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Hello, readers.

Here are things making me happy this week in no particular order except the one I wrote them in.

1) Bo Burnham. what. The stand-up of the YouTube-I don’t have time to finish this sentence because there’s a picture of a cat I need to write a poem about in which god doesn’t care about me or you and my emotions always get the better of me but I’m still gonna try because-generation. It’s fantabulism and surrealism and pop songs done with all the heart one could ask for in a performance that includes air guitar, air harpsichord, air cymbals, dis-embodied voices, masturbatory, orchestral, masturbations, and at least one murdered pentacorns (a unicorn with 5 horns). At some point, in some distant past, from somewhere, I saw the end of this performance on YouTube. And now, having seen the full show, I’m so excited it exists. Go watch it.

2) John Green. I know, I know, I’ve been talking about this all week, but Looking for Alaska is so damn committed to its characters and its emotions that it’s no wonder it spawned what has become the entity known as JOHN GREEN which now controls one-third of the interwebs. I do this thing sometimes when I read where I imagine criticisms of the thing I’m reading and then think of answers to those criticisms. Because I like arguing with myself, I guess, or maybe getting the jump on anyone who wants to argue with me. It leads to me sometimes talking in a way where people wonder if there presence is entirely necessary. The criticism I imagined people leveling at a book like Looking for Alaska is that it’s white kids at a boarding school and there’s a mysterious, crazy, magical girl and it reminds me of the stuff people said about Michael Chabon’s, A Model World and Mysteries of Pittsburgh. That the scope was too small, or the imagination not deep enough, or it was too romantic, too young, too naive. Well. I answered my inner critic by pointing out that all the best art comes from focusing on something, however big or small, until you can see the entire universe in it. Or. Well. The opposite. Douglas Adams focuses on the universe until you see yourself eating a sandwich. And, also, cricket. Also. Yeah. I like romance and death and finding the world inside curves of skin and falling leaves and it’s nice to pay attention to everything in all the things. Something like that. I like this book and the world is more awesome for it.

3) Tea. I received some gunpowder green tea from a lady and it is delicious.

That is all.

See you next week, readers.

ttfn.

Hello, readers.

In John Green’s Looking for Alaska, there’s a character obsessed with the last lines of famous people. This led me to thinking about the last lines of not famous people and about my mom and dad and how I have no idea what their last lines were. I remember things they said that would be good as last lines, such as, in no particular order.

1) It’s your turn for adventures.

2) Is this heaven?

3) I can’t think of a third thing.*

But, these weren’t their last lines. They said other things after these things. Very many of them not terribly cogent. Also, I wasn’t taking notes. Or recording them.** Presumably this is why there are so many last lines from famous people. Because someone was taking notes. Also, because they’re famous people write books about them, and I guess you need to have a last line or two in there. Also, also, people probably sometimes make last lines up, or collect the last, best, cogent thing the person said because having your last line be recorded as, “Aaaaaaaarrrrrgggggghhhhh” only really works if you’re a former member of Monty Python.

I presume that, in one manner or another, the whole remembering last lines thing will become a part of how Looking for Alaska wraps up. I don’t know how that will be, yet. I do know, though, that having a character obsessed with the literature of the very nearly dead is fun. It provides a context frame for scenes because, oh, yeah! Death! It’s always around us. John Green in video, and in words, presents such urgency. His stories have a will to bigness. They yearn.

Happy Wednesday, readers.

ttfn.***

*These might very possibly be my last words. Well, not the words I just wrote, but the asterisked ones, well, not those, because clearly many words followed them, but you get the idea. Whatever that means. How do people get ideas? Does our brain have an idea catching mechanism? Is it a mirror neurons thing?

**Well, except I did, after not recording conversations with Dad, ask Mom to let me record her as I asked her question about life, the universe, and everything, and that was a lovely thing to have done and to still have. If you’ve never interviewed your parents. Go for it. It’s fun. Maybe make some cookies, or cake, or tea, if that’s your thing, and sit down and share the eating and talking and make a record of who your parents are and were and who you were when you spoke to them.

***It’s unlikely my last words will be ttfn. I’ve told EG that what they should put on my tombstone is a quote from Kurt Vonnegut.

“If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

Hello, readers.

Two things.

1) Jane the Virgin reminds me of Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies and these are delightful things to be reminded of while watching television as very few moments while watching television do I think, oh, but THIS NARRATOR MAKES EVERYTHING SO MUCH BETTER. And so, when it happens, when I’m watching the travails of a curmudgeonly young woman surrounded by inanimate ephemera what give voice to her subconscious desires, or pie makers who kill and grant life with a touch, or, as with this new tv show, Jane the Virgin, I watch a young woman witness her life fall into a melodramatic orbit reminiscent of the telenovelas she loves, I take note, I smile, I think. Cool. I’ll give this a try.

