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Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser

April 17, 2011 //

Published: February 12, 2008
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Genre(s): Fiction, Slipstream
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 244

I was drawn to this collection of short stories by two things; first off, the cover is gorgeously designed, evoking both the period setting of many of the stories – the 1950s and 1960s – and the unsettling, off-kilter themes that resonate throughout the collection. Secondly, I’d heard of Millhauser’s story “Eisenheim the Illusionist“, which was adapted into a film that was unfairly compared to The Prestige because they were both period stories about magicians. I liked the movie enough that I wanted to know more about the author, although I’ve read that the story is very different from the movie.

It’s rare to find a truly consistent short story collection; in my experience, even the best authors swings and misses in this kind of collection. I read Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things earlier this year, and those stories alternated between gorgeous, disturbing, and incredibly slight. Dangerous Laughter has a few stories that I felt miss the mark, but by and large Millhauser’s collection is one of the strongest I’ve read in a long time. The stories alternate between macro-level narratives that read more like entries in a history book, and more personal stories that focus on specific characters. In general, my favorite stories fell in the latter category, but all of the stories in this volume have something to recommend them.

The first truly stunning one is “The Room in the Attic”, which tells the story of a young man who befriends a girl that lives in darkness. During his junior year at school, the narrator, David, befriends an odd, bookish new kid named Wolf. One day Wolf invites David over to his house and introduces him to his sister, Isabel, who lives in the attic room and keeps her lights turned off at all times. Wolf tells David that she is recovering from a nervous breakdown, but that she seems to like him, and David begins regularly visiting Isabel in her attic room.

They dance together in the dark, play games, and talk about anything and everything. Soon enough David is spending more and more time with Isabel, and can think of nothing else but his daily visit. Eventually the idea of Isabel looms in David’s mind, and her invisibility becomes an indelible part of her personality for him, until he is no longer sure he wants to see her face. I loved the way this story every-so-gently tweaked reality and played with symbolism; it manages to fill something seemingly mundane with incredible power.

The title story, “Dangerous Laughter”, also plays with something apparently normal that becomes twisted and strange. It focuses on one summer when a group of students start playing a game where they gather in secret and laugh as loud and long as they possibly can, until they are exhausted, spent. Eventually they form laughter salons, each with its own specialty, and the games start turning into a ritual.

The laughter salons seem both innocent and deeply, darkly personal; where other games like spin-the-bottle or seven minutes in heaven are naive or childish approaches to sexuality, the laughter games seem to tap into something more primal but similarly illicit. Things start getting even more intense when a formerly anti-social girl joins the laughter salons and starts laughing harder and longer than everyone else. This story perfectly captures the lyrical mysticism and strangeness inherent in those bygone teenage summers, and quickly became one of my most favorite in this collection.

Other stories in the collection deal with creativity (“In The Reign of Harad IV“), spirituality and belief (“The Tower”), identity (“The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman”), and more. Although at first they may seem gentle and understated, many of them are filled with a creeping tension or an impending sense of tragedy. Few of the stories wear their fantastic nature on their sleeves, but all of them are just a few steps to the left of reality, edging into more unsettling territory. More often than not, it was just enough to get me thoroughly hooked and keep me reading. I thoroughly enjoyed this collection, and look forward to reading more by Millhauser very soon.

REALLY LIKED IT

REALLY LIKED IT

Amazon | BookPeople | Indiebound

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Categories Books, Full of Words

Who watches The Watchmen? Definitely not the Heroes writers.

November 10, 2008 //
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First off: a disclaimer. I’m going to discuss this week’s Heroes’ episode in my post, so if you’re spoiler averse, please stop reading now.

With that out of the way, I think those of us who are current on the newest season of Heroes can all safely agree that the show is a complete mess. By the same token, I think if you are current on the show, it’s because there’s still something about it that keeps you hooked and ready for the next episode. It’s almost as if it has some kind of charisma that makes you want to forgive its plot-holes and serious lapses in writing.

It’s why I keep watching, and keep hoping that the writing will rise above the current level and the writers will avoid any serious lapses in logic or character motivation. I have a feeling I will continue to get my hopes up only to have them dashed yet again.

This week’s episode, “Villains”, was a particularly good example. It focused entirely on a flashback seen through the eyes of a “dream-walking” Hiro. It was nice to have an episode that centered on characterization as opposed to express-train “save the world” plotlines, but at the same time it only introduced more serious logical lapses to an already overstuffed storyline.

