspicion that I stole it from someone:

Jazz me up,
I’m like a bad mood soda
Feel your fizz carress my sky.
Do I?

It’s sitting all by itself above some really crappy verse in a different colored pen as if I’d thrown it in there really rushed and then didn’t know what to do with it.

Anyway, I like it. I’m not sure if it’s mine. At the edge of my brain, I think I remember trying to come up with music for it. But of course failing miserably. I’ve been told that my “original” music sounds like Christian pop-rock (no offense… but happy bouncy “rock” music is not my cup of jasmine tea.)

More quotes may follow. Wish me luck with taking a break from WoW. The rest of my life is calling. :)

Yesterday evening, I finally launched the new design for my WoW guild’s website. If you feel like it, check it out: A Horde Dazed Knight. It’s not 100% finished though. (12/15/07 edit: I’m no longer webmaster. This site is Shadowfox’s creation.) Some things I still need to do:

• create thumbnails for all the images (instead of just resizing them in the html)
• Add some way to contact me about site problems
• perhaps link to mozilla and put a happy note somewhere in the footer saying the site works best in Firefox (which of course it does)
• Finish the archives. I’m missing the Gnomes’ Night Out stuff
• Fix some random grammar typos and a link in the guidlines
• Pull out the non-guidelines info out of the Guidelines page and create a “resources” page in the main nav (with Dirge’s permission).

These are not in any particular order. :)

In Other News

My job sort of starts today. I’ve had a million technical difficulties since I got hired involving Comcast, which prevented me from being trained with everyone else and caused me to miss one meeting (the second meeting I missed was due to my own stupidity… grrr).

The project seems cool. Improving an existing technical document for ease of translation later. Very awesome and right up there in “some of my most loved things to do… fix other people’s writing!” (no joke. seriously. yes, we’ve long established that I’m a nerd.)

The software we’re using requires windows though… which forced me to hose my linux box… at least until March anyway.

And last but not least

I had an interview with Google last week. That was very very exciting. I don’t know exactly how “well” I did, but I know that I gave a pretty accurate picture of my abilities and my skills, so now it’s up to Google to decide if they want me as a tech writer. I’m crossing my fingers, but Plan B is still a strong possibility in 2008. Yay for more debt! At least this would turn into a USEFUL degree.

Felt like writing a poem. It’s crap, but maybe I’ll do something with it. Plus, today is the poetry slam, so I guess it makes sense.

There’s a hole
in my head.
It stinks inside.
Stupid.

There’s a hole
in my mind
where eyes and lies and thighs
used to pair up
and fill me up.

There’s a hole
in your face
and a cigarette
in my head.

There’s a hole
in this thing
called …
There’s a hole, and
using only words,
I try to fill in the blanks.

There’s a hole
in my head.
And my thoughts tumble out
like dead tuna.

There’s a hole, and
with your hair and skin still stuck
under my nails,
I try to paint them back.

I’m really really interested in the structure of fiction. Not just something so basic as knowing the difference between a framed and an unframed story. I’m really into tracing where the author chooses to shift in time between “present” time and the time of the narrative itself.

I’m also really into how a story can play with structure in a more physical sense. House of Leaves is a good example of this. The text itself is thought to be a collection of crap found somewhere, but the various narrators paint different, deeper histories of where that collection of stuff came from… and how it wound up published and in your hands. Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw is another one that plays with this kind of structure… it sets up the story as a story told on a late night orally, but the first narrator says that the text we are reading was actually given to him after that storyteller died, years later, and that he published it after that.

These kinds of structures displace the idea of “book” and “story” and cause the story or whatever you want to call it at that point to insert itself a little bit into our own world.

When an author does that, it’s awesome. If they can shake up the boundry between “book” and “me”, I practically orgasm.

So, I’m facinated by this. And thinking about these kinds of works has given me new ideas for cool structures that I could maybe someday make into stories. Things like, having two interlinear narratives… two different points of view seeing a story at the same time literally woven together line by line on the page. I know how it would look, and the kinds of effects it would have… but I don’t yet have the content to make it work.

Right now, I’m playing with a piece of fiction that on the outer-most layer is a fiction story (it has a title, but the title refers to the next “layer” in the structure), but it’s actually a story about a blog entry that recieves no comments, which is telling the story of the girl’s father’s death and how that effects her, which really turns out to be her trying to make connections with people in her life… It’s 4 pages long now, and I don’t know how it will end, or if I could get away with ending it with something bloggy like “but I have to go now, my mom just came in” or something.

