Mmmm, Detritus

In case you haven't seen yet, there's a new batch of Bockhorst Fields Candle Scents over at Andy's blog, and a startling visual.

Any chance there's still Sackcloth & Ashes in stock?

Record Time

Many of you have this news already, but it can use an official announcement: I've been working the last couple of weeks, as an Archival Assistant at Maryland State Archives doing quality control on land records. It's a good, if somewhat unexciting, job, though I must say being hired for actually having an applicable skill has been quite a bonus.

And I must say "unexciting" cuts both ways; I'm really just as glad to be doing something quiet and repetitive where I get left the hell alone for eight hours. It's been worth the early-morning hike to Annapolis, which I was pleased to discover takes not all that much longer than driving into Baltimore, at least during the dawn hours.

In less banal news, a reassembled OVO just spent the weekend - inspired not a little by the time-bending Fripp soundscapes show we attended Friday - making odd noises in Tony's attic and recording them. I look forward to hearing what shape it takes when it manifests properly, but the rough mix sounded pretty damn cool, even after we sobered up. Hooray! More of this sort of thing to come, let's hope.

I've Been Here and I've Been There and I've Been In Between

Okay, so I think that's a long enough hiatus for anyone.

It's been an odd couple of months, though I won't exhaustively detail the ins and outs just yet; more fragments, perhaps, as I (promise, really) do more updates. Suffice to say that life continues to be good despite the odd stumble, and I think it's a measure of something profound or other that in a year about which I must sigh and say, "So far, not in the top five," I'm reminded how very lucky I am.

On the subject of setbacks, I was in yesterday for my last day at the job I'd done since December, which I'd been waiting since March or so for the other shoe to drop on, so no big tragedy. I will miss the nice people I worked with; the work itself, not so much, which is why I didn't make it the start of a New Career Path inna first place. No word yet from the Agency on a new assignment, but I continue to pursue promising leads. (Yes, those of you who have been following the Missus' posts of late: this means we are both, at the moment, out of work. We trust this is a fleeting development, and revel in the meantime in being able to stay up late on a school night.) Anyway, I had a good final half-week of training my replacement, imparting the weight of five months' worth of file-management wisdom in an impressively short span. And I was good, and did not once refer to her as "My young apprentice" in a spooky Ian McDiarmid voice.

I've also been attending, since March, the Tuesday night open mic at Huckleberry's, the local independent caffeine clinic, and got some good reaction out of my quirky originals before it got so popular that getting a slot on the lineup only happens on a Critical Success. ("The place is so crowded, nobody goes there anymore.") I've also met fellow tuneslinger and offbeat-music-fan Bob Parrott that way, who has been especially kind to me about my work (he calls "One of Those Nights" my first breakout radio hit), and was cool enough to invite me to play at his solo show a couple of weeks back. (Bass on Sublime's "What I Got," and recorder on "Ruby Tuesday." Tony Levin and Ian Anderson are not in fear for their careers.) As a result of our weekly meetups, Bob's now got me plunged headfirst into reading Tom Robbins, an experience I was long overdue for anyway, though I must now plot whether an intro to Ligotti or Pratchett is the more suitably addictive revenge.

And, as Big Tony relates, I am now the proud owner of PaPa's station wagon, something that turned out to be a bigger bag of mixed feelings than I anticipated. It's a huge potential boon for our working lives to have two cars now, but there's still something very sad about having that car in my driveway and having it not mean that my grandparents are here. In a way, it was the last bit of laying him to rest for me. Weird and a little hard. It's almost a sense of... responsibility.

Anyway, this weekend's our big Memorial Day/Hurrah, We're Unemployed party, with a nice gathering of our out-of-town circle converging on Chez L-K (and at least a dropin, hopefully, on Balticon), so I suppose I should go wash dishes or something. Which is not to say that I will, mind, just that I'm aware of duty even as I shirk it. The deep ethical implications are left as an excercise for the reader.

Cue Chumbawamba

Checking in to say I've been having a three-month epic battle with seasonal depression, aggravated by stress of various kinds, which is why I've been less than great about updates for a while. I won't say I'm okay, because it comes and goes, and it's been scarier lately than I remember it being in a long time, if ever. But I'm getting by.

Someday, I will have a job I like enough to stick around for and get benefits, and then I will have therapy and possibly medication. In the meantime, television, chocolate, and the occasional reread of Weaveworld will have to make do.

On the other hand, I'm pretty excited about this.

Small, Favored

Huzzah! Spyder is 21 today! It is now perfectly legal to tempt her with pooftah fruity rum drinks, if that sort of thing's your bag.

And may I say that it's been a privelege, these last two and a half years, to have such a smart, talented, funny, all-around wicked cool person not only surface most fatefully into my life, but turn out to be so much on my wavelength that I think of her as the sister I never knew I had.

Welcome to your seat at the official Grownups' Table, mia sorella. Don't worry - you still don't have to act like one.

