Tag: PR

Hortatory self-aggrandizement.

Thousand-Word Taskmaster

“FROM SPACE, OASINE WAS AN otherwise tan ball flecked and dotted with green – but none of its inhabitants had ever seen it.

“Few of them, in fact, had been outside their own birthplaces. These were oases of various shapes and sizes whose populations, separated by trackless desert, varied from savagery to the sophistication allowed by circumstance and caravan. In one of the latter, called Fint by its blithe and industrious residents, and on one of countless cloudless days, a crowd of gawkers, mockers and the curious gathered at Horolan’s Pier for the maiden voyage of the good ship Deeper.”

Thus begins Under Oasine, a science fantasy novel relating the adventures of three unlikely heroes (Twiz, Ij and Hapler) who discover that their world is a lot bigger than they had thought — and it (along with everyone on it) needs their help to survive.

I’m telling you this for two reasons: 1) partly to avoid through preemptive imprimature a repeat of the “Matrix incident”, and 2) mostly to motivate myself (as with the Prosatio Silban stories) through risk of public humiliation should I flake.

Somerset Maugham once said: “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.” Although a skilled news reporter, I know nothing about writing novels save what I could glean from Stephen King’s On Writing, Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake Method and Simon Haynes’ How To Write A Novel. There is great advice to be found in each of these, but after mumbling it about my own muse is telling me to chart what I want each chapter to do and where I want it to end, write a thousand words a day until I reach 45-50,000, then look for an agent and a movie deal.

Blogging a novel may be dicey for aspiring writers who want to sell their works: the idea is still catching on, and while it can raise a persuasive buzz some publshers may see “blog” as “previous publication.” My task here will be to navigate the narrow path between these two extremes — and entertain the hell out of whoever reads what results. To this end, I plan to post the first two chapters, with synopses according to clamour. Your task will be to tell me whether or not I’m successful.

Deal?

Lunar Immortality: Vote Today!

A PLAN TO LOOP STANLEY Kubrick’s 2001: A space odyssey in the lunar crater Tycho is now ranked 413th on the website http://www.goodideas.org — and Metaphorager.Net readers can help this dream become a reality.

Although the project originally offered as incentive a million-dollar prize, today anonymous reader David S. pointed out that since the prize money doesn’t actually exist, the purpose might be better served by an appeal to like-minded nerds visionaries through GoodIdeas.org, “a web site which gathers, tags, ranks and distributes good ideas.”

Despite that most of the ideas thereon are goody-two-shoes attempts at cheap desalinization, environmental survival and feeding the hungry, we’re hoping the maginificent frivolity of Lunar Immortality comes to the notice of someone who might actually build it. If you are one, or would like to become one, vote today for “Lunar Immortality Now!” at http://www.goodideas.org/a/dtd/37744-6782. (And don’t forget to sign our online petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/2001shot/petition.html!)

Vote Lunar Immortality Now! It’s not every day you get to save a million bucks.

Perfuming Smacks (was Wadi, Inner Quay)

MORE ON THE EFFABLE FRAMING of ineffability: Back in November, I wrote a flashfictional fable (or, if you will, a flashfable [term (c) 2010 Neal Ross Attinson]) “Awe and Inquiry”. I called it that because it seemed an apt metaphor for one variety of spiritual experience (plus, I like the way it sets up the punchline).

Once it scrolls off the front page, I tend to forget what I’ve written. Imagine my pleasure to find “Awe and Inquiry” being read, not once, but several times — onvce a day for the last couple weeks, in fact. According to my .log files, it’s sweeping Eurasia one computer at a time: England, Sweden, Denmark, Ukraine, Moscow, the Netherlands, Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran and, just this evening, Prague.

I have no idea why, but it doesn’t seem to be a series of globetrotting bots so much as a closed connection within the (real and original) Matrix. To everyone who’s wandered by here, including the Brit who found me while Googling “Robert anton wilson recipe golem” on his or her iPhone: thank you for reading. Really, thank you. After all — it’s why I write.

UPDATE (3/28/10): I just had a closer look at my logs; %$#@!ing spammers is what it is, bouncing off of various anonymizers. Which is still interesting, but more depressing in light of my original take … especially in the sense of my baby “Awe and Inquiry” being understood by anyone but me. Ah, well. Back to the keyboard.