I’m not sure that makes sense, because I’m writing this in “rambling blog style” instead of literary analysis-clarity style… but I’m really excited about some of these ideas. And for a long while I had my heart set on working on some of them with Gavin. But, I don’t think that’ll happen. I read a story by a classmate of mine yesterday, and I really admire her work. The only problem is that really working with someone on your writing requires a huge amount of trust and vulnerability and that takes time to build…

I guess I’ve got time though. I should start talking to more of my writing classmates. Some of them are really jozu.

a character descriptor: politely clueless

Here’s some fiction I wrote for my Eng465 class (The Uncanny Novella) and I wanted to share. The setting is real, except the house actually was not directly between us and the waves. The dinosaur house was the dead crumbling house 2 houses down.

I’ve had a few people ask me if this story is “real”. It’s not. Yeah, it’s set on the corner of Paradise Dr. and Paradise Ala-Kai where I used to live, but all characters really are fictious. These are nothing like my real mom and ex-stepdad, or our situation in Hawaii at all. The narrator also is not supposed to be me. But it was fun to write. and I hope it’s fun to read, especially for those of you who lived/live in Hawaii.

Anyway, enjoy. It’s been revised since I let a few people read it last night. I’ve also cross-posted this in my other log-ish journal .

Dinosaur House

There was a skeleton of a house across the street from ours. It was right on the ocean, although it did nothing to block us from any of the salt spray. It was massive and gray, rotting in the humid summer sunlight and the oppressive winter rains. Its history was a familiar one. Lots of people had tried and failed to build out here. There was another dinosaur house on Kaloli and 5th—also massive, but framed with heavy iron beams that were now red and disintegrating. “Plastic rusts in Hawaii,” my mom would sometimes complain. The dinosaur on 5th street might have become something more grotesque than just another way to shelter things. They’d let a big gnarled Ohia tree grow right in the middle of it, as if it was going to be an over sized conversation piece in the middle of their ballroom. A tree as a decorative caged animal. The tree now stood five or six feet higher than the highest beams in the metal skeleton, reaching out of it like a bony hand, or a long swaying neck.

The dinosaur house across the street was four stories high, and seemed to sway and creak in the wind. It was all plywood and two-by-fours, with no glass in its windows, and no finished walls. It was open like a broken ribcage, its roof acting like a sagging spinal column barely holding it together. My step-dad wanted it torn down. Wanted it cleaned up and hauled off. He called it an unnecessary eye-sore, a rude reminder, and wanted it to stop blocking his view, and to stop creaking and whining at night, as if it felt it was missing something by being all bones and plywood. “At least we’re not like that,” my mother would say, sunning herself topless on our back deck. My step-dad would startle himself awake with his own snoring in the hot-tub, and for an instant I would think of him drowning in his sleep.

My desire to go inside the dinosaur house grew the longer we lived near it. We rented down the street while our house was being built, and I walked to the work-site almost every day after school just to be near it. I sat in its tangled shadows, and watched them unravel and stretch on the ground around me. They seemed to scratch at the gaudy new paint of our unfinished house growing up beside it. Together, we watched with tingling anxiety as the men my parents hired boarded up the open walls, fleshed out the windows, filled it in, covered it up, plastered it into place. But even when the walls were finished, and the windows and the doors kept the humidity and rain from seeping through, I knew what kind of emptiness and rot would be growing underneath the thin paint, the stainless steel nails, and the white sheet-rock.

I wanted to go inside the empty, open dinosaur house. I wanted to watch rain fall into what would never be a cold and empty kitchen. Wanted to see it dripping from where a chandelier would never hang. I wanted to see the water run down the unfinished twisting staircases and soak the downstairs sitting room where a bar and a second living room would never be. I wanted to let it trickle from the treated wood into my stringy sun-bleached hair while I leaned against a wall, or lay on the floor of a bedroom that they would never make me live in. The day our house was finally finished, Alaska sent 25 foot waves to smash against the cliffs across the street. I could see the white explosions of water in the light of the moon. They towered over even the dinosaur house, and salty water sprayed against our windows, trying to break the glass. My parents were holding a housewarming party, their glowing Champaign glasses reflecting the calm white ceilings, diamond white teeth and empty glowing walls. The storm outside pounded and clawed at us—the empty gray skeleton was unable to move out of the way. In the darkness and the flash of the white ocean explosions, I didn’t hear the dinosaur house roaring—didn’t see it rocking violently. It buckled under the weight of my parent’s house’s gaze, and under the impulsive anger of the ocean. It collapsed suddenly, as if exhausted. As if it had been holding on to the same bitter hope I had been of seeing us and our vacation house shrivel away at the last minute. Instead, the dinosaur house crumbled and expired. I didn’t even see it slip away and it became nothing more than ancient bones occasionally breaking against the cliffs for the rest of my childhood.

