of VAMPYR and the perambulations of ass-kicking giants

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Impromptu horn-honking parade down the potholed state highway last evening for the local girls' high school basketball team which made me think they won their state semis but it turns out they lost, an occurrence which sums up this area all too well but – unlike when OSU wins, loses, or draws – there were no overturned cars set ablaze: firetrucks were out wailing their sirens alofng the impromptu well-you-tried / go team / maybe next time parade so it wouldn't have mattered anyhow; the sidewalks are lined with the remnants of vicarious-living-through-the-efforts-of-others team spirit.

My VAMPYR "thinking of without actually rewatching though I'll get around to it I promise" consideration continues: this, from Mark Le Fanu's (a relative of "Carmilla" – the story upon which VAMPYR is at least partially based – author Sheridan Le Fanu) opening essay to the Criterion edition, "Vampyr's Ghosts and Demons," strikes an inspirational chord as it pertains to director Carl Theodor Dreyer's tastes:

"Notoriously, VAMPYR, his next work and first sound film, would fail to find an audience too, and, even more disasterously than JOAN OF ARC did, so it is worth emphasizing that this strange, hermetic, and experimental film was originally conceived of as, if not exactly a 'potboiler' (the concept is impossible in Dreyer's case), then at least something possessing – he hoped – healthy moneymaking possibilities."

Clearly, it did not: but that VAMPYR approach and my own complete inability to produce anything that could be construed as even remotely "popular" in spite of my love of genre rings so very true: elements/evidence of this in both MainFiction– and AnotherFiction– Projects, though AnotherFiction is most definitely an effort to write more straightahead, accessible (in keeping with my MAKING THE CUT runway and accessible look methodology – but only within the parameters of what I consider "accessible").

Finished REACHER's first season last night: solid (and my favorite Amazon show in awhile) – though I worry that, given the standard first season "getting used-to-it-ness" growing pains of the cast forming their bonds with the written material and with one another of which REACHER, like nearly every other show, was not immune, the "different book / location brought together only by a perambulatory, ass-kicking giant" per season will result less in increased cohesion and simply more first season "getting used-to-it-ness”: a shame to leave behind Finlay and Roscoe – though hopefully Neagley figures into the show’s future, somehow — though who knows, maybe there's a different plan for the series than strict adherence to the structure if not the contents of Childs's novels. All that said, well worth a watch.

Were one to construct a wordcloud of the three most oft-heard phrases in this house, they would be "Kirby, stop," "JesusFuckingChrist," and "What are you eating now?": this is the way / and so it is and so it goes.

notetaking moderation upon an alphabetized menagerie of influence and/or inspiration

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Updated Access page; Module0004, arriving Sunday (free for NL subscribers, $1.99 for non-), now has a title – until it doesn't.

Started a fresh notebook (Volume 28) this morning (Baron Fig Confidant – I like that they plant a tree for every notebook purchased; comforting to know that my inane scribbles at least do SOME good for the world) and abandoned much of the Bullet Journal methodology, at least within the NB. My index is my zettelkasten / card system (might write a fuller thing about that at some point – including what I use and what I throw out in the method); efforts underway to make my notetaking as much for later reference as it is for brain exorcism/processing via ink (see: inane scribbles, above).

Thinking here of something Sertillanges said in THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE re: notetaking:

"Keep notes made after thinking, and with moderation. In order to avoid some first minute suprises, the effect of some passing preoccupation, or the enthusiasm sometimes aroused by a brilliant form of words, do not definitely include the passage in your notes without letting some time elapse. Quietly, at the right distance, you will judge of the value of your harvest and store up only the good grain in your barns."

But: my method involves using the notebooks as a space to think and using the zettelkasten/index card system as the guide and storehouse for those thoughts and notions potentially useful beyond their brain-clearing/process-of-processing capacities. Todo, then: make handwriting neater (ever ongoing); create defined processing times throughout the day (two or three, probably); consider a different organization of index cards – in addition to indexing the notebooks, they are also where I index bracketed and marked-up books – more in line with how it best works for me (still figuring that part out) / balance, balance, balance.

VAMPYR Blu has arrived and supplants my coffee-stained DVD edition which now lives in The Sanctum for some purpose TBD. Thinking: my current writing style can best be described as somewhere between VAMPYR and THE LIGHTHOUSE, whatever that means or spells for form or for material. Related, perhaps: my fantasy shelf space is to have a Sanctum that won't flood and is possessed of enough shelving to include BluRays and DVDs and Vinyls alongside the hallowed books: all of my disparate influences and inspirations unfolding in an alphabetized menagerie of good shit. Dreamdream / related, in reiteration/broken record: TSR dreamchat is and remains talking VAMPYR and NOSFERATU with Guillermo Del Toro. Someday maybe.

One of my favorite recent discoveries, Ukrainian artist 58918012, is back with a new album, NEEDLE TIP: this is challenging, brutal stuff (made even more so by the context and time in which it is released) and an absolute a must-listen (and support):

open loops / godzillae

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As I rearranged my desk for the nth time this morning – my wont when I return to MainFictionThing after some time away – I realized that resting upon its drill-bored bankers space is the entirety of my life, of myself, up to this present: the Hot Wheels Jeep; the pewter pig and rings; the bulldog; the wedding picture; the broken Flattop mug with a Hulk ball filling its shattered ceramic skull; Yodas elderly and Baby; a monk figuring riding a triceratops planter; a chessboard whose pieces have been missing for more than ten years and the lie told to an individual who requires the lie to feel better about themselves for a similar durationl; a row of spinebroken Big Little Books; assorted Pops and Godzillas (Godzillae?); and the row upon rows of maybes and open loops either waiting or never to be.