Preface: Across the Rimless Sea

These fables are self-contained excerpts from the picaresque hopepunk work, The Cook For Any Price: Across the Rimless Sea. Because the tales encompass a world of spectacular landscapes and forgotten ruins, teeming with vastly different and occasionally commingled cultures, religions, prophecies, species and cuisines, those curious to explore it may benefit from the following helpful words.

ACROSS THE RIMLESS SEA LIE the Exilic Lands, where dreams come to die – or so say the coffeehouse wits of Soharis. But they are a cynical lot, and often fervent in their presumptions. Continue reading “Preface: Across the Rimless Sea“

ORL Interview: Robert Anton Wilson

(AS A FOLO TO THE previous post, and at the urging of sinister forces who would prefer I remain nameless, I now present a reprint from the bygone Bulletin of Obscure Research, Far Corner (v1n5, c. 1991): an interview with the late Robert Anton Wilson, who wrote about everything Dan Brown does (and much, MUCH more) but did it first and funnier. He was and is a great influence on both my writing and my thought, and I hope his fans will be amused rather than disappointed by this previously Lost Interview (conducted through the mail and transcribed with errors intact rather than scanned, at least for now). And if you’re listening, Bob — thanks for the cartography lessons.) Continue reading “ORL Interview: Robert Anton Wilson”

ORL History, or Where’s Mine?

LONGTIME READERS WILL PRICK THEIR pointed ears at the mention of “Obscure Research Labs.” If you’re not one of them, but especially if you are, please read on:

Back around 1989 or so, I became involved with a group billing itself as “the world’s only TRUE research organization … devoted to finding out Just What’s Going On” (see FAQ). Headed by BT Elder, whose tenure as Professor of Applied Memetics at Miskatonic University came to an abrupt and scandal-hushed end during the 1970s, Obscure Research Labs played a key role in the development of 1990s-era underground popular culture. Without ORL’s influence, Roswell would still be a noncommittal speck on the Nevada map; the Men in Black (the real ones, not their sequel-laden counterparts) would still be frightening witnesses with anonymous abandon; and the Wachowski brothers would still be stuck for an Idea.[1]

The scope of ORL’s work and accomplishments would require several volumes to explain in disambiguating detail. Suffice to say, despite the hours and working conditions I accepted the position of newsletter editor and produced seven issues of the ORL bulletin, “Far Corner.” Filled mostly with recent ORL doings, specifically in the areas of time travel and experimental mass psychology, the newsletter also featured interviews with such secretly famous celebrities as Robert Anton Wilson and Ivan Stang.

Of course, that was all before ORL’s still-unexplained disappearance c. 2002. Although I haven’t worked for them in years, I still Google them on occasion to see what they’re up to, if at all (also, they still owe me money). Thus, imagine my surprise when I discovered someone selling ORL merchandise at inflated prices! It is flattering to have produced a collectors’ item, but annoying to be cut out of the profits. At this writing, I have been unsuccessful in contacting the seller — for all I know, he or she or it may be a disgruntled ex-employee (of which ORL seemed to produce dozens, all altered in some fashion) trying to recoup his, her or its losses.

But perhaps it’s better not to know; to let, as it were, tricephalic dogs lie. After all, according to ORL’s credo and operating principle, “You never can tell…”

[1] Few are aware that “the Matrix” is the name given by Elder and his mentor, Neal Higgins, to the “glue” which binds consensual reality like the dough in raisin bread: “Among other things, The Matrix is the theoretical basis for just about everything we do here at ORL. Put simply, it’s that vast area between what you know and what you don’t; paradoxically, it’s both universal and personal. (If you could make a circle around yourself to illustrate the limits of your perception, the area inside would represent your knowledge. Outside lies your ignorance. The circle itself is the Matrix — the indeterminate state you use to account for the existence of things you can’t see but ‘know’ are there, like the person typing these words.)” — from the ORL FAQ

A Proposal for the Moon of Earth

I HEREBY OFFER ONE MILLION U. S. dollars to the first person, corporation or agency with the vision to proclaim humanity’s name to the cold eternal stars.

To wit: the construction of a suitable solar-powered visual display in the lunar crater Tycho, for the purpose of looping Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A space odyssey.

The display may be black-and-white or color. It must be large enough for resolution by a 90 mm telescope, yet invisible to the unaided eye. A sound broadcast is optional, but must correct for the 1.2 light-second delay.

