Not only is this relevant to Prolongment (marketing!), but I’m sure there’s some interesting conversational bit to be nibbled about the Internet and the human consciousness, and if those things overlap.
However, my main reactions are 1) that this would be extraordinarily sad and hollow if used for its intended purpose, and 2) I want to purchase this thing and have it go into effect before I die, just so I know how the Internet thinks I sound.
MIT Invents A Machine That Can Look At Batman’s Face And See His Heart Beating
This is cool. Combine with Google Glass?
It’s probably the most action-packed of the first five installments. It’s got violence. Don’t you like violence, kiddies?
In other news, I really appreciated this article from the guardian: “How Science Fiction Helps Technology Design“, mostly because it gives a pat on the head to something I already believe, which is that science fiction helps us, as a society, try out different scenarios before they happen. In the same way, I think fantasy (and I’m not just talking about “high” fantasy here) has the power to put in practice some of life’s greatest questions on philosophy, purpose, and ethics.
Truth be told, I’ve become increasingly more convinced that the only real, personal writing I can do is to myself, in a journal. I have to completely resign myself from the notion that I’ve got anyone to impress. I have to stop trying to make sense. I can begin talking instead in the language of coded allusions, unafraid to say something stupid, admit a half-baked idea, admit how little I sometimes think of myself without the danger of convincing other people to agree with me. That’s the danger of being truthful in a blog as well. I’m coming back here to occasionally talk about my book and about the world, for reasons I’m still not entirely convinced of.
Everything you say out loud will affect someone else’s opinion of you, including self-deprecating statements. You say them because you wish to convince the world you aren’t a threat. You become more childish at times to protect yourself from scrutiny. All the little fears and frustrations that take up your mind, fall so naturally from your mouth that you don’t realize you’ve been speaking in a string of them. That string has become your personality. That appeal to harmlessness has become your m.o.
I know that many of the things I tell myself, if I look at them objectively, are untrue. I know that when you take risks, like moving to Australia, and you find yourself bobbling around a lot, and feeling less accomplished than everyone around you, that’s because you’ve taken a risk. You could be sitting somewhere perfectly comfortable in a world which easily hushes your discontent. You could calm your hunger for the greatest life into a whisper, and let it settle odorless into your home. And then you would feel quite accomplished, wouldn’t you? Instead of feeling like a ne’er-do-well, some kind of transient stalking the playground perimeter. It’s because your wants and your dissatisfactions made your life more complicated (and isn’t that the story of so so many people?), and you have chosen against all ancient wisdom to take a chainsaw those conjoined twins of happiness and simplicity.
And at any rate, this situation of instability has nothing to do with your skills and your worth, but it feels like exactly that.
This weekend I found myself watching a few wedding highlights videos with my (boy)friend because he’s shooting a wedding soon. There was this song in one of them. It’s a song you would probably know because it’s very bad and popular. I’m not going to bother to look it up, but the chorus includes these lines:
“She doesn’t know she’s beautiful
and that’s what makes her beautiful.”
Which I think is such a load of horseradish. I hate this verse so much. First of all, do you know what kind of man is attracted to a diminutive woman with no awareness of her own worth? A man with a really really fragile sense of self, that’s who. Second, would she cease to be beautiful if she knew it? Third, this girl you’re singing about has really pulled the wool over your head, buddy. Here’s a secret: beautiful girls know they’re beautiful. They also know you have feelings for them. They play dumb so that your feelings, unaddressed, will escalate into a desperate pitch. They pretend that they don’t know they’re beautiful because you find that endearing. It literally happens all the time, because women who openly admit to their own attractiveness are seen as threatening, bitchy and arrogant.
But here, here is another chord with which to harmonize this revelation:
Just because a girl knows she’s beautiful doesn’t mean she can’t, at the selfsame moment, think she’s looks bad in a lot pictures, or thinks she looks fat, or that her legs look weird, or that she has a stupid face sometimes, or wishes her style was less vanilla, or whatever. Those two opposing opinions can be held in the same measure at the exact same time. Because the human brain is complicated.
In a similar fashion, I will write in a fraction of truth this blog and be vaguely afraid that a potential employer will find it and uncover the ugly, wormy underbelly of my fear and self-loathing (in Las Vegas). Well, potential employers, if you’re reading this, I hope you can understand what I mean when I say that my brain, like all brains, is some complicated mess, and that I can both know that I am completely capable of thriving here and feel like I don’t know anything, at the same time. This is my blog and if I task myself to write in it, this is what’s going to come out. I need a lot of stimulation because I’m a really smart person with a lot of energy, and when I don’t get that stimulation (of feeling needed, of working with a team, of accomplishing things that people other than myself care about), then I tend to go a bit inward and harsh on myself.