A similar recognition of my vicious cycle: in order to counteract familal stress and delay acceptance of the reality of my present (whatever that may be), I'm adding projects to my dancecard which, because of familial stresses and needs, are languishing in open loops (see rows upon rows, above). Solution: accept reality, accept humanity, pare things down a bit, pare them down to the essentials – Create, think, discuss – and publish new shit (see concluding paragraph).

From this notion, a routine – a Spring routine, that is – one cognizant of afternoons being spent tending to spaces outside and surrounding and further familial: mornings are for writing, for time-based work (trying to be done by 0930 – the familials start texting around then); afternoons (1400 on; postprandial errands and walkies with Kirby followed by a brief reading respite are required) are for task-based – be it family, home (fence mending at the top of that list; improv'ed a fix yesterday but I'm not sure it will hold in the climate change winter-spring transition), TSR assembly, etc; evenings for the liberation of Yara (completed), for blasting my way through the YAKUZA games (I'm on YAKUZA 4 and it is, so far, my least favorite of the series), TSR interviews, and further reading about totalitarianism (see postprandial respite, above) as we witness this century's iteration of a bunkerbound genocidal war criminal willing to annihilate the world to avoid humiliation and condemnation to the shitheap of history do his bunkerbound genocidal war criminal willing to annihilate the world to avoid humiliation and condemnation to the shittheap of history thing.

But rejoice for there are – assuming we aren't living THE ROAD by then – new Cormac novels (PLURAL!) coming this Fall.

Also: finished the first issue of Pornsheck Pichetshote and Alexandre Tefenkg's THE GOOD ASIAN and I fucking love it. Can't wait to read the rest of Volume One (nightstand reading FTW); I'll be ordering Volume Two as soon as it's available (May, it seems – though see note re: THE ROAD, above).

I will be releasing the yet-to-be-titled Module0004 for free to newsletter subscribers (and to non-subs for $1.99) this Sunday. Do with or do not with what you will.

dissipate / exuberance / return

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The Sanctum did not flood (nor did the basement, surprisingly) and it seems that yesterday's road-and-field-obliterating floodwaters have dissipated – most fortunate, given the 20ºF+/- temp drop yesterday afternoon and evening: backroad ice skating not recommended.

(Also not recommended: being headbutted by an exuberant German Shepherd dogchild at 0600 (or at any time of day or night) for the stars, they shine they shine.)

Efforts to replace DVDs with Blu editions continue even though I told myself they wouldn't (a balm, no doubt, for the acute and unfolding reminder of why I left this backwater hell in the first place twenty years ago and consider my return to be – in spite of my connubial and dogchild bliss – a failure) until I made my way through the other unopened results of said efforts (LES VAMPIRES, NOSFERATU, MULHOLLAND DRIVE, among others)): ordered the Blu of VAMPYR when I ordered Chemex filters because the impulse buy (via premeditation) has come to online ordering in the form of shopping lists. Dream TSR guest remains Guillermo del Toro to talk NOSFERATU and VAMPYR.

16+ hours of Eliane Radigue right here.

Might've figured out the thing that the thing discussed yesterday wants to be: my wife read it and liked it so of course I changed the form because it still didn't feel right (though I might be wrong – wouldn't be the first time) even when given the seal of approval by someone whose taste I trust implicitly. The question being now how (say brown cow) to release it in a way – other than newsletter exclusive / paid individual non-subscriber – that satisfies a desire to both get the thing out into the unforgiving silence of the ether AND experiment with physical release; while I'm as close as ever to a solution, I want to give it a few days to settle before I decide whether or not the solution I'm looking at is the solution I'm looking for or the solution I thought I was looking for.

And finally: it's good to be home – in this space, that is: couldn't think of a better new name to call these menagerie/collision morning ritual posts so it's only fitting that I return them to the name that always fit them best: Informalities.

floodwater modulae

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Committing to these once-daily things and only these once-daily things for the next week. Won't let myself backslide. This is a space about writing and thinking and the collisions that occur between.

The road and the fields below are flooded: a brutal rain last night. Fortunately, the Sanctum is dry – or, rather, I haven't stepped in a pond while working back here this morning; the condition of the other half of the paint shop TBD.

An anger brewing, fighting to get out: unsure if a return to meditation is a way to get through it or if my theory – that the last 20 years of meditating were an avoidance tactic to ignore what needed to be felt and that I'm now playing catchup with iterations of myself lost between breaths – is correct.

This, like the other half of the paint shop, is TBD.

Reticent to release what I've written over the last couple of days: it feels like more of the same but is, at the same time, wholly different. Might be best to accept that this rhythm, this sameness, is where I am creatively in this moment and that it's the end – or maybe the beginning, fuck if I know –  of this particular rhythmic book.

That said, having rechristened the former Stories Modulae, I do feel more free to write and to publish whatever springs to mind – even if I've (potentially) climbed so far up my own ass that I can't see the dog scratch on my nose in the half-hearted sun.

I am weary of being weary.

sun/20220306

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Kirby is barking at some unknown something somewhere in the world or across the street IDK... newsletter brain in full force, social media breaktime (save for TSR releases or other work notifications) because fuck it at this point: I've got my internet home and it's here... Started Spielberg's WEST SIDE STORY last night and goodlord the opening shot: every frame is a work of art – and Lenny's music still delights... MacroParentheticals0071 in +/60; the day awaits.

links/20220305

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