The location corresponds to the site of the buried monollith in the film, which is why this is so cool.

Full disclosure: My current financial position far, FAR precludes me from providing the promised reward. However, given that the project will generate far more than this sum in acquired skills and spinoff technologies (not to mention sales of telescopes and astronomy media) , I am willling to settle for 10 per cent, payable per annum. Please direct all serious inquiries to scoop at sonic dot net.

UPDATES (5/16/10):

APftMoE goes back to the drawing board: we’re no longer building a MegaJumboTron. Instead, we’re going to do it via rocket-delivered “TVA1” module as detailed in https://metaphorager.net/lunar-update-back-to-the-redrawing-board/. Know anybody with a metal shop?

UPDATES (4/6/10):

Sign APftMoE’s “Lunar Immortality Now!” petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/2001shot/petition.html. (By G?d and George Pal, we’ll get this thing built yet.)

UPDATES (4/15/10):

APftMoE is now listed 413159th (as of 4/16/10) on http://www.goodideas.org/‘s list of 509 Good Ideas. Vote it into reality by going to http://www.goodideas.org/a/dtd/37744-6782.

UPDATES (3/26/10):

– “A Proposal for the Moon of Earth” now has its own Facebook page, with 12 fans at this writing. Click to become one.

– APftMoE is also soliciting donations at http://tinyurl.com/moonbucks. (Donors should probably send an email to scoop at sonic dot net so I don’t spend it on something else.)

Torah Nerds, Unite!

Some people say that the Torah can only be meaningful if the events depicted therein are true. In other words, if 600,000 people didn’t march through the Sinai Peninsula; if the plagues were just a mythologization of natural disasters; if Lot’s wife never turned into a pillar of salt — then nothing else about this Text of Texts can be worth the parchment it’s inscribed on.

To which I say, “What’s the fun in that?”

I’ve written on this topic at length, and although my own approach differs I don’t quite know how to describe it. “Who cares? Shut up and study!” is accurate, though a tad impolite; “Judaism as Fanac” comes pretty close, but a) non-fen don’t always know what “fanac” means, and b) some Jews seem to think the phrase a trivialization. (Which indicates that they also don’t know fandom, and how seriously fen treat the objects of their fascination.)

And then, in the middle of a conversation, out it popped: “I guess I’m just a Torah Nerd.”

So with a little help from cafepress.com, I present the Torah Nerd Lifestyle Identification System. Far more than a kitschy piece of ephemera (although it’s that too), the TNLIS is designed to identify the wearer as someone who:

– Doesn’t take Torah literally to take it seriously
– Doesn’t believe in the concept of “overanalysis”
– Has $1.49 to spare. Collect the set!

“I Seen It Too!”

WAITING FOR THE GRATEFUL DEAD with Sputnik at the Shoreline, c. 1989ish, one of us began the following conversation:

“For example, that guy over there with the ‘I Climbed Lassen’ T-shirt.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, he obviously wants everyone to think that he climbed Lassen. But ‘those who know do not speak,’ so…”

“So you’re saying he didn’t really climb Lassen?”

“I’m saying that whether he did or he didn’t, he wants everyone to think he did.” Continue reading ““I Seen It Too!””

Shema Echad, Shnei Regalim

Couple of random recent things:

1.) An amazing and unexpected side effect of daily prayer (which, last night in the shower, I have decided to call “Jewish text-guided meditation”) is the feeling of expansion and contraction. This occurred to me… a week ago? when I was davening in the morning. The morning before, I felt that my prayer-session contracted me into a single still point from which I could then go forth into the world. The next morning, I felt it again — with the added fillip of feeling that I was at the point between the waves, so to speak. I’m not sure I’m explaining this well, since it’s more of a visual impression than anything else. But it gives me something *ELSE* to shoot for.

2.) During a Shabbos walk-discussion with Ann (one of our great Shabbos joys), I was able to put into words soemthing that had been bugging me for a while about treading the rabbinical path — the balance between humility and self-aggrandizement. In other words, the paradox between seeking the center of attention in order to remove yourself from it. “I like being the center of attention,” I told Ann, “but I don’t like liking it.” She looked at me with her wise and playful eyes and said “There’s your problem and solution right there.” (She’s the one who really should be getting s’micha.)

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