I Still Ate'nt Dead

It's been a weird couple of weeks and I'm more or less well, though I'm still feeling the lingering effects of the bug I had a week ago, plus seasonal depression, but that's how it works sometimes. In any case, I haven't felt like I've had anything interesting to say for a while. This may be nobody's fault but mine.

I turned down a full-time position at my current place of employment last week, mostly because spending the next year as a file clerk was less appealing than I'd thought at first. ("I don't blame you," said the supervisor to whom I broke the news. "It's a terrible job and you're completely overqualified for it.") I'm still there as a temp, at least for a little while, but the search for satisfying employment continues, as does figuring out what the hell I want to be when I grow up. Aside from "brilliant and famous," that is.

Sadly, the creative well's bit a bit dry of late too, and the several projects I felt all fired up about in recent memory have completely failed to capture my attention. I know, I know - if I was really serious I'd be working on them anyway. Don't remind me.

And, uh, that's all I got these days. I'm sure I'll have much more interesting things to post in the near future. No, really, I promise.

Fire to Endure

Well, it's been three weeks now since my grandfather departed the world, and since I last wrote here; I think twenty-one days is probably sufficient time to gather myself and share a little.

It's been hard. The nature of loss is that it finds odd moments to remind you, when you've gotten around to thinking you're okay and acting like you're living a normal life again. But I'm mostly okay these days. I miss him terribly, which is the selfishness of the living for you. He was not happy in his last months (at least), enduring the dual onslaughts of his body's betrayals and living in a nursing home; he was ready to go. I'm glad he's not suffering any more. And I think that, hey, fourscore and one is a pretty good run of it, all told. (And Death, in her top-hat, smiles and says, "You got what everyone gets. You got a lifetime.") Nonetheless, selfishly, irrationally, I wish I'd had more time just knowing he was around. The part of me that kept up a silly hope that he'd find some spark of the person he'd been ten years ago is frustrated that now he'll never have the chance.

Anyway.

His ashes have been interred in one of his own pots, which is as grand and fitting as can be hoped for. I had the honor of bringing him home one last time, two weeks ago Saturday, after the memorial service in Allentown. It was also my great privelege to deliver his eulogy, which ran as follows:

"Thank you all for coming.

"First off, I must beg your indulgence. I know that many of you knew my grandfather as Ray or Raymond or possibly Mr. Gallucci. None of those names feel right to me. All my life, to me he's been PaPa - my brother's mispronunciation of 'Grandpa' when he was just learning to talk. It's stuck these last forty years, and if that's the name that first comes to me to call him, bear with me.

"(I also apologize if I'm echoing other things said here by family and friends. We shared, obviously, many of the same experiences, and didn't bother to make sure we weren't repeating each other. Today of all days, anything worth saying about him is worth saying more than once.)

"I have the honor of delivering this eulogy this in part because, as you might have noticed, there are no services being given by clergy today. I'm afraid PaPa's sympathies for the religious impulse were somewhat limited. (That is, believe me, putting it mildly.) He was, all his life - even through his involvement with the Unitarian church - a skeptic and a rationalist, as zealous in his atheism as any convert to a faith. To be entirely honest, it wasn't one of his kinder qualities; he was rarely hesitant to express his lack of patience with anything he saw as nonsense. A universe full of nothing more miraculous than the dance of elements and forces, circling each other in the measureless void, was quite wondrous enough for him. I myself am largely agnostic, though a great believer in the value of beauteous and meaningful nonsense, so my own sympathies are somewhat divided. Nonetheless, I won't do him the disrespect of referring to God or heaven or souls in what follows, the truth of all of which you may decide for yourselves, and which he certainly now knows better than any of us here.

"I will, however, point out that this underlines one of the delightful paradoxes in his character - the rational atheist who spent most of his life as an artist, engaged with numinal forces that science and reason have yet to quantify. To create Art is to invoke Mystery, as the first people to paint images on a cave wall knew, and those first artists were indistinguishable from priests and magicians. My grandfather's materials were the same as those of a paleolithic shaman - earth and pigment, water and fire - and the magic he conjured out of them of a similar kind.

"And, like a shaman, he seemed to only partly live in the world the rest of us did. His eccentricities - and they were, believe me, numerous - were almost all the result of the worldly things he couldn't bother to be concerned with: appearance, possessions, frivolities. It was enough that his clothes were comfortable, that a car was a serviceable conveyance, that he had enough money to live simply on. The things that were truly important to him were abstractions: Color and form. Perfection of composition. Beauty. Language. Family. Dignity. Justice.

"Even his own creations, which never awakened the joy and awe in him they did in almost everyone else, ceased to hold his interest once they were completed. A finished pot or a mosaic was just a thing, an object. A work-in-progress was sacred; woe betide the person who upset a tray of mugs before firing, before they had the chance to become complete. But break a finished piece? 'It's just mud,' he'd say, as if unable to understand why anyone would be upset by it. In a way, he may have suffered some of the disillusionment artists are prone to once they're intimate with the messy, dirty processes of creation. Some of the magic is inevitably lost once you know how the trick's done; the pot looks different to the man who spends all day up to his elbows in the stuff of its materials.