Considering how this season has been received in the press and by fans, this episode felt like a last-ditch effort to remind the folks at home about the good times from season one. A number of familiar plot points from the first season were revisited and fleshed out from new perspectives. For the most part these details weren’t much more than filler, but one storyline did at least have an interesting premise, namely that Sylar’s descent into murder and mayhem wasn’t entirely his own doing.

Essentially the roles are reversed here, with Noah Bennett as the manipulative Company man (“villain”) who wants Sylar to keep killing so that they can study him, and Sylar as the relative innocent (“hero”) who truly regrets his initial act of violence and tries to commit suicide out of guilt. Sylar is a fascinating character, and I do like seeing more of his backstory, but I do wish that it didn’t have to come at the cost of the imposing air of menace he cultivated throughout seasons one and two. That isn’t my biggest problem with this storyline, however; my real issue is with the involvement of Kristen Bell’s character, Elle.

In this flashback storyline, we are told that Bennet and Elle partnered together to study Sylar. Elle was sent in undercover to draw him out of his shell by befriending him. She has second thoughts, however, and begins to have sympathy for Sylar as they become close, and she asks Bennett to back off.

The big disconnect is that when we meet Elle for the first time in season two, she is a daddy’s girl and an immature mess, completely sheltered and reliant on The Company for everything. In her scenes here, she seems much more in-control and mature, not to mention moral. In addition to that complete change in character, there are scenes later in season two where Elle saves several characters from a rampaging Sylar. I don’t have the episode in front of me to watch, but from what I remember there wasn’t even a hint of a shared history when they confronted each other.

You could, perhaps, explain some of this away as a case of a serious mind-wipe or manipulation performed on Elle so that she doesn’t remember what happened with Sylar, but that seems like a lazy explanation for what is, on the whole, half-assed writing. This particular storyline felt like it had some potential to be interesting, but it barely stands up to any kind of scrutiny. Overall, this week’s episode amounted to nothing more than plotholes interrupted by filler.

In conclusion, I think Heroes is best appreciated when you don’t analyze it too closely. I liked this week’s episode a lot more when I first started writing this post, and my opinion seriously went downhill from there. Doesn’t mean I’m going to stop watching, though. Shameful, really…

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Categories TV Shows

The Fall

April 8, 2008 //
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The Fall, starring Lee Pace from Pushing Daisies:

“In a hospital a little girl with a broken collar bone meets a bedridden man who starts telling her a fantastical story which reflects his state of mind. As time goes by fiction and reality start to intertwine in this uplifting epic fantasy.”

– Via Timo’s HD Movie Trailers in Miro

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Categories Film

Mr. Gantry Comes To Visit

July 23, 2006 //
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So tonight was “Cathedral For a While” party #3. I didn’t perform, but I did put together “a second issue of Summer Reading”:http://unsquare.com/temp/issue2.pdf. (If you’re curious, “issue #1 is available in .zip form here”:http://unsquare.com/reading_1.zip.)

For some reason I wasn’t satisfied with just formatting everyone else’s stories, and I didn’t want to include something old. So I wrote a new story. In an hour.

I have this feeling that it’s probably terrible, but it is amazing considering I forced myself to produce in a very short time limit. I threw caution to the wind and I just wrote! Perhaps a lesson can be learned?

(Don’t write under deadline?)

In any case:

Mr. Gantry Comes to Visit
by Jeff James

Davis woke suddenly from a very deep sleep. This was less than comfortable. His eyes would not, did not focus, and his thoughts were still dozing, lethargic and lost in the jumble. What had awakened him? Something sharp and metallic. Jabbed right into the soft part of his left foot. There was no sign of it now.
He rose from bed, walked unsteadily across the room to his miniature bathroom. “Walked” was perhaps giving him too much credit – he stumbled, cursed, stumbled again, and stepped on something that irreparably broke.
He splashed water on his face, cold water. As cold as his faucets would allow, which meant somewhere just below lukewarm. It seemed to help, at least a little bit. He could focus his eyes now. He no longer saw his apartment as a colorful field of fuzzy jumbles. The jumbles rearranged themselves into his fairly depressing collection of earthly possessions.
He toweled himself off and heard, faintly, the sound of clinking glass in the kitchen. A voice called out: “Coffee’s ready.”
Davis stepped into the hallway and walked towards his undersized kitchen. A full pot of coffee steamed on the burbling automatic coffeemaker. Just to the right of that on the counter, at about chest level, was a man’s face.
Or, to be more specific, a man’s head.
Where the man’s neck logically should have continued down into his body, there was a small metal platform that sprouted spider-like metallic legs. They clicked softly on the kitchen counter as the head skittered from side to side.
This was Gantry. He said: “I would have poured you a cup, but these things’re worthless for gripping,” and gestured meaningfully with two spider-legs. Read the rest of this entry »