Inevitability of Exploration

I find that what is significant about Angela Carter’s stories are not the consequences of exploring a “curiosity”, but the pattern of the necessity in exposing the hidden, subverting an undesirable but persistent situation, or of finally expressing long repressed desires. Exploring something out of “curiosity” seems to be a much too tame way of describing these apparently inevitable “spiritual ruptures,” as I will call them.

“The Bloody Chamber” is a story where several ruptures take place, all doing more than simply subverting the cliched use of flat characters in tales or reinventing a familiar folk story. They are accomplished through the complexity of the narrator’s sexuality, and through explicit exposition. Before her husband takes her to bed, the narrator browses his bookcase and thinks, “…and I think I knew, I knew by some tingling of the fingertips, even before I opened that slim volume with no title at all on the spine, what I should find inside it” (16). It’s not that she’s driven to expose her husband’s secret pedophiliac hoard out of some moral superiority–she already knows it is there, and possibly because she already knows, she must open it. I hesitate to call this “curiosity”; the pre-knowledge of its horror is explicit. The scene also acknowledges a perverseness in her character as well because of her pre-knowledge, and the development of her character as not naive, although innocent. After her husband leaves her, she feels “a certain queasy craving” (22) for him, which is disturbing considering the nature of their marriage. Revealing this underbelly of her own sexuality makes her more complex, less easily labeled “innocent victim” and more like an active participant (perhaps a hero), and subverts the usual use of stereotypical flat characters in folk tales–all of this adds to the inevitability of her investigation of the bloody chamber itself.

In “The Lady of the House of Love,” Carter constructs characters who are binary opposites of each other, which rhetorically contributes to the inevitability of the rupturing of the Countess’s situation. Compared to the sexually tormented and tarot-reading vampiress, the young british officer is a virgin, rational, and “rooted in change and time, is about to collide with the timeless Gothic eternity of vampires…whose cards always fall in the same pattern” (all from 97). Their opposite characterization borders on the cliche, if it weren’t for the depth added by the haunted vulnerability of the vampire, and the tragic knowledge that the officer’s innocence will end soon in the war, but this familiar construction makes their collision and the rupture inevitable.

If time and space permitted, I would explore more examples of the apparent inevitability of these explorations, and see if there is enough evidence to argue that her stories actually hinge on these kinds of constructions. Nothing in Carter’s stories appears to be accidental or driven merely by “curiosity”; all heros (especially women and virgins) seem to be active-participants, and either fated to complete the story (as with the virgin officer) or very conscious of their actions (as with the narrator in the “Bloody Chamber”)

What is interesting is that with these spiritual ruptures, Carter reinvents and re-integrates the “fairy story” quality of her tales. They become dark, moral, and spiritual fantasies appealing to readers’ deeply repressed emotions. A traditional folk tale might seem like a familiar, quaint and unthreatening fantasy; Carter inverts this and creates unfamiliar, threatening and dangerous stories but the end result is still a type of fantasy because they allow us to vicariously explore darker psychological depths than we are unlikely to be comfortable exploring outside of a fictional setting.

The Turn of the Screw: Tangled Layers of Displacement

The way Henry James subjects us to tangled layers of narrative displacement from the events in The Turn of the Screw is fascinating and disturbing because of how far it reaches into the story and how far it reaches outside its pages. Ironically, the effect of these displacements actually works to unravel and destroy the sense of safety and distance from this story as we read it and think about the implications of this carefully crafted illusion of distance.

There is no “first” layer from which to begin unraveling and examining the structure of this displacement, but we might start by looking at the character Douglas, who is the alleged first inheritor of the manuscript. His disinclination to immediately share the story is mixed with the narrator’s observation that he evidently “had something to produce” (3) suggesting that his hesitation has nothing to do with unwillingness, and more to do with the effect he intends to create. His unraveling of the story, cutting out voices seeking to jump ahead in his narrative with his reply of “that will come out” (8), resembles both a performance and the handling of something more sacred, which complicates our sense of the tale being factual.