"Which is certainly not to say he was immune to wonder. He called clay 'the poetry of the earth' (and in his hands it was), though he may have given too much credit to the medium and too little to the maker in that. He sought the same poetry elsewhere as well, in music and literature and the works of the other artists he admired. About ten years ago, he decided to reread all of Shakespeare's plays (a passion we shared, and talked about too little). He remarked to me that the thought had occurred to him, over one particularly poignant bit of verse, that he knew all the words in that sentence - why couldn't he have put them together like that? The spark of genius - Shakespeare, Mozart, Rembrandt - fascinated him, maybe in part because he felt like it eluded him.

"The rest of us knew better, of course. Look at any of his works - his pottery, his paintings, his mosaics - and his incredible gifts are apparent. Many of them are abstracts, studies in pure shape and color, but even his more representational work is infused with a vision that was uniquely and brilliantly his. Once you come to know it, there's no mistaking his art for anyone else's, though the sheer amount of it is astounding: dozens of mosaics and paintings and sculptures, probably thousands of pieces of pottery. Again and again he returned to the forms that obsessed him - circles, rectangles, branches, strata - and yet his revisitations of those themes never feel stale or tired. It was part of his particular gift to reinvent without repeating himself, and that is a thing wondrous rare. Though he never quite articulated the reasons he finally ceased creating, now many years since, it may be that he felt he'd come to the end of his explorations and wanted to stop before his interest soured.

"We can forgive him for being too close to what he did to see it as it truly was. It's hard enough for me, growing up surrounded by his work, to reconcile its genius with the man who was my grandfather, just plain PaPa with his silly charm and disheveled clothes, his uncut hair and his pungent cigars. The man who made sure his grandchildren got to go to the zoo at least once a summer, who could effortlessly eat a quart of ice cream at a sitting, who cut open his shoes with a razor because they fit better that way - this person has a hard time existing in the same space as the maker of the mosaic that hangs over my fireplace. I saw many, many of his pieces as works-in-progress, saw him bent over them for hours on end, and I still can't quite fit those two personae together in my head. But it's a credit to him as both artist and man that, in my memory at least, he occupies both roles in equal measure. And it's one of the wonders of the universe that a finished pot can be a work of sublime beauty and also be… just mud. It may do that mystery honor enough to recognize the paradox and live with both truths at once.

"There is never enough time. If the human condition has an overriding theme, that may be it. The fact that we get death as part of the bargain of living ensures that time is something that is always in insufficient supply. I wish I had more now, to tell you everything about the PaPa I knew, his quirks and his brilliance and his flaws all together. And I know that everything I can recall is just a fragment of the person he was. In the time to come, I hope to know more, from those of you who saw other fragments, other facets. One of the means by which we cope with our shortage of time is the way we spend our lives at least as much in story and memory as in the living moments; it's a tragedy of our species, but also a gift. It means that Ray Gallucci will endure in all his facets for as long as our memories of him remain, as long as there are stories of him to tell, and for as long as the works he shaped out of mud and poetry may last. Flesh, after all, is also just mud, wet earth given shape by steady turning on an implacable wheel. And when this fragile vessel breaks beyond repair, we can still take joy in the poetry that lingers afterwards.

"That is why we are here today: to take joy in what lingers after a person departs the world. The rites of the dead are not for the dead, who are past caring. Our rites are for us, to say farewell, to know that we are not alone in our grief, to somehow find a way to accommodate our unbearable loss; to learn, with each other, to cope with the fact that there is now a hole in the world the size and shape of someone we dearly loved.

"His body is ash now, unmade by the same fire by which he turned clay into Art; there's a poetry, too, in that completion, a circle made whole. It's a dignified end, and dignity was something he treasured, one of the things he kept for himself until the very last. It's a comfort to me to think of him released into the Universe like that, his energies returned into Creation: no better than earth, but also no less than a sun. That was how he lived, too; may we all be inspired to do the same.

"I close my thoughts today with two pieces of verse, both of which say things I wish I had thought of first ('I know all those words') about loss and mortality and the honoring of the departed. The first is Walt Whitman, from "Song of Myself":

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the
end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

"The second is a prayer, of sorts, written by another unbeliever. This is from the Requiem Mass by Kurt Vonnegut, a fellow Unitarian and, like my grandfather, a pacifist veteran of the Second World War. It's a corrective to irrational, judgmental theology, a petition to the Universe itself to take pity on the dead and give them rest; I like to think PaPa might have approved.

Chrone, eleison.
Stoechia, eleisate.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Munde,
Neve lux somnum pertubet eorum.

"Time, have mercy upon us;
Elements, have mercy upon us;
Rest eternal grant them, O Cosmos,
And let not light disturb their sleep.

"Thank you for listening."