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Categories Writing

I like the rows of lights because they keep me calm

February 19, 2006 //
2

!{float: left; margin: 0 1em 1em 0;}/images/nada.jpg! tonight was the “nada surf”:http://nadasurf.com/ show at “emo’s”:http://www.emosaustin.com/. it was actually the third time i’ve seen them play. the first was well before they made a comeback, and they were opening for the impossibles, a local texas band. the second time was at emo’s about two or three years ago, just after they had started edging their way back into respectability – that show was inside on the tiny stage emo’s has in their front room. it was an exciting show because i was so into their last album, let go, and you could tell that they were confident and ready to face the world again.

this third show was on the big outside stage at emo’s. at this point, nada surf is back and well established in indie circles, and the outside area was packed even though it was pretty cold outside. they did have heaters running, but i was definitely still glad i brought my warm hat with me. it was a good show, but i was slightly less excited this time. it’s not that i’m less into their music – i think i was just in a weird mood or something. i suppose the fact that i couldn’t round up anyone to go with me did also put a little bit of a damper on things. anyways, it was a good show, they were definitely _on_ despite some sound problems, and they played all of the songs i wanted to hear.

one thing that was kind of annoying, though, was that about 30-45 minutes into the show a girl who had been standing next to me for a while started trying to talk to me, except she was plastered and i couldn’t hear a thing she was saying. despite this fact, she kept trying to talk to me, and kept trying to lean against me or put her arm around mine. she was either hitting on me or looking for someone to help her stand up straight. probably both. i tried to let her know that i really just wanted to be left alone so that i could watch the show, but this wasn’t really getting across, so finally i just had to give up my spot and walk around to the other side of the venue. this kind of sucked because i was further away, but i was really getting the impression that this girl was not going to leave me alone, and i was never going to figure out what the hell she was saying.

at the end of the show, i bought a nice little poster. i think i’m going to go get some frames tomorrow for that and my mission of burma poster. i’ve basically figured out that those little sticky tabs just aren’t going to work in this apartment – the walls aren’t the kind of smooth surfaces necessary to make things stick. i’ll just put up some nails and worry about fixing the holes whenever i move out.

on the way home, the roads were icy all over – i saw a bunch of fire trucks, cop cars and ambulances headed to or from accidents. i got stuck behind an accident on 35 for a little while, and then when i got to the 183 exit, it was blocked off by a cop car, most likely because the exit, a curving overpass, would be treacherous in tonight’s weather. i decided to go further north and take the Yager exit, since I know how to get to my place from there. this is the kind of driver i am, especially when i don’t have other people in the car to judge me – i’ll miss an exit and just casually find my way home some other way.

anyways, i was driving down the feeder road verrrry slowly because there was a long bridge coming up and i know from experience that car tires and icy bridges do not mix. i was driving about 25 miles an hour, and when i finally got over the bridge i looked off to my right and realized that there was a flipped car on the side of the road. the front bumper was in a ditch and the car had landed at a 45 degree angle with the tail end straight out in the air. for a second i couldn’t believe my eyes, and then i pulled over up ahead of it to check on the driver. (noting, as i did this, that several cars in front of me had just driven right past the accident.)

the car looked pretty bad. those few seconds while i walked up to the wreck were pretty scary, because i didn’t see any movement at first, but as i got a little closer i saw a face in the window, so i called out to the guy, who told me that he was okay. when i got up close, i reached down and helped him climb out through the window – he had just finished cutting off his seat belt. the whole thing had probably happened minutes before i got there, although i didn’t see it. the guy was, amazingly, fine, although he was pretty freaked out (understandably). once i got him out, i called 911 and waited with him for them to come. i felt pretty sorry for the guy – apparently his weekend had been bad already, and this was just icing on the cake.