Part four of Prolongment will be out soon. Lots of people say it’s really good. I’ve even heard “brilliant shit”. This makes me feel really good. This is the main page for it:
http://curiosityquills.com/published-authors/grace-eyre/prolongment/
I got really excited when I watched this video last night,
)
not only for the true-life science fiction potential of this technology, but because when they mapped, graphed, and recorded a small snippet of this monkey’s thought patterns, it was basically exactly the same as the consciousness algorithm I wrote about in Prolongment. That you can record thoughts now, the electrical patterns of thoughts, bodes well for a future in one or two hundred years’ time when we might actually be able to find the consciousness, sentience, or (dare-I-say) the soul mapped out in a beautiful pattern of signals.
What interests me most is when the speaker says that the monkey’s brain learned to incorporate the third arm as a new sensory pathway. That neurological awareness of “self” can, and does, expand to incorporate the tools we use. What if, instead of addendums to our bodies, like the third arm or “exoskeleton” for paraplegics, you could actually entirely remove sentience from the physical body and place it into an avatar/robot, which sends sensory information to your brain exactly as you felt them. So that a monkey at MIT could “be” a robot in Japan. That totally could happen. They know how to make it happen right now.
The world is awesome. Prolongment talks about bodiless sentience, but this is just as cool.
I guess I’m blogging again? It’s been so long that I couldn’t immediately remember how to create a New Post! A bit of habit, faded into the forgetting place.
The world is a complicated place, and life is complicated at the moment. It’s easier to write about things that come naturally to mind. Unfortunately right now, my mind is pretty self-centered, so this is what you get. Lucky!
Here’s the thing. I’m five months into living in a new country, and still trying to find the kind of job that can keep me here. I need to be kept here. I see myself headed toward a cliff at a rate so steady it has no mercy. The cliff drops off at 7 months, and after that, there is nothing. I really can’t see anything. If I have to leave Australia I’m going to be a completely resigned and kind of nothing-person, and maybe I’ll live in some small landlocked town and find a job that computes with absolutely no one’s idea of success. And I’ll be happy there because I will have given up entirely on the idea of success, maybe I’ll just spend all my time reading books and the news and writing stories and going into the woods on weekends. It actually doesn’t sound so bad. Maybe Colorado. Maybe, I don’t know, maybe someplace even more unassuming, like Nevada.
But right now I’m in love with Sydney, I’m in love with it, and that love makes you kind of wretched because even if you see yourself headed for a cliff, the love means you can’t just roll there limp-handed, you have to grab at things, at anything you can, instead of thinking about Nevada.
My book just came out recently and this is where my head is at. It’s a serialised set of short stories, which, I guess when packaged together become something of a novella. It’s called Prolongment, and the first two parts have been released online through Curiosity Quills. There are sixteen parts, and a new one is being released every Monday. Hurray!
I quite like Prolongment. It’s a science fiction ghost story, basically about a research center turned corporation (B&E Labs), that is attempting to finance their research by providing a pretty exclusive service wherein people can have their consciousness extended past death. There are a lot of facets to the story, and a lot of people looking at the situation differently. There are investors and regulatory committees and journalists and legal problems and a touch of violence, infighting and so on. While it’s a bit ghost-y and scary in places, I think it’s really just about a city of people trying to deal with this weird situation, a world where ghosts are entirely real and the threat of time paradoxes are actually quite plausible.
Yes, there’s a bit of scariness and ghost-iness. But was really intrigues me (and I feel this way about sci fi and fantasy in general), is when philosophical problems are put to the test by being made real. What does it mean to have a body, and how would being body-less change the way you think? What constitutes a person? What does it mean if a ghost doesn’t have the experience of death? For something quite real-world relevant, what happens when a company produces and then markets a technology before society is actually equipped to deal with it? If the past can be changed, what happens to the old version of the future?
I can be awful at marketing. It’s not a lack of knowledge, just a passionate disinterest. But I’ll do the best I can.
Ideally, I would just write, and then hand my writing off to someone else, and they’d take care of all that nasty publishing/marketing stuff. And then once in a while someone would ask me if I want to talk about my book or read from my book and I’ll say sure! Because that stuff is fun.
But there’s a gap. Right now I have to pound on doors. A lot, a lot of doors, and convince strangers that my book is a worthwhile way to spend their valuable time. I don’t necessarily feel worthy in this regard. You could be reading my book, but you could also be watching The Wire or something. I hear the writing on that show is great.