So life, inexorably and absurdly, goes on. I like my new job, even if it's a bit of a demotion and not quite where I saw myself at this point in my life; so it goes. We've had our first snow of the winter this week, with more on the way, and Baltimore is lovely with white. I'm going to be thirty-one on Tuesday. I hope to be able to write again soon, an impulse I haven't felt able to tap into for a little while now.

Mostly I'm just getting through the days. There are worse fates.

Thanks, everyone, for your support and love these last weeks. It's meant the world and helped more than you know. And thanks, too, for your patience while I dropped off the earth for a while. I promise I'll be in touch properly and more often in the time to come.

Ochón

Not entirely unexpectedly, my grandfather died this morning.

More later, when I and the rest of the family have had time to adjust and get our heads together. Meanwhile, my grateful thanks to those of you who have already called with your good wishes, and my love to you all.

Have pity on the dead
Pray for the dead
Sleep has his house
Sleep has his house

Overwhelm me
Overwhelm me
Forever
Forever
Sleep has his house
Sleep has his house

Hollyday Road

Quickly, before I drop off the map for a couple of days:

New job good. Still very much in terra incognita and trying to learn the language, but it's good. More on this when I've had some time to absorb.

Haven't had much chance to keep up with everyone this week, so if you've tried to get my attention somehow, it's likely been elsewhere. I'll try and get my act together after the weekend.

Meantime, a most joyous, merry and happy holiday to all. May you be touched by light, whether of the Son of Man, the Sun Unconquered, or just cheer and good company. May the Fat Man bring you a pile of goodies. And may you eat too much, drink too much, and stay up too late doing it; it is, after all, the season of Misrule.

Pax vobiscum and much love to you all.

White Ships Sail

I post this from amid the weird chaos of my last day at GWU. Monday I start my new gig as a temp at Johns Hopkins.

This place had its ups and downs, but it was a good job, and I'll certainly miss a lot of things about it. In any case, this is four years of my life I'm closing the door on - hopefully for better things, and most certainly for things closer to home.

Everything ends.

Zai jian, GW. It's been fun. May the next guy love that scanner as much as I did.

I Ate'nt Dead

...though between one thing and another the Great Gray Beast November certainly did a job of roughing me up.

So I got my 50k in well under the wire, and I'd be more pleased with myself scoring three for three if I wasn't so dreadfully dissatisfied with the shape of this one. It's got good moments, and moments of wreckage, and some seriously deficient through-lines, and at least one turn of phrase that caused my wife, glancing it on a random page, to taunt me with a noted lack of mercy for the purpleness of the prose. All of which adds up to convincing me that the thing is not fit for human eyes. So no beta-reads until it's done and gone over at least once.

Maija, on the other hand, gets a big old laurel wreath and a hearty Huzzah! for finishing this year - her first, if I'm not mistaken. Applause and congratulations and the jingling of bells.

Meanwhile, I'm looking at a little over a week at the old job before I'm off to the temp mines for a while. This is very weird. Not that I haven't done it before, but it's giving me a kind of lost-at-sea feeling which is not exactly what I'd have chosen for my holiday mood. Meh.

Otherwise, not much to report. My conviction that I have anything interesting to say about, well, anything is in wane at the moment, so go amuse yourself with the sidebar links and try to keep out of trouble.

...Sits In Western Parts

John Balance, one of the founding members of Coil and a sometime contributor to Current 93, died over the weekend.

Thanks to Andy for sending me the story. As he said, "The world certainly doesn't need any fewer interesting musicians."

"Hell is paved, despite the Balance, with tedium and loss":

(Yet the stars and the moon and the sun and the comets and the little birds and the little lights and the little animals that sing to God God bless the little animals and the little animals that scream to God please O Lord bless the little animals that weep and weep and weep they are approaching the Greatbluegate of Death itself oh Lord hear me when I shout and shout and shout my heart is almost empty)

...I fall to my knees and weep. And goodbye to You all.

Update: David Tibet pays heartbreaking tribute on the Durtro site.

There will undoubtedly be more.

Omnia mutantur, Neil interit

It's Neil Gaiman's birthday today. Happy 44th, dream-weaver; Murphy watch over you, and many happy returns.

I can think of no better way to mark this than to renew my overlong-expired membership to the CBLDF - which you should join, too, if you haven't already. Now more than ever, defenders of free speech are going to need all the help they can get, so get a membership, donate, buy some of their swag. They're seasoned champions in the war against fuckwittage, and we need them, and they need the support of Readers Like You. (And, dude, they have Barry Ween stuff. How goddamn cool is that?) As they used to say in the funnybooks: 'nuff said.

My own writing isn't quite going like gangbusters so far this week; I'm at an even-keeled 15,652 words, which isn't where I'd like to be but is respectable enough. NaNoFounder Chris Baty recommends a hearty breakfast, so maybe that'll make the difference tonight. In any case, a day that starts with a bacon, egg and cheese bagel (no doubt my first of many violations of Leviticus before bedtime) can only be so bad.

There's a Wall of Words Around My Heart

I am, I'm pleased to report, right on schedule for Week One with a wordcount of 12,297. This is good, and gives me hope.