after about 20 or 30 minutes, a cop and a wrecker came, and pretty soon after a fire truck pulled up as well. because the guy wasn’t hurt, he turned down EMS service, and once the tow truck turned his car over and towed it off, i gave him a ride home. perhaps the worst part for the poor guy was that he was literally minutes from his house. (isn’t there some statistic that says that most accidents happen when you’re a few miles from where you live?)

after that, i drove extra slow the whole way home, only stopping for a bit of whataburger because my stomach was rumbling. and now it’s 5am and i’m only a little sleepy. that’s what i get for taking a nap before the show. oh well. i’ll try and go to sleep here in a little while.

tomorrow night, “supergrass”:http://www.roadtorouen.co.uk at “the parish”:http://www.theparishroom.com/!

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Categories Music

losing my edge

July 3, 2005 //
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Well, it’s official. I find _myself_ boring now. I have two subjects on which I can speak, at length, and they are:

1. my job, and how it is boring me to death

2. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other tv-show-on-dvd-related pursuits

(but, really, i mostly talk about Buffy.)

I seem to remember that I used to be able to carry on interesting conversations with people. Or something. I don’t know what it was, really… maybe it was all of the different classes i was taking, and the play(s) i was writing, and basically all the very different things that happened in my day-to-day life.

…yeah, that sounds like the thing.

sometime yesterday afternoon I knew that I was too… frustrated and aware of it… to come away from the party last night without being a little sadder and hung up on some girl younger than my younger brother. this, despite my fondest hope that i would just drink and hang out with my friends, nothing more.

and, of course, it happened… that girl i got a little crush on last time i went to a party was there, of course, and i re-crushed on her instantly. damn. since the whole thing has entered into that “crush” territory, it’s already broken, and I need to figure out how get over it, and quick. the last time i did this with regards to her, it made me twitch every wednesday night because i seriously considered driving down to georgetown to hang out in case i might see her or something.

i was finally able to kill it when someone told me that she was interested in another sig, and that they would most likely start dating. in such a situation, crushing is inadvisable. however, that situation has now passed.

to make matters even stupider, i’ve got her phone number. i have this because she lost her cell phone and i called it for her so that it would ring and she would find it. this is far too tempting, even though the sensible part of me knows that i could never use a phone number gained in such a way because of the sheer creepy-weird factor. (“oh, right.. you got my number _that_ way…”)

urgh. must get my mind off this crap.

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Categories Blog

some weird sin

June 16, 2005 //
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i am wide awake at 3:00 in the morning. this is not a good sign for my impending day of work tomorrow. i occasionally toy with the thought of calling in just because i don’t want to go, but i’d rather save my days out for when i’m actually sick and really need them (rather than just tired from lack of sleep), and besides, i’d like to keep this job, as much as that scares me at the same time.

on tuesday there was a going away party/baby shower for a woman who is so pregnant she looks like she might just about pop. besides her, there are something like three other pregnant women in the department, and one guy who has a pregnant wife. everyone in the room at this little party was well into their thirties, and the only subject of conversation was babies, and what babies do, and all of the little things you need to know when you’re about to have a baby.

it had never occurred to me before that such a thing could give me the willies, but all of a sudden it did. appropriately enough, later that night i watched an episode of sex and the city about a former wild-woman that the girls knew from years back who was now settled down and about to have a baby herself. somewhere along the line, this woman had transformed from a sex-maniac that liked to take her clothes off at parties to a housewife in connecticut.

(and then there’s the third season of six feet under, which finds nate settled down and married to a woman he may not really love because she’s had his child.)

i don’t know why the thought of women having babies should disturb me. i’ve never been in a relationship serious enough to imagine that in some distant future i might think about possibly marrying the girl, so why should babies be all that weird?

in fact, it kinda weirds me out that it surprised one of my co-workers that i had never been in a relationship “serious” enough to consider marriage. she also didn’t understand how i could call my last relationship serious without having considered marriage at any point. my mind splutters impotently at the thought.

the reason i’m still awake at this hour is that we went and saw batman begins at the latest showing possible, which is what i get for wanting to see the movie with all my friends who stay up until 8 in the morning instead of starting work then.

it was, not surprisingly, as good as i hoped. i really liked it a lot, actually, and i hope it does as well as i’m sure it will, so that the batman series can be seriously rebooted and done well.