But I very much want to be read by others. It’s the scariest and most gratifying thing there is. I wish I could get others to read my book and my stories just by being a really really really good writer, but alas, that’s not how the world works. You have to throw your hat in the ring and say “Listen, I’m the boss of this ring, and you’d do well to pay attention to ME.” I’m still working on this.
When my friends do amazing things like write screenplays, or make movies, or produce albums, I’m always right there, liking and sharing, listening and reading and watching, giving feedback if I’m asked to give feedback. I love when people send me their stuff. It’s a life affirming thing. It’s a mutual confirmation that we are here to do more than shit and breathe.
I love writing. I love writing in its essence so much that I didn’t think about being published or being a “writer” until long after college. But I still wrote, constantly, because that’s me. If you took that away from me, there would be no Grace. Just a face that looks like Grace.
Writing fiction is the best conversation I could ever have with the world. Blogging or journaling is different. It’s clamoring around in a messy backyard and picking up bits of detritus with a poker stick. It’s just me.
But writing fiction is going outward. It’s a challenge. It’s my grubby baby brain fingers reaching for everything brightly colored and weirdly textured. It’s a big brainstorm sesh with the universe, where I’m standing at the markerboard feeling so alive and the universe is sitting in a desk looking back at me. I’m saying “Hey, is this right?”
and something comes back to me saying, “Yes, this is right,” or “You’ve got your shoe on the wrong foot, Grace.”
It’s hard to balance everything right now. I’m scared and sort of angrily optimistic about the rest of my life. And as far as promoting my book and submitting my things for publication, I realize that’s a pill I’m going to have to swallow if I want to be a real-ass, low-down writer. Because I don’t want to spend my whole life with just the universe and me, talking to each other. I want to pull you in, to put you in another desk nearby where you can pass notes.
I’ll be writing forever, you know. No matter what. Even if I do end up a burnout in Nevada. What I’m saying is that I want you to read, and that opportunity will always be there. I just hope you like it.
You can start here! (marketing!). Prolongment is published every Monday at CQ. Enjoy.
Prolongment Part One is Live on Curiosity Quills!
I am interrupting this blog’s hiatus, which I hope is not a hiatus for too terribly much longer, to shamelessly promote my sci fi serial which is now available from Curiosity Quills. It’s about a company that makes ghosts.
I hope you will like it!
1
not knowing where when or how these things come together
you pray as only a child could
with cosmic gravity
as waves pray to the shore
a human knows that when too far ventured
without his harnesses, his mother-metal
he would shade into purple-green-black
and become a thing
when man left earth he was
uncomfortable
looking at the stars
as a reptile grows a second skin and itches inside it
on the corner where cars trade swipes
under the talcum light of bottle shop signs
a similar itch follows me
things that make me comfortable enough to sleep:
men and their flat bodies against my back
drugs in many incarnations
trips to the corner grocer
the false advertising of to-do lists
uneasy words to get at cracks
that words aren’t designed to reach
and must be bent like coat hangers
2
for example
the word beauty is bowl shaped
it waits for something
needs something
is passed around
when light and water fill it
they become discs, closed loops
only metonyms for some greater element
your eyelids are bowl shaped
when they cover you
and when open, sun-filled eyes
are lighter, hollow, cringing.
the drop of space between cornea
and pupil, lit like glass
iris revealing a truer texture, with millimeters of depth
something you could touch if you tore it apart
3
one night in a sudden waking moment
that fantasy had returned
that brilliant universe
like a missed appointment
it sat there dark and smiling, a bit superior
you in a panic saying “wait!”
you wanted to tell someone
and you couldn’t hide that wish, so it retreated
a slip of wing, and then nothing
left you with the slowly lifting sensation of minor gods
and colors without names
4
once he searched all night for a tree that didn’t light up
you looked up at the empty bulbs and tried to wake up
(wake up!)
it was a gamble and a miss
he is a plagiarist of love, none of it his
see love and conflict are actuarial opposites
in love, put as little skin in the game as it takes
to keep you there — in war, put every inch
in love, fear is an asset — in war, a liability
I don’t know which this is
the fight to love
to be allowed to love
a place — with no second skin
when birds fly together in flock
the second bird’s reaction to the first
is less than the time it takes
for a neuron to fire
so tell me about that
people who love each other
feel they can pull down the stars and the mountains
just to participate in the impossible
if we could only pull down the stars for ourselves
we would be
both monstrous and deific
a new pantheon of petty children
5
I will be as empty as they come,
as strange as strangers go
I will do
anything they ask
maybe the right choice of words
maybe the right course of action
will save you
you are a protolith
I am metamorphic
both of us stuck in the stone
but kick for shore, kick kick
death is no conclusion
and the manner of death is no summary
but living death is all of these things
I’m trying to find ways to restructure and/or simplify life. It’s difficult to find areas to cut back, because I feel that everything I do is important. I want to keep this blog because I very much like talking back to the material I read/watch/absorb on a regular basis.
