No Genre

/vid of the week

2008-12-04T19:08:00.005-07:00

v. Oh, Pilate, you cheeky bastard.

At some point, I may engage the psychological motivations behind my obsession with absurd slash videos on youtube. For now, I'll just present this:

Please tell me I'm not the only human being who thinks this is truly fucking hilarious.

My dream

2008-12-01T17:01:00.002-07:00

So much hatred, it manifests as desires of global destruction. Flames shooting out of broken windows as high-rise walls crumble on rioting masses. No mercy. No escape. The vile self-perpetuates in a feedback loop so that there is no death for the mangled & screaming. Every severed piece sends shrieking signals of agony through the air back to the source until confusion becomes too much & waves mix with waves. One unified & useless communication of shared suffering. No sympathy of any kind. Only escalating aggression & loathing. The planet becomes one giant smoldering crater, almost immaterial. Every bit of matter becomes consumed & used as expression for this inability to escape. Nothing is too far from the reach of the great crawling chaos. The moon is the first to fall victim. Then Mars, the asteroid belt, etc. A tortured solar system drawing in any body foolish or fixed in pattern enough to get close. Alien things of unmatched and nigh-imagined beauty, strangeness, intelligence, compassion, hostility, ignorance, sheer existence. Adjectives of increased accuracy & potential just become integrated into the roiling anger. One cosmos is not enough. What possible end comes from a single focal point?
I have wet sheets.

Thanksgiving blessing 2008

2008-11-30T13:44:00.000-07:00

A couple of days late, I know, but...

We thank thee, random chance, for bringing us together in this unique way. We thank thee, human ingenuity, for the combination of smallpox & blankets, which made today so much more likely, as well as the combination of cocaine & baking soda. We thank Social Darwinism & eugenics for inspiring standardized tests, without which we may never have been brought together. We thank arrogance & ignorance, particularly of past generations, for giving us so much to fix & worry about. Without you, life would have been so much more dull. We thank political correctness for preventing us from seeing ugliness & asking why it's there. Without you, we would never have had the serial killer superstar, & I may have always felt alone. We thank sexual education & awareness for preventing more of us from breeding. Abortion, too. We thank colonialism for competitive prices. Thanks to Remington, or any pump-action shotgun. I love smoking drugs from a lethal weapon. We are endlessly indebted to extinct cultures for giving us such a great example of what to do after a harvest. It's just a shame we don't have a wicker man. Most of all, thanks for the lumps of carbon & cognizance that surround me. I know I can count on you to put a slug between my eyes in event of zombie bite. You all know it goes both ways. Now, let's eat until we can eat no more, & then we'll shit on each other & have an orgy.

Dream Blog No. 1, Camel No. 9

2008-11-15T19:08:00.004-07:00

Last night I tracked down a serial killer. A robot driving a bus had been kidnapping passengers on the 6:12, taking them back to his safe house, and decapitating them. I tracked him, with my super public-transportation-taking skills, and killed him in a dance off. There was more, but the point is: I'm a wicked awesome dancer.

I also ended up with two packs of Camel No. 9s, buy-one-get-one-free. Why do things marketed toward women always have to be pink? Mainly, I'm disappointed they didn't go all-out and make the whole damn cigarette pink. They could have been the poor girl's Fantasia.

And obviously, I have writers block. So this is what you get.

Carry on.

And..... begin.

2008-11-09T16:52:00.000-07:00

You don't really need to read this post, but I feel like it should probably be here anyway.

A bit less than two years ago, I did a reading of a cross-genre piece I'd written. At some point during the introduction, I spoke of "trying very hard to think of crossing genre the way one would cross a border or cross an enemy. Rather than crossing species. Which is to say that I'm more interested in violation than mixing."

But that is not what this blog is about. Well, that's not all this blog is about.

I'm fascinated by the internet. More specifically, I'm fascinated by what the internet has become. What it's becoming. It's so very different than the internet I grew up with. When I was 12, maybe 13, my family had a subscription to Prodigy. Yeah, Prodigy. We accessed it with a 2400 baud modem. It was wonderful, and new, and almost entirely useless except that it allowed me access to telnet. Now look at us.