as we were walking out of the theatre, i was talking to my friend mcphail about when we could possibly hang out, since he comes up to austin tuesdays and thursdays for his internship. i found myself saying “well, not this week or next, because i’ve got *mandatory overtime* because of *quarter-end*.”

at this point i had a bit of an out-of-body experience. was i that guy? did i just say “quarter-end”? the fact that i uttered these words in the middle of a crowd of college students only made it that much worse.

luckily, i’m going out drinking friday afternoon. it’s with the people from work, though. i’m not sure how i feel about having a dwindling group of friends close to my own age…

one final note: nothing like watching a good movie to get your storytelling muscles itching to work again. at the moment, i don’t feel guilty or inadequate because i haven’t written anything in so long. i just feel it there, and i know that before long i’ll be writing again. i don’t know what i’ll write, or how my inspiration will ultimately come, but… for right now… i feel secure again in the knowledge that it isn’t broken, or gone, it’s just resting. resting and getting strong for another trip out into the world.

i mean, look at this… this is the longest entry i’ve written in two months. that, surely, is a good sign. wanting to write something, anything at all, sitting down here and tapping out my thoughts… it’s making me feel just a little bit more alive right now.

luckily, it’s also made me tired enough to lie down and go to sleep.

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Categories Blog

a bunch of entries that weren’t in my backup

April 12, 2005 //
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you know… thank god I upgraded to MT 3.15 recently and made a backup of my entries before i did so, because otherwise, i’d have to re-enter five months of entries manually. as it was, i still had to plug all of april’s entries back in, as well as a few from march. fucking ridiculous. i suppose at some point i’ll redo these so they’re back to individual entries, but it’s late right now.

——————————-

April 09, 2005

woody allen interview… where?

neil gaiman has helpfully pointed out the pretty nice little woody allen interview on suicide girls. of all the things… woody allen on a site full of underclothed goth girls.

April 07, 2005

one more time

well, i had an entry, but firefox slowed to a crawl because of too many tabs full of sites with useless flash animation, so i had to force-quit.

this was the important bit – listen to the french kicks – sorry, fixed the link.

Found another song on Epitonic: so many cakes

EDIT: Just so you guys know, because of the upgrade to MT 3.15, your comments will not immediately appear on the site. I get an email notifying me of the comment, and I approve or deny it accordingly. This helps prevents comment spam. Looks like it was a misconfiguration; I was getting the comments, but I’ve made it so that I don’t have to moderate every damn one now, and they will appear immediately.

Oh, and… personally, I like “Trial of the Century” better than “One Time Bells”. “Bells” just sounds a bit too much like Spoon, although it is still a good album; “Trial” shows the band actually moving forward and forging their own sound. And besides, i like the new wave-y style better, m’self.

April 05, 2005

hmm….

now that all of the archived entries have names instead of numbers, this entry about napoleon dynamite leapt swiftly to the top of my webstats. and i don’t even have anything particularly interesting to say in the entry! such is life.

eye in the sky

Google knows where my house is!

screenshot of google maps

(click on “satellite view” in the upper right-hand corner and zoom in to get the full effect.)

i’d have to get a lot of spam to fill that up

well, apparently google has decided to gift everybody with more space for their gmail accounts. even though i’m only using 41 megs of space, i now have a full 2 gigs to fill.

maybe i should start storing full-length movies on there or something.

April 04, 2005

the proverbial eureka moment

so i was taking a shower tonight, letting images and thoughts percolate through my head, as they are wont to do in moments of quiet contemplation, and suddenly, very much out of nowhere, an image that had been floating in my head for some time now turned itself into an idea. i was so happy i laughed out loud, loud enough for vincent to hear me through the wall and think i had gone a little bit crazy.

anyways, i had this image in my head of a man wearing dark glasses and a trench coat, and suddenly that turned into the following, i.e. the comedic play idea that i have been searching for:

“four blind men meet in a park to plan their takeover of the world. however, every man has a secret, and there is a spy in their midst.”