However, what I love most of all is writing long, point-by-point critiques. Posting every Wednesday (and I think I’ve done a decent job of this), means that I either have to limit my blogging to one or two hours per post (including research and image gathering), or I spend half my week blogging.
Perhaps it would be better to post more sporadically, but more in depth, about topics that really get me. When I want to spend an entire weekend thinking about how eco-feminist theory applies to a film I saw, then it’s great to have this platform. Posting less often might not be great for traffic, but it’s great for me.
I’m moving to Australia in six weeks. I have a work trip coming up next week. I’m racing to finish rough drafts of the last five sections of my book, Prolongment. I’m going through rounds of submissions with Kernel in David Morrow. I have another project on the docket before I leave the U.S. I need to finish some stuff for Waterfront Film Festival. I try to make time to exercise every day. You can see how it gets thorny.
In other news though, Australia is going to be awesome, and I totally said I would get there, didn’t I?
If you want to know when this blog updates, just be sure to follow me at @TheGraceEyre. Or put me in your Reader, yo. If you want to follow my adventures getting to Sydney and having my mind blown by it, check out the new tumblr I made for sharing pictures, stories, etc.
Otherwise, see you when I see you.
* With over 4 hours of primary footage, an audio-only clip to comment on each, and another 2 hours of interviews, this anthology is practically a class in itself. There’s something about his work that compels me. It’s a lot to work with, and a lot to take if you put the time in.
—
Okay, I’ve got to hook you up with the awesome that is Bill Bryson. In a Sunburned Country showed up near me on Saturday and I got hooked. I haven’t finished it yet, because I’ve prohibited myself from hours of reading while I’m trying to finish writing a book. But still, it’s practically a thrill and a joyride of a work, and I look forward to returning to it after lo, these many long days of typing.
Because my name is Grace, many people think it is a neat gift idea to buy me books with “Grace” in the title. I’m the reluctant owner of a lot of books with Grace in the title, many of them unsurprisingly religious, and almost all of them unread.
Similarly, because I’m going to Australia, it’s a thing now where lots of books about Australia are being drawn to me like dust motes to a lightbulb (thank you but no more books! I have to move soon!). Luckily in this case, my obsession with Australia just about matches the quantity of popular literature on Australia, and I read them enthusiastically, sweeping facts toward my person like I just won the round. (mammals that lay eggs are called metronomes! the box jellyfish is the most poisonous creature on earth! both live in Australia!)
Bryson is a fantastic writer. One of the special ones. He wrote many travel books, including a Walk in the Woods, which my sister loves, about hiking the Appalachian trail. There’s Notes from a Small Country, about living in England, another book on the history of the English language, and a few observational-type books about quaint, observational-type things, mostly with a historical focus.
Bryson writes with an intellectual compassion and with an extreme love of detail, much in the vein of Howard Zinn or Jared Diamond. He’s a hell of a lot funnier, though, and leans at times toward a sort of sentimental lyricism that I think is pretty essential in a travel writer. Also, much like another non-fiction writer, Sarah Vowell (whom you must must read), he travels freely off on factual tangents, pulling in arcane bits of news and history to give color and background to his present situation. It’s a beautiful thing and I love when writers do this, if their stories are good enough.
Because I just reminded myself of Sarah Vowell, I should also suggest that you check out Assassination Vacation, which was my favorite. Vowell goes on a tour of the country to visit significant sites related to the assassinations of three Republican presidents and give the backstory. (Pop Quiz! Who was assassinated other than Lincoln and Kennedy?**). She also wrote Partly Cloudy Patriot and Take the Cannoli. Also good, and great material for winning at parties with your knowledge of American History.
Coming up next in my reading list is Lolita (incidental) and the semi-nonfiction On The Road. Many people have insisted that I read On the Road, but it was given to me because the giver was happy to have it off his hands. I’m interested in the moment in history that On the Road conveys, but less interested in unemployed grown white men who consider themselves kings of the fuck-all universe while being supported by their working mothers and girlfriends. I suppose you can separate the art from the artist, so long as it doesn’t lead you to give the artist a pass on being a decent human. Jackson Pollock was an alcoholic who basically ruined Lee Krasner’s life, after all.
And here!
