Plastic Millennium blog

Have been monkeying around with cover design over here.

The Authorial Movie

A WIP new site.

Family Maps II - Gordon at Montreal General (penultimate cut)

[Update]

This is the penultimate (what I thought yesterday was the final) cut of a project that started out as audio-only. I got the idea of adding footage while Suki and I were in her hometown for Chuseok; the roughness of the visuals shows. Still, I liked the dreamy quality of the surrounding nature so much -- its seeming to be part of this world yet not -- that I decided to keep working on it.


It took quite a few more takes than I thought it would to get it just right. This was more a question of getting a take of the audio that I was happy with. Changes with the music, re-takes of the audio (sometimes because of background noise, other times because of badly timed pauses) meant a great deal of recording. Anyway, better now. Almost there.

Baram Writer audio

At BridgeText, an audio version of BARAM WRITER.

Plastic Millennium - audio part 3, take 1

At BridgeText, part 3 of the Jerry Gunnarsen section of my mega-novel PLASTIC MILLENNIUM.

Plastic Millennium - two

At my creative website BridgeText, part two of the new series of audio files I'm producing for my mega-novel.

Plastic Millennium - audio 1 a

The first of my new Garageband Plastic Millennium audio files.

Truth Marathon - full

I now have a site exclusively for the full screenplay novel of TRUTH MARATHON.There are twelve videos in total, and you can view them from beginning to end in sequence.

Truth Marathon - full - ONE A

This is the first of the full-length movie I made of TRUTH MARATHON. It is part of a project that exists in a variety of versions, each with different word-counts, thematic foci, and modes of appearance. For example, all the projects in this series can exist as text-only novels, or as hybrid graphic novels.

Truth Marathon - art/short video 2

At BridgeText, a few sketches from the second short TRUTH MARATHON vid.

Truth Marathon art

More at BridgeText...

Wars' Hours

Since this year is the centennial of World War One -- with a lot of press to come over the summer as August approaches -- it's likely a lot of attention will be given to the origins of that war. It's generally viewed as a catastrophe that was blundered into because of iimperial interests and hubris (the belief the war would be short). And of course, there will be many references to how WWI sowed the seeds of WWII. So it seems to me a mystery why similar questions aren't asked of the origins of a much more recent conflict -- one that's still going on. Below is a speech by Philop Agee which describes the intelligence available to Western powers before the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein. It also provides interesting background on the policy of the Bush administration in 1990, as well as a sketch of the American/Iraqi intelligence relationship during the Iran/Iraq war.

It's worth noting that one of Agee's points -- about elevated arms spending world-wide despite the end of the Cold War -- is still as pertinent as it was more than 20 years ago. Levi Asher has had a series of good posts at LitKicks on the distorting effects of militarism. The origins/policies forming a background to Gulf War I are a good place to start.

Noteworthy

Here's the link to the Will Self piece mentioned below

Steven Beattie on Mavis Gallant's "Varieties of Exile"

Tea culture and the fate of the novel

Will Self I

Go here

I'm still blogging. But it's almost entirely taking place here.

One year

Y

On the Selector Class System (1)

A while ago, I wrote to Dan Green to ask him some follow up questions to an article he wrote entitled "The Standard of Literature" at his website. In that piece, Green argued against Alison Walsh, who had previously published an article in the Irish Independent on the need for gate-keeping in literature.(Walsh is a semi-regular contributor to the Irish Independent, and generally writes on the publishing scene there.) The question at stake is a rather complicated one, since on the one hand it hinges on issues of taste and on the other rests upon very commonly held -- one might almost say axiomatic -- beliefs about the great proportions of amateurish junk that get produced in any society by people who dream of being professional artists but do not possess the requisite talent. For Walsh, it seems, this axiom is incontrovertible. Or to be more precise, for Walsh, the axiom justifies gate-keeping as it is commonly practiced by the publishing industry. For Green, this justification is questionable; the true determiner of a work of fiction's worth is the reader, and the conventional gate-keeping model -- driven by profit motives as well as personal aesthetic taste -- is not adequate to ensure the production of what the publishing industry claims it produces: the best novels, short stories, etc., that are being created by living writers.

I wrote to Green with some follow-up questions after he posted his article, and he was kind enough to answer. I'm going to post some of that discussion here. I'm also going to ask a few more questions on top of my original ones.

When I emailed Green, I asked...

more...