I'm not following my original plan of working from an outline, mostly because I kicked it off at the top a week ago and it just sort of kept going. This may yet change, of course. For now, pace and progress are both good, though I've been positively Benedictine about not rereading, so for all I know it's twenty-five single-spaced pages of complete crap. So it goes; ask me again come winter, when I'm gnashing my teeth over the rewrite.

I apologize if I haven't been up to jumping into last post's excellent political discussion, though all y'all are doing such a fine job of it that I can't bring myself to feel much guilty about it. My energies, at least for now, are largely elsewhere, and I figure if the Chimp's keeping me away from my novel then the goddamn bad guys have already won. But do carry on, and I'll try and contribute when I feel I've something constructive to add.

It's been a gorgeous autumn weekend up here in Edgewood, and it's weird as anything to think that we've had nearly a whole year in our house. Strange turns of fortune. I'm lucky as hell, and don't think for a minute I don't know it.

Now I'm going to treat myself to a shower and some pleasure reading. I'm pretty confident I've earned it. Good night, and be kind to each other. Now more than ever, it's what the world needs.

"Where is the horse and the rider?"

Take the day, if you must, to grieve.

Get it out of your system, because tomorrow we're getting back up.

Be angry. Be frustrated. Be furiously, fiercely,righteously pissed off, because we're going to need it. There's work to be done.

What we don't need is defeatism and hopelessness. And we don't need any fucking despair. It's a luxury we're done with, now. Remember that half of the nation stood with you last night. I'm not ready to do them the dishonor of curling up and going quietly. Are you?

And shame, shame on you if you start talking about Canada now. This is the country that needs you, more than ever. It's still ours. We're not giving it up without a hard, bitter fight. (What, you thought this was going to be easy?)

This is not a tragedy; this is a setback. The battles that were there on Monday are still there this morning. I plan to keep fighting them while I can still draw breath. If I lose - if we lose - it won't be because I lost heart when the tide of it turned against me. The one sure way our enemies can prevail is if we give up and let them.

Are you with me?

For Wrath, for Ruin--

Re-Defeat Wishworld

Final thoughts on why we should oust the Smirk today:

Anyanka. You trusting fool! How do you know the other world is any better than this?

Giles. Because it has to be.

Break the demonic power. Vote.

Samhain 2004

Now is the hour. Now is the night.
Close thou the circle, speak thou the rite.
The doorway is open; The veil is thin.
Now is the time. Begin, begin.

Cat Vaccuum Go!

So it's nearly that time again.

Which would make this my third (!!) year participating - which was a horrible shock, let me tell you, when I went to the Maryland initial meet-up last Friday and realized I was the scarred and grizzled veteran. (Nobody should be getting advice on how to be resolute and responsible from me.) And now that I've finished two for two on wordcount without actually managing to reach the end of a damn storyline, I've made a couple of decisions this year to, as it were, increase the weight a bit.

First, just to get this out of the way: I won't be writing a Jenny Haniver story this year. I'll miss her, but I think comics is her natural medium, and I don't want to tell all her stories before we have a chance to get Adeptus off the ground. (Rest assured there will be future prose Jenny tales - though I think they may be shorter forms for a while. The big plot arcs I've outlined are graphic-novel ones.) And, too, I want to be sure that her first-person voice isn't any kind of crutch for me; I know I can write pages and pages of that, and I'm ready to try a different path this time around. And, besides, if all goes well, this year's tale will be so relentlessly cool that it won't be an issue.

Second, I likely won't be sending it out in installments as it happens. It's likely to be a much rougher draft this season, and I'll probably want to give it at least one revision before it's fit for human eyes. I may change my mind about this, depending on the demands of my Fawning Acolytes, but even then it'll probably be choice excerpts rather than the whole thing.

And this is because - Third - I'm really hoping to finish this one. As in, actually finish the story this month and not leave it hanging for frigging ever. Now that I know for certain I can write fifty thousand words in thirty days (with only minimal bouts of logorrhea and adjectivitis), this is obviously the new bar to set myself. So I'm very seriously considering writing from an outline, starting with a skeleton of plot and adding more flesh until it becomes, well, a novel. I've never done that before, and I don't know if it will happen as planned, but there's only one way to find out. This part frightens me more than anything else, but if it works, it may work better than anything else I've tried to produce a Real Novel with a beginning, middle and goddamn end.

So that's pretty much my November. I will, as usual, be giving updates here, and I apologize in advance if they make little sense. I'll be spending a great deal of next month's time with Moira Connor as she uncovers the mysteries of the city Night, and with Greyden Peregrine, the Brown Mug, Tass the Bravo, and the magician Caltaign, and probably forgetting in the thick of it that no one else has been there or met them yet.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

If you caught yesterday's illuminating glimpse into Bizarro-World, and could bear with it any length, you might have spotted that a comment by "Your father" included the line: "Just like the administration that you pompously rail against, you don't accept contradictory evidence."