2) After watching ten minutes of The Flash, the latest in the forever neverending run of our current superheroic culture, two things occurred to me.

a) Barry Allen’s father is the actor who played The Flash in that other TV adaptation of The Flash which feels like it was a dream I had once.

b) This, and Gotham, are both attempting to inject some silliness and fun and, while Gotham is hindered by the fact that ultimately it must, in order to succeed, be something of a tragedy such that Batman is required to exist, the Flash is not hindered by anything other than TV special effects. Point, Flash.

It’s blustery today. Blustery is an important word in Gary Shytengart’s Super Sad True Love Story. There’s apparently a hurricane landing in northwest England. In London, this has meant bursts of wind that bring to mind the fastest man in the world running past you and knocking you back with his wake.

Also, I have begun reading Looking for Alaska and am in love with the phrase, THE GREAT PERHAPS. It’s a good phrase.

Happy Tuesday, readers.

ttfn.

Hello, readers.

Today is October the 20th, a Monday, partly blue with blusters of blustery wind and scattered, occasional, not really trying all that hard, rain. It’s also the first day I have worn a scarf. My pants are red.

Earlier, I thought about a Vietnamese cafe called Palpitation. I only ever visited the cafe once, but I think of it from time to time for many reasons. One, the woman who owned it, and would later move to Thailand, was the only person there, and it was kind of awkward, and we might never have spoken except, up above her counter, written in chalk, there was this quote.

I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.

It’s from John Green’s book Looking for Alaska. 

At the time of me standing in that cafe, in Vietnam, the only other person near me the owner of an otherwise empty cafe, I had read one John Green book in my life, The Fault in our Stars, which had been my brilliant choice to read around the time my mom died. It is a sad story full of happiness. Which, I suppose, could just as well be a way of saying that it was a happy story full of sadness. I’m not sure which is truer, of the book or of life, but I do know that I very much loved the book, and I mentioned this to the cafe owner and we briefly chatted, about John Green (she hadn’t read TFiOS), about words, about otherwise empty cafes, and we friended each other on Facebook. She very soon, as I said, left the country and we may very well never speak again, and her cafe is very likely something else now, the quote erased. But, the quote, the moment, the woman, the cafe, all remain, as certain words, moments, and people do, safely tucked away in my mind, ready to return at the strangest moments, such as today, after preparing a lunch of roasted vegetables and polenta, I sat down in my London flat, began to eat, and watched this video, which reminded me that Looking for Alaska was published 10 years ago, and that quote was seen by me one year ago, and I’ve still not read the book.

So, I will do that. Starting tomorrow.

Happy partly blue, readers.

Enjoy.

ttfn.

p.s. The vlogbrothers are, in large part, why I ended up deciding to throw my hat in the ring of videographical logging of things and stuff. This video by Hank, for example, does a great job of explaining how the vlogbrothers achieve their vlogbrotheriness.

Hello, readers.

It’s Friday, the day of Fries, or, wait, I’m being told by my brain that the ‘fri’ in Friday doesn’t refer to fries, but, in fact, refers to Freya or, possibly, Frigga. Frigga being the Goddess of Clouds. Freya being the Goddess of Love. Possibly they were the same person. You can’t tell with gods.

Other things of note.

On Tuesday, at The Phoenix, the Liars’ League gathered and delivered 6 stories of slashing and burning in honor of Halloween. These included stories about abused children, armies of rats, and a great deal of horrors that lurk beneath the baseboards of various establishments. The last story delivered a delightful twist on the theme of the night, presenting a slash-fic full of a fiery tangle of passion between Kirk, Spock, Han, Harry, and many other corners of fandom.

Also, Tuesday was Ada Lovelace Day, which celebrates the not terribly often recognized contributions of women to our current, possibly dystopian, world of technological wonderterror. NPR has a lovely write-up of such humans as Ada Lovelace, herself, as well as Jean Jennings Bartik (one of the first programmers on the ENIAC—perhaps my favorite of the old-school supervillian names for computers, see also Pegasus) and Grace Hopper, Queen of Software, who realized hey, what if we programmed with words instead of numbers?

Tomorrow, EG and I venture off towards Bristol for those terrifically tangible evidences of autumn, leaves of red and gold, falling, swishing about our ankles. We will walk and talk among them, EG and I, and several generations of her family, from those not terribly able to walk or talk, to those who perform conversation and ambulation quite well, thank you. I don’t know what happened to my language there, readers. Sometimes I surprise even myself.

Note: No videographical interfacing this week, because trip. But the video life talking will reappear next week. Possibly with ghosts and ghouls, among the other things and stuff that are included in my thoughts and their tumbling across the universe.

Happy love and clouds, readers.

See you in the future.

ttfn.

Hello, readers.

Things are happening. As they do. For example, a motorcycle just drove down the street. The rider wore a helmet both yellow and fluorescent. A little further away, I can see the towers of St. Pancras. They are happening in the way that buildings happen, with all of that time and hopefully not too many dead bodies buried in their stones and also they are cool. Objects happen as much as anything.