April 03, 2005

am i an old man yet?

going back to campus for alumni weekend last night and the night before was definitely interesting. i guess i’m more used to being an alumni than i was before. i can still remember the first party that i came back for. it was like going back to my parents’ house after it had crossed over from being my home into something else altogether.

i also realized that part of the reason i haven’t been too bothered about girls is because i haven’t talked to or seen any in a long time. there’s only a handful of girls at work close to my age, and they’re not that interesting. other than work i don’t get out much, so i suppose it’s not surprising that it’s easy to be alright about not having any female contact.

but then last night i was actually able to talk to several girls, all but one of whom were freshman – they’re supposed to be too young for me, right? …and it reminded some part of me that it’s been a while now. this voice will increase in volume until i go fucking bonkers.

i, of course, tried to go into each situation knowing that i was just talking to somebody cool, not actually hitting on a girl. the only one that really seemed a shame was a girl who i am pretty sure is paul’s girlfriend. she was a nice anomaly… a talented but humble theatre major. they don’t make those often at southwestern.

some silly little part of me was like “you should hang out more at the sig house so you can meet girls…” but, no, no, i shouldn’t. i have no business lusting after girls younger than my younger brother. it’s one thing if they’ve gone through college; being four or five years older than someone at that point isn’t a big deal. for a while i always said that once you reach college, the separation of a few years isn’t as big a deal, but after having seen what freshman girls tend to behave like at southwestern, it is a big deal unless the girl you’re talking about is one in a million.

————-

well, it’s been ages since i wrote an “emo” post or one about girls, and now i’ve done both in the same week. i am an eternal broken record.

March 31, 2005

alright, this is just too terrible not to mention

from yahoo news:

If you expressed your support to Terri Schiavo and her parents’ fight to keep her alive, you may begin to receive a steady stream of solicitations, according to a Local 6 News report.

Terri Schiavo’s parents have agreed to sell their list of supporters to a direct-mailing firm, Local 6 News reported.

The company, “Response Unlimited” pays about $150 a month for 6,000 names and $500 a month for 6,000 e-mail addresses.

A spokesperson for the Schindlers confirmed that they had agreed to sell the information, but won’t say for how much.

do you ever get the feeling that there’s something hanging just out of view, whispering in your ear?

firstly, it’d be hard to explain why i got so choked up when i finished the last few episodes of farscape season three. it just sounds kind of silly. sure, it’s acceptable fact that if you watch, say “six feet under” or, well… “schindler’s list,” you’re going to get a little teary-eyed. it comes with the territory. but a show full of weird people in funny leather costumes spouting futuristic gibberish?

i can’t explain it (to my satisfaction), but let me say that it was an important feeling. important, you say? how so? well… maybe this realization that i’ve had was already there, just on the outside of my peripheral vision, but it didn’t become completely clear until i watched a special feature on the last disk giving a recap of the whole season.

what became clear is something that i talked about in my earlier entry: the quality of the writing. remember how i talked about the use of cliches and the way they broke them in astounding fashions? well, as i sat and watched the feature about the season, i heard them describing the exact bits that i had pulled out; the very plot devices that packed an emotional punch.

and then the season finale… where the end of season two was action-packed and absurd, this one was… all too human, and painful, and emotionally wrenching, and somewhere along the line those writers, those crazy writers, had made me care deeply about the fate of a bunch of puppets, cgi creatures, and people prancing around in leather. a lot. a heart-breaking amount. i’m still finding it hard to keep from tearing up, and it’s been a long time since i’ve felt that way.

but this is when i heard the little voice in my ear. the thing that has been patient, oh so patient, while i have been wittering my life away doing nothing, not living, not serving my purpose.

i was watching the special, and the producer/writer was talking about the last episode, an episode that he felt was so important that he did not want it to fail, but he just didn’t know how to get it right.

it was nagging at him, constantly, until one night, he woke up in bed, suddenly enough that he frightened his wife and dogs, and he knew how to write it. he knew what was important, and it was so important the he got up right then and started writing.

at four in the morning.

until i feel that feeling again… (and i have felt it. i have been in that moment where nothing else mattered but telling the story, just getting it out…)

until then, i’m not really living.

so, you might ask… why not write, right now.

write something!

i’m paralyzed.

i’m scared.

i have no ideas that i want to write.

i come home from work every night and i’m so tired, and i just want to disappear somwhere else for a few hours and get a good night’s sleep. i want to be gone.

and i have so many friends, so many good friends out there, who nag me, and tell me that i should write something new, and then i have so many friends who wish i would write something new, but who have given up on me long ago.

it’d be great if i could finish something, after all.

(but i have finished things! i’ve finished plays, good ones…)

but that was so long ago. i can’t feel it anymore. i can’t remember what that tastes like. those plays aren’t even mine anymore. now that they’ve escaped onto the page, they’re strangers ready for someone else’s touch.

the whisperer, i can hear her…

she says that i know what i have to do.

now i just have to remember how to do it.