You caught that, right? It's really an admirably packaged sentiment: It's bad to be like the Occupying President, and it's bad to speak out against him. Or maybe just bad to be pompous about it; it's sort of hard to tell.

Leaving aside for the moment that I'm being given a lecture on the tone of my discourse by a man who told his wife she was too fat to deserve an indoor toilet, or the well-nigh poetic pot-and-kettle nature of that "pompously" (obviously a new favorite word), this is a sterling example of the man in miniature, and of the kind of head-scratching comeback you get all too often in an argument with someone who has no higher agenda than being righter than you.

Scroll through the comments of any lefty blog that's prominent enough to get freeper trolls, and you'll recognize the same sort of thing immediately. It's a particular kind of tactic that's beloved of the intractably stubborn and contrarian, a combination of ad hominem and psych-out that, for a fleeting moment, warps reality just enough to create the illusion of plausibility. It grabs whatever material's at hand in the service of "Oh, yeah? Well, so are you!" and hurls it, willy-nilly, like a stool pitched in a barfight. It's not even really an argument, just a seized opportunity to break as many things as possible while the battle's on. Sometimes it's a rant, sometimes it's condescension and head-shaking, but don't be fooled; it's always bullying, no matter what veneer it puts on.

Now, let me be clear: I have been wrong about lots of things in my short lifetime, and mule-headed as I often am, it's even possible, every so often, to convince me to admit to them. But I don't care if your argument has all the good sense of the Dao De Jing, I will not hesitate to name you as the ridiculous creep you are if you present it like a second-grader with a schoolyard taunt. (Shorter yesterday: "Hey, if you think about it, this guy's a lot like Dubyah." "Nuh-uh! You are! And you're a sissy mama's-boy, and your mother wears army boots! And you're pompous! Pompous, pompous, pompous!")

I promise, this will be the last I spend words on this subject, and normal pontificating will presume shortly. But it's obviously time to make clear, this being a public blog where (as you can see) any asshole can wander by and put in their two cents, that there's a minimum level of civility that's expected here in my playground. This was Dennis blowing his second chance to at least pretend to pass muster. And so I think there's some benefit in leaving up a couple of heads on pikes hereabouts, with the sign beneath, "Here may ye see the rude."

"And to Him, We No Longer Speak"

For the morbidly curious, the "private feedback" to the previous post is as follows:

Your amoral, manipulative, misogynist father has a point of view, too. A point of view you don't have the decency or guts to recognize. Who took you to your first musical? Who bought you your first book of Shakespeare (over your mother's objection)?

I never tried to be the perfect father--just a whole lot better than mine. You and Tony, who have had the benefit of many good role models, exposure to art and literature, and the freedom to develop as individuals, never seem to have acquired the basic human virtues of compassion and forgiveness. Not the decency to attend you grandfather's funeral or to return your grandmother's love. Neither of you has had the decency to respond to my efforts to reconcile our differences. You fancy yourselves good people who will save the world by virtue of your own high standards, but you're incapable of returning the love of those who loved you most. Real men!

I've never seen such self-righteous hypocrisy.

Good night, sweet prince.

I'd leave this as an "I rest my case" for the Real Man debate, but there are a couple of things worth pointing out here. Note that nice touch of gratuitous poor-put-upon-male in there ("over your mother's objection"). Note the mention of compassion and forgiveness from a guy who sued his twenty-years friends and neighbors over the rights to a strip of driveway, "not ground enough and continent to hide the slain," causing rifts that will never heal. Note the mention of "decency" from a man who tried to use his wife's private sexual fantasies as evidence in his divorce case, and denied a grieving daughter access to her late mother's personal effects. "Self-righteous hypocrisy" is especially funny after all that.

While we're at it, it's worth noting how he cut off helping to support me in college when state law no longer required him to do so, which should give you some perspective on just how deep his Real Man fatherly devotion runs. And that's not even touching on his constant, palpable disapproval - of the time I devoted to the theatre, of my queerness, of my hobbies, of anything that wasn't in the service of Getting Ahead. Don't be fooled - if we had "freedom to develop as individuals," it was very much in spite of his best efforts, and because my brother and I had the good sense, eventually, to learn to ignore him and listen to the role models who'd earned our respect.

These last may seem like small failings, and probably alone they would be; certainly many parents worthy of love share them. But it adds up - the solipsism, the creepy head-games, the willful disinterest in his family's lives unless something benefitted him, the constant martyrdom. And I might well have even forgiven all that, if not for his cruelty, his vengefulness, his willingness to make people suffer because they won't play the game his way. I won't trouble you with more of the gory details; all you really need to know is that, unless you've proven your loyalty to him, all conversations, all relationships with him have the feel of his rant above. He talks a good game about love, but no kindness from him ever came without a price. You see it here: I was so good to you, see how you repay me, you owe me. It's Pete Seeger's shorter "Greensleeves": I gave thee this, I gave thee that, and yet thou wouldst not love me.

Those of you with a lot invested in what a nice guy I am, assuming you're out there, may want to cover your eyes now.