Web 2.0, as they say. The brave new virtual world of user-generated content. But, as much as I follow its continued growth like a doting parent, so proud & occasionally horrified (specifically when I forget how much it hurts my head to read YouTube comments), I really have nothing whatsoever to do with this iteration of the web. I don't edit any wikis, I don't post videos, I might hit up digg or slashdot several times a day, but I haven't even bothered with an account on either. I love it here, but until now, I have been only passively invested.

The desire to actually generate content is one reason to bother with this blogging thing. There are others.

I write (among other things) long winded, rambling (and often rather clever) emails to handful of people with fair regularity. They have each said to me, at some time or another, "You should really start a blog. That would be a perfect blog post." Which is almost certainly code for, "Please stop filling my inbox with your clever insights and realizations, and instead yell them into the empty vacuum of cyberspace." With any luck, I'll find it less empty here than I expect. If nothing else, I can still fill loved ones inboxes with messages that simply read, "Did you see what I just posted to No Genre? I think you'd be interested."

I wouldn't have bothered with any of this if it weren't for the nagging of my two (for now) partners in cybercrime. (Special aside to members of various federal agencies: not actual cybercrime. Just the metaphorical kind.) They're pretty amazing people with a penchant for motivating me to get off my ass (or, more accurately, sit on said ass for long periods of time) and write things.

I'm not sure if they both plan to use their real names here, and I'd hate to ruin the fun for the one that doesn't live 2000 miles away from me if he's planning to go by 'Professor Zero' or something. So let's just call them 'Professor Zero' and 'Megalodon.'

Professor Zero has a unhealthy interest in tech, in the 'I want to amputate my own arm and replace it with something robotic so the cyborg chicks will dig me' sort of way. His knowledge of noise music is damn near encyclopedic, and he uses the term 'transhuman' entirely seriously. I don't think I'd be as excited about this project if he wasn't on board.

Megalodon and I originally bonded over our mutual obsessive love of Stargate SG-1. I think. Memories of college can be a bit fuzzy. Every Friday afternoon, we'd leave class, go back to my apartment, watch a few episodes and play our Stargate drinking game. Maybe I'll post the rules later, at which point you'll understand why the memories have fuzzed up. She read with me at the aforementioned reading. I had the pleasure of introducing her, saying:

Writing is an immensely private endeavor in search of an immensely public goal. Moments like this are exhilarating, to be sure, it's wonderful for me to be able to get my work out here, to stand here sharing it with you. But 99% of the life of the writer is not this. It's sequestering yourself behind a closed door for a weekend to finish a draft. It's waking up at 5:30 in the morning to write, because you know that if you don't get time in then, it's not going to happen all day. It's all the stuff that no one else sees. Which is why it's so important for me to have close friends like Megalodon, who I respect immensely. And it's not for the shared workshops, or the editing advice, though there's plenty of both. But it's for the nights when we're both waist-deep in red wine, jabbering on about this or that, when suddenly there's this deep, empathetic connection over the writing. Not the product, but the process. The part that no one sees still ends up shared. And knowing that helps us get past those inevitable tough spots that crop up when you're struggling for your art. Megalodon and I agonize over writing in very similar ways. I think you'll see that, in Megalodon's case, the agony is well worth it.

I was trying to make her cry. For some reason, it didn't work.

Which brings me back to the title of this blog. We'd kicked a couple things around. I was rather fond of 'A Brass Orchid,' due entirely to my obsessive and frequently sexual love of Samuel R. Delany. But that's my thing only, and I really did want this to be a group project. I was poking around wikiquote, looking for inspiration, when I found the Alan Moore quote that's currently at the top of the page. (It'll certainly change eventually, so I'd like to let the future know that, when I was writing this, it read: "Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky.") Now, while I have a tremendous respect for Mr. Moore, there's a lot more going on here than just that.

Genre, historically and in a fairly narrow view, is a means of categorization. The construction of genre is inimitably tied to the construction of the literary cannon. What is included, what is excluded. My focus is fiction (and to some extent essay), and I've spent more time thinking about genre divisions within that framework than anywhere else. But for now, the tier of genre that seeks to create discrete spaces for fiction, poetry, drama and maybe essay is probably more relevent.

Because, if those are the genres we have, where does blogging fall? It's not essay. It's simply not included. And it's not unique in this respect. Where do comic books fall? For instance.

And so, what we're doing here is operating outside of genre, which means -- to an extent -- outside of of what is typically thought of as 'Writing.' I like this. We are not publishing literature or poetry. We are simply writing. No genre needed.