…they say it’s like a bike.

another reason i want to be a writer full-time

it seems to fit my lifestyle:

…anyway, I was on a roll last night. So I just kept working. And somewhere around seven this morning I realised I’d actually finished it, so I sent it to Dave McKean and went to bed. Up around eleven this morning, with a message from Dave waiting letting me know that I’d given one section short shrift, and I looked it over, and he was right, I had, and it needed to be longer, so I simply made a cup of tea and turned it into a full chapter, and did a final tidy.

It went off to Dave, to HarperChildrens, and to Bloomsbury, about half an hour ago. And now I’m going to do all those things I’ve normally already done by five in the afternoon, like shower and make breakfast.

(from Neil Gaiman’s Journal)

farscape, i wub you

i just watched six episodes of farscape on a work night, and the only thing keeping me from watching the remaining three right now is the fact that i need to go to sleep so i can make it to work at all.

i’m sure it’s a bit silly at this point for me to continue raving about this particular show, but it keeps getting better and better… and the writing is pretty incredible this season. they’ve taken some cliches of science fiction and tv in general and managed to turn them on their heads and make them new again.

it is, for example, one of the first times in a long time that an unrequited love story has not only worked for me but been both satisfying and heartbreaking instead of annoying. unrequited love is one of the most over-used tropes in television; i’d personally argue that one of the reasons that seinfeld was so great was because it’s the only sitcom you can point to that was on network tv without ever having some of the main characters fall in love but have a hard time making it work. i challenge anyone to name one other sitcom that has done that.

alias was another good example of unrequited love working well, until the unfortunate latter end of the third season, at which point i just got tired of hearing about it. the fourth season has managed to salvage this to a pretty good degree by making that particular plotline no longer relevant, which is probably the only choice they had. it is, unfortunate, however, that it stumbled at all.

another thing that Farscape has pulled off very well involves a major plot point this season; without going into detail, let’s just say that one of the clichés of earlier episodes of Farscape and sci-fi shows in general is that they will have something terrible and ridiculous happen to the characters that gets resolved by the end of the episode, or in the one after that.

about a third of the way into this season, there was one such episode, where some weird shit happened to a main character, and we assumed that the situation – extreme as it was – would get resolved soon without harm to anyone involved. except they took what could have been a one-shot and made it into a major story arc, and a heartbreaking one, too…

thing is, i just know… i can feel it… if the finale at the end of season two was fucked up, this one is only going to be worse, and i am most certainly going to have a much harder time getting my hands on season four…

anyways, a parting thought: who needs a life, when you’ve got sci-fi on dvd?

March 29, 2005

Updated and Upgraded

Today I decided on a whim that I wanted to upgrade my version of Movable Type to the newest, brand-spankin’-est one available, so I downloaded the goods and did all the standard upgrading.

However, I also decided that I no longer wanted to use the numeric archive links, which are lame and, shall we say, unfriendly to google. This, of course, was another case where i needed to use htaccess and mod_rewrite, but I was not sure exactly how to decipher the highly technical documentation, so I dug around until I found a site that explained in clearer terms.

It was easy to set up the monthly archives to redirect; what was difficult was making it so that anyone trying to access an old numbered entry would get the correct named entry.

I ended up having to do some fun things with htaccess and a cgi script that I found on scriptygoddess’ site. Once I fixed the dumb mistakes I was making, it started working like a charm…

So instead of Google thinking my whole journal has disappeared, it will instead discover everything has merely been updated. Huzzah!

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Categories Blog, TV Shows, Web

Interesting Week

December 18, 2004 //

This is how I search for jobs...

My job search isn’t going too much better, unfortunately. Last Friday I went to the substitute orientation, which was appropriately mind-numbing. At the end, our instructor told us any number of reasons why being a substitute was a horrible job and why (if she had a choice) she would have chosen being a principal again over being a substitute. Several people in the class gasped at this, because (of course) your employer is supposed to talk up your new job, not give you dire warnings about horrible things that could happen to you.

There were, however, a good number of idiots in the room, so perhaps it wasn’t so surprising. There’s a certain class of batty middle-aged woman who decides that being a substitute teacher is a good idea. These are generally the sort of subs that i remember getting, and are why i remember thinking so little of the profession in general. We all know the only reason I set myself up for all that was desperation.