Dennis, once and for all, go the fuck away. You and your nasty guilt-trips aren't welcome in my life, by this backdoor or any other, and if you come back and pull this poisonous nonsense again you'll get ignored like the troll you are. If you ever had a chance at redemption and reconciliation, you sure blew it now. (What, this was supposed to convince me to come back? Or just be some penance-and-grief-inducing revelation? It worked as neither.) You've shown me that you'll never comprehend how deeply you hurt me and my loved ones, or why you're not wanted - that you just don't get all that you have to atone for. If I hadn't done so clearly enough before, I denounce you: Liar, adulterer, sower of discord, pathetic, misogynistic, self-centered sociopathic petty tyrant. You're not my father any more, and honestly, you never truly were. I'm here to disabuse you of the notion that a well-timed orgasm makes you a parent, because Heaven knows that's about all the effort and sacrifice you ever truly put into it. For all your claims of everything you did for me, my life is fuller and richer and happier with you out of it. You didn't even leave enough of a mark on who I am for me to hate you; you're not worth the effort. Mostly I just don't give a shit about you, and maybe that's the most fitting repayment of all.

(So why, then, do I drag this out in the open here? Well, for one, this whining manipulator deserves to be exposed to the world for what he is, especially when he comes onto my blog (not having taken the hint at any time previously) and makes a fuss about how wronged he is - and any of you who might have wondered why I want nothing to do with him now have some concrete, right-from-the-bastard's mouth evidence. And too, to draw a contrast between his twisted model of what a family is - what he needs it to be - and the one I'm surrounded by here. You folks are "the ones who loved me the most," and you're the family I truly cherish, the ones I'd lay it on the line for. You earned it, and that is clearly a thing he will never, ever understand.)

The Desert of the Real

I've been following, over the last couple of weeks, the discussion on Alas, A Blog about Real Manhood (for which start here, and continue here and here, with many links therefrom) - or, if you must, Ideal Manhood or Authentic Manhood or whatever the sensitive-yet-masculine term of choice for the moment is.

If you don't feel like wading through all that, the thrust is this: many men, guided by the Men's Movement that came into the popular consciousness anround the early '90s, feel that it's become necessary to redefine what "manhood" is, because the culture's default setting is destructive and toxic - and I have to pretty much agree. I've certainly been witness to the effects of testosterone poisoning enough times to see that the current system is broken, and I'll be the first in line to agree that macho posturing, unchecked aggression and stalwart emotionlessness are fucked-up yardsticks by which to measure personhood.

The Men's Movement and I part company, however, when they begin to assert that what's needed is a new way to frame what a "real man" is, rather than dispose of that kind of terminology altogether. I'm just not convinced that it's constructive to say "a real man can cry" or "a real man is good to women" - or at least I'm not swayed that it's better than saying that a good person does these things, without loading everything down with gender-role baggage in a better-tailored coat.

But these guys feel very strongly that only a man can teach a boy to be a man, and they've got all kinds of arguments from Jungian mythopoeticism to Evolutionary Psychology to back them up, often with great force. They believe that men and women are so fundamentally different (as opposed to being affected in different ways by a gender-divided culture) that the only way to solve the problem is to work, as it were, within the system rather than subverting it altogether. And I don't buy it at all.

Now, I'm as mythopoetic as the next long-haired guy with Sandman on his bookshelves; I read Iron John in college, and nodded in recognition at much of it, right about until I read Women Who Run With the Wolves and found lots of the wildish-woman stuff as resonant as the hairy-man stuff, and realized that about 95 percent of what I was encountering needed no gender qualifier at all. (And it's been a while, but I seem to recall Pinkola-Estes saying as much at one point in the text.) Here was a whole bunch of self-affirming metaphor I'd be missing out on if I were hung up on Maleness, however progressive, however sensitive. I think I turned my back on all of needing to be a Real Man by whatever measure about the same time I stopped feeling the need to reconcile with my amoral, manipulative, misogynist father; I wonder what Robert Bly would make of that.

So I'm going to go out on a limb and say that we probably should quit dividing up what we teach our children - what we want them to become, as Good People - along gender-role lines unless the lesson in question actually involves a particular set of genitals. (Okay, it's probably better to learn to shave from another male - though if Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is any measure, most Real Men don't know how the hell to do that, either. But I digress.) I don't believe that only a Man can teach a boy how to treat women (or vice versa); indeed, do we really want those kinds of decisions being made by males off on their own? A boy learns how to treat women by talking (and listening!) to his mother, his sisters, his girlfriends, his women friends. He doesn't learn it by some Real Man role model taking him aside, any more than he'd get a lesson on how to make love to his girlfriend from the guys in his locker room.

(This is not to discount the good influence male role models can have, and I think it's immensely valuable for young kids of all genders to see the good example set by adult males who aren't assholes. I'm always happy at Swampstock when my mom takes a moment at the firelighting to thank the good men in attendance for being positive examples of nurturing, gentle, kind people. But I bet none of the guys she's talking about are wrapping it up in some bullshit New Ideal Real Authentic Man image, and lots of us figured it out when we stopped playing the Boys and Girls game altogether.)

