Reading and Writing

 Well, it's been a few days. Not much progress has been made. I think I'm starting over yet again. I have another idea, I have renewed hope for motivation, etc. I also made a new website over the past couple days, but it's still barebones. It may stay that way forever, who knows. That's at www.1800newgods.com if you want to check it out. If you get the reference, email me. Okay bye.

 Last night I tried writing a new story's beginning. 500 words in, I'm not sure if it'll go anywhere, but I think I'm a little more interested in the potential here than I was for the first thing I wrote. Of course, that means I'm 500 words behind my goal. That's OK.  I joined an online writing goal on a site called Trackbear, which allows groups of people to self-report their progress over a period of time and charts it on a big graph. That's fun. Again, we will see if it lasts.  I also watched the premiere episode of season 18 of RuPaul's Drag Race last night. It was pretty good, I thought. The guest judge was Cardi B, who I found to be quite charming. In any event, that's all I have to say. See, I told you these would be short!  

 I took a train back to the city on New Year's Eve. It was an Amtrak, which is the closest we come in America to genuine commuter rail. It was a four hour journey, give or take 30 minutes, which was bearable, until a random child sat next to me for the last hour. I didn't love that. Also I was running on about 3.5 hours of sleep. When the train arrived at Union Station (incidentally, I'd like to write a collection of short stories called Union Station, where all the stories meet at one point or another. Like a union station. It's basically a metaphor) I got to experience my favorite thing, which is walking up the narrow walkway between the train platforms and into the station proper. It feels like a remnant of the 19th Century, in a way that I find thrilling.  I knew I was supposed to take the Brown Line north to the station nearest my apartment, but when I got to the platform, I saw only an Orange Line train. Luckily, I heard the robot announcer voice say "This is...

  He stopped, transfixed, on the stairs. Something about the window- the way the light cascaded through its multicolored panels and pooled at his feet on the carpet staircase had caught his attention this morning that hadn’t been there before. No, it must’ve been there the whole time- it was just that he hadn’t seen it until this morning. Green, red, yellow, blue, and purple light spread itself into a divine tapestry and here he was standing right in the middle of it, totally unaware of its existence. How could he have been so blind? And then, when the blame crept into his mind, it held the door open for its good friend and companion, worry, to follow behind. And he thought, oh God. What if this has ruined the world for me? What if my eyes are cursed to judge all that they see by this impossible rubric? For truly, he had known as soon as he set eyes upon the masterpiece that nothing could possibly compare to it. And at this thought, this realization, he despaired. Because t...

     Tiriel, the first of William Blake's Prophetic Books , is a work filled with anxieties of abandonment, tyranny, and the absence of filial piety. It narrates the sad, if deserved, fate of the eponymous king, now aged and widowed, as he seeks revenge against those he feels to have wronged him (principally his own children).     " The cry was great in Tiriel's palace his five daughters ran/And caught him by the garments weeping with cries of bitter woe...Hela my youngest daughter you shall lead me from this place/And let the curse fall on the rest & wrap them up together..."     Hela, the youngest of the five daughters of Tiriel, is spared the dark fate that befalls her sisters and brothers. But why? Simply so she can accompany her blind father on his final exile, like some Anglo-Saxon Antigone? Or is there something deeper at work here?     I dunno. But I'm bored of writing this now, so I'm posting it. 

When I was a kid, I shared a bedroom with my brother. It was on the second floor of our family's two-story Cape Cod, at the end of a long hallway. In some ways, it was the best bedroom of the four in the house: large, with plenty of closet space and windows arranged so that, morning or afternoon, the whole thing was bathed in a pleasant diffusion of sunlight. As if that wasn't enough, out bedroom also harbored a secret, a tall, thin door tucked away in the far corner, between the closet and the wall, which led to a storage room we called 'the attic', despite it not being an attic. It was, I believe, just something that was tacked on to provide some extra space for clutter. But to my child brain, it was a gateway to an infinite number of magical worlds. It represented something hidden, yet accessible.   So, it has finally come to this. I've grown so bored at work that I have decided (at last!) to delve into the Ulyssean tome that is House of Leaves by Mark Danielew...