EG and I just finished 30 Rock. It was glorious. Full of heart, strip clubs, blimpie sandwiches and a brief discourse on the etymology of love. We cried a small bit, which is a wonderful thing to do, from time to time, especially when watching comedies. I remember reading something somewhere sometime that said something like all the great comedies are built within the framework of sorrow. This makes me think about Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and how beginning with the end of the world is solidly sorrowful.

After finishing 30 Rock, I asked EG what she thought about me doing an entire video blog in the voice of Jack Donaghy (president of NBC on 30 Rock who speaks with the sort of gravely voice one associates with giant rock creatures from Neverending Story). She said she thought it would be weird when her mom watched because reasons. I asked EG if she knew what it meant that we had watched, together, the entire 30 Rock series from beginning to end.She said no. I said it meant we were married now. She said, So, how many times did you marry your Mom?

A new review by me has appeared at Strange Horizons. I reviewed Tigerman by Nick Harkaway. I loved it. My review, though, includes many more words than that.

Here’s an excerpt:

In his first two novels, The Gone-Away World and Angelmaker, Nick Harkaway evinced a predilection, and skill, for the gleeful plunder and bashing together of, more or less, every genre ever invented. In The Gone-Away World, he rollicked through a post-apocalyptic-SF-horror-romance-fantasy-kung-fu epic, and in Angelmaker, he thoughtfully tromped through a steampunk adventure, with dashes of crime, romance, mechanical bee doom, and family drama. What Harkaway does well in all this bashing and smashing, is to combine his ecstatic world-building with an equally ecstatic empathy for his characters, whether they be larger-than-life superheroes, or middle-aged, somewhat stereotypically reserved British sergeants who, despite their best efforts, end up becoming something not unlike a superhero.

Also, here’s my new video blog in which I discuss irretrievable and unknowable things, and also thread and labyrinths.

 

Happy Saturday, readers. You’re a happening bunch of happening things.

ttfn.

Hello, readers.

Having watched Before Sunrise last night, I’m reminded of many things, including this trip taken while in Korea which I had happened to be remembering earlier in the day as I rode the bus home from school. What I was thinking as I rode the bus home from school was how, once upon a time on a mountainside in Korea, I met someone and we talked, and we explored, and we rode the bus, and we wondered if we would ever see each other again, and then we did see each other again, and again, and had many adventures, and then I left Korea and we haven’t seen each other for some months. What I was also thinking on the bus home from school was how so much of my time in Korea was built around a moment in which I met someone and we understood each other before we knew who each other were and it all seemed inevitable in retrospect, but it was pretty much totally evitable and fragile and incredibly happy and sad to remember.

What had led me to think these thoughts on the bus was seeing a girl sitting by the window with an empty seat beside her. I wondered, what would happen if I sat next to her and said hello? And then I remembered what happened the last time I did that.

Here are some things that caught my attention this past week.

William Boyle–friend, writer, fellow noir lover, devourer of music and film–has written a book called Gravesend. I’m so damn excited to see how his love landed on these pages.

By way of A.S. Moser, a nifty deal on the so-far five books of The Song of Ice and Fire.

Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, discussed at Feminist Fiction. It encapsulates a lot of what I loved about the show (Tennant, the humor), some of what I have felt about the show recently (the favoring of dramatic whamwow over emotional continuity and narrative logic), and some thoughtful thoughts on the recent treatment of the women that surround the Doctor. I found myself, while watching the 50th anniversary special, to be so charmed by the proceedings, and so moved by the finale, that my misgivings over recent Who did not misgive me this time around. The dynamics of 10 and 11 and The War Doctor sparkled and sparked with so much emotional bite that I felt, at last, here was Moffat back to engaging us so deeply in the emotions and emotional arcs of characters that any possible narrative flim-flammery barely registers because we the emotional arc sustains us.

I’m so excited for the Christmas special and what might come next.

Happy Saturday, readers.

Enjoy your burrito.

Hello, readers.

Today, November 20th, is Teacher’s Day in Vietnam. This means that I know have a great deal of roses, along with some body wash, pens, and a very nice tie. It also means that the students put on a show in a big hall for us teachers. Dances were performed to a mix of dubstep, Justin Bieber, and k-pop–not all at once, of course. There was a play about bullying, and a song or two sung as well.

As a bonus, in the teacher’s lounge, one of the teachers had her guitar, or a guitar, and with it she played some Bon Iver, Journey, and Fraggle Rock. We sang along as best we could. The room clapped for mine, and another teacher’s, rendition of “Don’t Stop Believing.”

Sitting outside at the moment with some coffee and plans of writing and reading. It will probably rain at some point, which is when I will go inside. For now, it is pleasantly wonderful.

Happy Teacher’s Day, readers.