What are some other non-fiction books that I can take a crack at? I like quirky things and history and social justice and Australia. Send me recs!
** McKinley and Garfield
Books:
o fallen angel – Kate Zambreno (finished)
Still Life with Woodpecker – Tom Robbins (finished)
Movies:
Brakhage: an anthology (continuing)
Tom Waits: Under the Influence
Moonrise Kingdom – Wes Anderson
Television:
Arrested Development – Mitchel Hurwitz (finished)
Man Med – Matthew Weiner (continuing)
Live Shows:
Sex, Love and the Second City – Second City
Cirque du Soleil: Dralion
————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
I was clearly overstimulated this week. Part of that was the week I spent in Chicago. Here is a picture of me photobombing Chicago:
Charming.
It’s somewhat difficult to take all of this apart now and determine which little piece of someone else’s imagination had the greatest impact on me.
I’ll stick to the books this week.
Kate Zambreno’s “o fallen angel” is a short book I picked up at Quimby’s, a local Chicago comic/book store. They line their shelves with a lot of local talent, and Zambreno’s novel very quickly made its affiliation known. It’s a critique of overfed suburban America from three perspectives: a small-minded housemom, her pill-chomping semi-estranged daughter, and a homeless man who has apparently appointed himself a prophet.
Anyway, the book was delicious and a little mean. It was easy, and it took some easy stabs. It was almost like reading a reality show, but written by someone with all the same obvious critiques as you, o enlightened viewer. But still, it was intelligent and interesting how some of the sections mirrored each other, or the same phrase would turn gently in different hands, or after a few chapters of development. But it was fun and fast, and I swallowed it in the same chomp that I would a little Buckowski book. A good writer, writing a whole lot of things that a whole lot of people already know.
I love Tom Robbins and pray to god that I can someday be a writer of half his caliber, but Still Life with Woodpecker was a little troublesome. I suppose that was the point. There’s a lawyer character in the book who is supposed to be identified as the old fuddy-duddy, the brain-stiffened social activist with little patience for the wild whims of Harold-and-Maude-like romanticists like our protagonists, Leigh-Cheri and Woodpecker. Woodpecker’s lawyer wasn’t the antagonist exactly, but she was poo-pooed an awful lot for her commitment to basic common sense. Anyway, I identified with her the most. I guess that makes me a “social idealist” instead of a “romantic individualist”, but at least it doesn’t make me a useless rose-smelling turd.
“Woodpecker” is the nom-de-guerre of Bernard Mickey Wrangle, an outlaw (minor terrorist). He bumps into our other protagonist, Leigh-Cheri, at an environmentalist conference in Hawaii. Leigh-Cheri is the dispossessed princess of Hawaii, who (and this is never explained) has red hair and blue eyes. Woodpecker also has red hair, which is a magical fact.
Basically, as the book runs its course, Woodpecker bombs and attempts to bomb things, Leigh-Cheri goes insane and gives up every particle of her spine to be a hopeless romantic, including sympathetically jailing herself for him, etc. etc. They have lots of gross sex. Woodpecker convinces her that nothing really matters except thwarting the rules, not having obligations, and being a romantic. Eventually, Leigh-Cheri deduces that they (redheads) are the lingering vestiges of a superior race, yes, a superior race of redheads which will one day rise again to presumably lead the more ethic looking masses.
I mean, the whole thing just has a twang of bad-weird. Maybe Robbins is fucking with me, and everyone, but the novel lacked compassion and had an odd fuck-all, Third-Reich attitude about it. Not to mention how frustrating it was to watch Leigh-Cheri lose her marbles over a guy who doesn’t mind bombing things, potentially hurting people, or thwarting all attempts to make the world a better place, because attempting to fix social problems is useless and old-fashioned as a movement.
I get some of it. Lots of people who make social activism a way of life (in my experience), have been either glossy-eyed, way-too-cheerful recent college grads, or people who are as dry, brittle, and dogmatic as DMV clerks. However, I also know a lot of people who have lifted their hands to the world to say “I care”, and they are amazing creatures with a gift for light, and I don’t think their existence is cheapened because they haven’t fallen back on romantic fatalism.
I mean, did I misread this entire book? Isn’t it slightly disappointing that our heroine Leigh-Cheri could act this way, when in “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues”, our main girl Sissy was an adventurer who bent her style for no one, and who got deep down into the world and interfaced with wise men in ways that kind of made your jaw fall? Sissy had a lot of gross sex too, and that was fine.
Just my two cents.
Oh, and what did everyone think of Moonrise Kingdom? I thought it was pretty okay. It played like a book.