Course, that didn’t even help much… didn’t get me any work this week.

I did email this one listing on “Craig’s List”:http://craiglist.org and get a response. Apparently a real estate firm needs some transcription work done, and they pay alright. It’ll be shitty work, but I can do it on my own time, and when the money eventually comes in, it’ll probably help in a pinch. And, much like subbing, If I don’t like it, I can turn down future jobs.

In writing news, I submitted a story to the Austin Chronicle short story contest. You can read it here if you like: “_A Sister_ by Jeff James”:/portfolio/writing/a_sister.htm.

Other than that, there have been some interesting happenings this week. For example, on Monday night, I went to “a strip club”:http://www.austincityguide.com/content/palazio-austin.asp with my friends Beau and Jeff… Yeah, that’s right. A strip club. It was decided on a whim Sunday night after Beau realized that he had pretty much failed (Ds and Fs) all of his classes this semester, so the logic went… what better way to cheer him up than boobs?

We were there for a good four hours, and all of us spent more money than we probably should have. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that not only were the girls who worked there pretty cute (only one had fake boobs), but that there were several girls who came over to our table just to sit down and have a nice conversation. One girl in particular was really cool and interesting to talk to. She sat in my friend Jeff’s lap all night, only getting up to dance onstage later in the night. Needless to say, it was really surreal to have a really good conversation with a girl and then see her naked and gyrating onstage. At the end of the night, Jeff got her phone number, although I don’t think he’s called her yet, or even if he plans to call her at all. Can you date a stripper? I’ve heard tales of such things, but I’m not sure how well it would work.

On Thursday, Allyson drove into town to hang out. We went and saw “Closer”:http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0376541/, which was really well-written (the scene between Clive Owen and Natalie Portman in the strip club was pretty ridiculously amazing writing), and followed that with drinking and “Collateral”:http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0369339/ (also very good). It was a good visit, and well timed, because she’s leaving to go to China for eight months on January 13th.

Last night, Beau, Demian and I went to a party somewhere in Austin, thrown by people I’ve met in passing. There were a good number of people I knew there, and for once I had a good time at someone else’s party and got drunk enough to feel crappy in the morning. There was a girl there that we all wanted to hit on, funnily enough, though, she told us that she was a junior at SU when our friend Jonathan – now 26 and married – was a freshman. Which makes her, what… 28? 29? Weird. She was still really cute, although her boyfriend was dullness in a suit.

It seems a little bit like the world is opening up again for me, which is perhaps connected to the fact that I stopped taking Zoloft last week. The medicine seemed to help when I was really down, but it definitely had its side effects, so I’m glad to be out of my supply. There is, of course, a possibility that I may get pretty depressed again in a while, but I’m willing to risk it.

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Categories Blog

Well, this makes me happy…

June 21, 2004 //

Taken from Dark Horizons:

ABC President Stephen McPherson revealed that next season’s episodes (starting Jan ’05) will once again return to Sydney juggling her dual roles as an international spy and normal twentysomething girl, conceding the complex plot heavy episodes may have turned off some of the more casual viewers of the show – “We got so deep in the Rimbaldi and Covenant [mysteries] that we lost sight of some of the stuff we fell in love with [in the beginning]. J.J. is talking about getting back to some of the joy that she used to have in her personal life early on… while still living in this crazy world”.

Abrams himself, whose been working on the pilot for his upcoming ABC thriller, “Lost”, said the step back from the show during the break has allowed him a whole new perspective – “Going away to do Lost allowed me to look at Alias in a way that I could not have done otherwise ? from the outside, and it was like an incredibly enlightening thing. I suddenly knew in my heart what I wanted and what I didn’t want ? and I saw what was happening. Not that I wasn’t proud of what was there, but I saw some mistakes that I made and I thought, ‘Oh my God’”.

The delay to January which will allow the shows to be aired weekly without interruption was something Abrams was keen on – “I was begging them to do it”. McPherson adds “We’re going to be launching a lot of new dramas in the fall and we wouldn’t have been able to put any money [into promoting Alias]. So we felt the best thing to do was bring it on in January when we’ve got all [20 episodes] and a huge promotion platform with the Academy Awards”.

In good news for fans, McPherson also confirmed that there’s “not a chance” Season 4 could be Alias’ last – “It will be an asset for years”.

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