We see Douglas through the eyes of the unnamed first narrator, who seems to highly regard writing and story-telling (connecting him with the story’s real author), as seen by his recognition of Douglas’s desire to speak, and his willingness to participate in the creation of the story by claiming to have a title (9)—of which we are never made privy to within the text.

Passing the manuscript to us adds complexity to this distance. We are told that these are an “exact transcript of my own made much later” (6). Then we finally turn another two pages, begin reading Mrs. Grose’s narration we are ready to have the rug pulled out from under us and to finally be shown the story everyone else in (and outside) the story had been making such a fuss about.

However, it’s clear that Mrs. Grose is an author and story-teller as well, emphasized by the attention to “beauty of the author’s hand” (9) in the frame. Grose—if we can suspend our disbelief in her existence for a moment—seems to consciously and strategically construct a chilling and powerful narrative. The chapter-breaks are no resting points in the narration at all but drive us forward with the very first sentence of the next chapter. Her decision to transcribe her conversations about her experiences rather than attempting to narrate the fantastic itself makes her account more literally believable, even as it amplifies our desire to see what she seems to avoid revealing and confuses our habitual drive to figure out what’s real. None of this suggests that this is a simple diary of events.

Finally, the unmentioned title of the manuscript and the published title of the actual book forms a bridge between author Henry James and the first narrator, and we can’t forget that Henry James is an actual physical person who we must believe has invented and written this entire novella. It is when we recognize this as a layer of displacement from the story like the others that we receive our biggest jolt as readers, because by extension, we are suddenly a part of the tapestry of this story, and perhaps not even a final part. (I sit at my desk now attempting to craft a convincing analysis inspired by this jolt.) All of this results in (and in my case, has already resulted in) a chilling and complicated experience of the uncanny as we attempt to unravel Henry James’ puzzle.

I’m FINALLY finished with my short story. If you want to read it, click here. is where I’m keeping stuff I create. The story is currently untitled.

The story is basically a fictionalized telling of one of my childhood memories, as cheesy as that sounds. When I was younger, I randomly decided that it would be fun to peel all the bark off of a dozen or so christmas trees in the christmas-tree orchard my parents owned. The story is about “Megan” (psudo-emily) and how she does this, and how she deals with the guilt of lying about it.

If you read it, thanks thanks. Help me think of a title if you want, or let me know how much the story sucks, and specifically where so I can make it better.

And yeah… I have to send a little note out there to my dad too. :) I’m curious if my dad remembers this happening. I gave the “older brother” character in the story the same name as my real brother too.

ANyway… I’m going to be late for work now. bleh.

This is what I’m working on right now. A five-page essay on nietzsche.

Give me feedback NOW BITCH!

Among the many related concepts explored in “On Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense”, Nietzsche describes a human existence in which it is impossible to ever directly experience or understand what reality actually is. He bases this philosophy on the idea that because we are unable to remove ourselves from our world and see it from an objective viewpoint, we can never hope to perceive more than the stimuli that reach our senses. According to Nietzsche, it is merely the “nerve stimulus”(82), which is already once removed from the original source that is then transferred into an “image” (82) or thought, no more than a metaphor, and then into sound and finally words. These then become our understanding of our world. However, these several degrees of separation between the original “thing in itself” (82) and our understanding of that thing prevent us from truly grasping its truth. Keeping this aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy in mind, an inescapable paradox reveals itself when it is recognized that Nietzsche cannot hope to effectively convey or discuss the actual truth or reality implied by his essay using human language. A discussion of just the diction used in the text of the essay, even in a translated version, provides evidence that language can never be used to effectively convey the exact truth that Nietzsche hopes to reveal. This paradox then turns back upon itself when it is realized that the fact that language fails Nietzsche not only undermines and weakens the validity of his idea of an inaccessible truth outside ourselves, but also provides the strongest evidence in support of it.

Yeah. that is one paragraph. The intro at that. But according to MSword, it is a full page. :) So… only four more like it to go. And btw, ignore my incorrect citations. Fuck figuring out which citation style he wants.

Yeah… you know I secretly love this shit, right?