The trouble, as Amp points out, is that setting a new standard - Real Man or Ideal Man or whatever - sets up a heirarchy, however good the intentions. And it's too easy for the opposite of Real Man to be Woman, and there we are back in the same quagmire again, where the worst thing you can do is call someone some female name: girly-man, lady, sissy, pussy, cunt. Real Manhood advocates protest that the opposite of "real man" is properly "boy" and not "woman," and I think their hearts are in the right place, but it's still reinforcing that Female-As-Other problem and I don't think it's tearing down the right walls. Because when you build the standard up to what Men Should Be, rather than how People Should Be, you're leaving a whole lot of folks in the cold.

Like me.

See, I've already failed the Ideal Man test. I didn't have some conscientious male role model to teach me Authentic Masculinity (and though I did grow up being exposed to some kind and gentle and good men, their influence was much less direct). I learned most of what I know about being a good person fom the women in my family - how to compromise, how to listen, how to share, how to fight and still love each other, how to be a gracious winner and a good loser, how to value the worth in other human beings. How to be understanding. How to be strong, how to be angry without being hateful, how to be responsible. How to drive and cook and do math and do laundry and make art and put the seat down.

So - what am I missing? What's wrong with me? And if my ambiguous, genderfucked, androgynous sense of identity is short some vital, authentically masculine component - why am I so content?

Flesh, Feit and Fugue

Will you show these pages to the world, so that every wanderer may find their way home?

Happy birthday today to Clive Barker, who's now had 52 years in a life dedicated to the fantastique, the subversive, the outrageous, and the delightfully queer (in every sense of the word).

If you only know his work by way of his more terrifying creations - Books of Blood and the Hellraiser films being the best-known examples - you may be surprised at what you're missing. He's spent most of the last two decades trying to shake his reputation as a Master of Horror with an impressive catalogue of genre-bending books, from the psychedelic urban fantasy of Weaveworld to the dimension-spanning spiritual quest of Imajica to the supernatural Romeo-and-Juliet romance of Galilee. And he's now halfway through his illustrated YA series The Abarat Quartet (which he described at its inception as a combination of Harry Potter, Narnia and Cirque du Soleil), full of beautiful, surreal paintings to which he's dedicated years of his life.

The first Abarat volume is also notable for being the first book for kids I've encountered that openly mentions the author's same-sex partner on the bio page. Among the other things I admire about Clive is the way he's been entirely, unapologetically open about his sexuality for the last decade. His accomplishments as author, artist, filmmaker and storyteller are inspiring, but it's the way he's made himself a good example in the public eye that really stirs me to do the same.

(My favorite Clive Barker moment may be the time he was on Politically Incorrect about five years ago talking about gay themes in cinema, and Bill Maher quipped that, you know, Clive, there are some straight people in the world, and Clive without blinking replied, "Yes, but are they talented?")

Many happy returns, Maestro. Long may your Art endure.

Woven in Lead, With Little Specks of Silver Showing

Resurfacing here just to let all and sundry know I'm alive and okay. Sorry for the long silence; it's been harder to get in the writing spirit of late. But all your good thoughts and encouragement have been a great help. Thank you.

My grandfather's doing alright, for a fairly generous value of the word. He's being treated for depression, which is the biggest risk to his life if he undergoes surgery at this point. He'll probably never be really okay, but that's no great surprise after two strokes and a heart attack. I remain hopeful, in a guarded sort of way.

The lesson here: Don't wait until you're 80 to get drugs and therapy, kids.

Otherwise, things aren't too bad, though the stresses of job hunting and election-year political overload are wearing on me. Also found myself up on the roof the other night with a caulking gun full of tar, clinging like a gecko to the tiles and searching desperately for the source of our brand-new waterstains, all no doubt looking much funnier than it felt at the time. (Thanks a lot, Jeanne.) Fun. Still better than renting, though.

And I'm wicked excited about the Small Press Expo tomorrow, even if it means an extra commute to the City over the weekend and hauling around a huge sack of Stuff I Need Signed. This is the sacrifice we make at the altar of geekdom.

And I also got a kick out of this week's Durtro News mailing, wherein David Tibet opens by briefly transforming into Warren Ellis:

This is 28 IX 2004; I am sick with a cold and drinking Italian chardonnay wine and am delirious. My cats are my HALO. I was reminiscing about how often I went to see Adam and the Ants in their early years and talked with myself a lot about it all. They were amazing. Adam Ant was the best man at the marriage of Nick Saloman (Bevis Frond) as they went to school together; I believe Adam also suggested the name Bevis Frond to Nick. At one point in the late 80s Rose McDowall, Douglas P. and myself were planning a group consisting of us three called STRAWBERRY DEATH CURRENT, which must be one of my favourite names ever… I don't believe any recordings were ever made however. I miss punk rainbow beauty.

I know just how he feels.