Undulating Ungulate

is a book by Edmund Carpenter which I bought yesterday.

In New Guinea, when villagers ignore their leader, the government may tape-record his orders. The next day the assembled community hears his voice coming to them from a radio he holds in his own hand. Then they obey him.

The phantom of the title is the media we experience.

Carpenter was an anthropologist and media theorist who collaborated uncredited on McLuhan’s Understanding Media and edited Explorations with him. Oh what a blow… so far seems to be a really extraordinary construction exploring the effects of media by contrasting different culture’s experiences of media and juxtaposing all sorts of narrative elements to achieve effects, including many of his own anthropological notes.

The connection between symbol and thing comes from the fact that the symbol – the word or picture – helps give the ‘thing’ its identity, clarity, definition. It helps convert given reality into experienced reality, and is therefore an indispensable part of all experience.

If this seems like your idea of good times, it is online free here.

Filed by billy at 12:47 pm under consciousness,culture,language,quotes,reading,research,technology
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Michael Ventura on writing:

No class can cultivate what a writer most needs, the gift I call the “talent of the room.” Writing is something you do alone in a room. If you don’t have a talent for being in that room, your other talents are useless. Before any issues of style, content, or form can be addressed, the fundamental question is: How long can you stay in that room, for how many hours, for how many years? That’s the writing part of a writer’s life. Nothing romantic about it. It’s the one thing about writing that’s straight up-and-down. No matter your felicity with words, no matter how good a tale you have to tell, if you can’t spend a long time alone in a room, you can’t be a writer. Classroom learning happens in a classroom, a room filled with other people, and no classroom can teach solitude. Which is why most writing courses, by their very nature, ignore the fundamental thing a writer needs: the ability to cultivate the subtleties of solitude.

The whole thing is well worth a read if you are so inclined.

My own musings about the writing process can be found here.

And now I must resume spending time alone in my room.

Filed by billy at 4:41 pm under language,quotes,the moose
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This is probably the best and most interesting interview I have ever read with Alan Moore.

I tend to see magic, in a way, as a kind of language. I think, unsurprisingly, the gods of magic ARE the gods of language. And magic is, in a sense, a kind of language with which to read the universe. It’s a language of symbols with which you can extract meaning from the most mundane things. And in fact it’s that aspect of magic that I find myself attracted to. The idea of magic as some weird alien Dr. Strange dimension that one can escape to from this one doesn’t really appeal to me. I think that if magic his anything, it’s about realizing the [stage whispering] unbelievable supernatural magic is that in just the fact that we are thinking and having this conversation. Realizing just how magical every instance is, every drawn breath, every thought. Just how astronomical the odds are against it. How wonderful. And following through these kinds of beautiful chains of symbols that can lead to some interesting revelations. But again these are revelations that to me relate to a new way of seeing life in this ordinary mundane world rather than an escape to some fantastic new plane of existence. It’s about uncovering the revelation that is in everything.

There is so much good stuff in this one, I could quote half of it. Go read it.

(For those who don’t know, Moore is the reigning mad genius of comics, who did more than just about anyone else (other than Neil Gaiman’s Sandman) to get them considered an adult medium. He is most famous for Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell and Promethea. A bunch of his work has been used as source material for really awful movies (with the exception of V for Vendetta, which survived pretty well) and he is well worth checking out, as are his spoken word incantations, and so on and so forth.

Holy crap! He just got married.

He’s normally freaky looking in a completely different way.

(interview via technoccult)

Filed by billy at 12:59 pm under consciousness,language,research
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Beyond a certain point writing is so individual – the strengths and weaknesses of an author so divergent – that I don’t think I am qualified (or willing) to set out general “rules” for how to write. (Other than: tell a good story, with interesting characters, in excellent prose. Easy ) Especially since there is so much latitiude in what a good novel can be: the styles of, say, Hemingway, Rushdie, and Burroughs diverge greatly, but they are united by the indefinable essence of being good.

If it works, it works. Good writing justifies itself. You have to figure out what that is for yourself, and the main way is by reading good books.

Reading is the often invisible counterpoint to writing. Good writers must also be good readers, requiring a very fine sense of discrimination, an intuitive sense of how words work, and how people read and experience books.

You need to be able to read back what you have done and understand its effect on someone who hasn’t written it. What does what is on the page do to the reader? It can be difficult to get this distance once you have carved each word from the silence of the page, and know what has been left on the floor among the mute shavings of possibility. (This is why at a certain point you will need to get feedback from people whose opinion you trust.)

This all relates to the point in part three of this series – only when you have a complete draft can you read it and understand what it is trying to do, what it is doing, and where it is succeeding and failing. While built from words, sentences and paragraphs, the natural unit of the novel is the whole. A novel is more than the sum of its parts, and therein lies the art. And the magic is elicited by skilled reading.

Filed by billy at 12:34 pm under language,reading,the moose
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Check this out.

Seriously amazing collection of lots and lots of free to download PDF books. Really interesting stuff. Science, politics, philosophy, NLP, military documents, occult, DIY, drugs, weirdness and more… if you can’t find something interesting at this link, I don’t know why you are here

(hat tip to posthuman blues)

Filed by billy at 3:14 pm under consciousness,culture,language,meta,politics,reading,research,technology,the world
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The horror of the situation is this: once you have sweated blood out your eyeballs for months on end and got a first draft down on paper, you will then have to read it.

And then you will discover you need to Rewrite.

There is a reason they call this phase “killing your darlings”.

While a sentence/paragraph/chunk of prose may individually be the wittiest, most wonderfully worded and altogether brilliant insight into the human condition ever committed to paper, the real question is “does it belong on this page of this chapter in this novel?”

It’s damn hard. But to get the best from your novel, you have to step past your ego and work in the service of the novel.

However, once you accept that the novel will require rewriting – that the first draft will change, possibly quite substantially – this can be quite liberating in terms of the process of writing. While no excuse for shabby writing, forget about perfection first time through. (Actually, this might change over time, but I’m implicitly aiming this advice at first-time novelists.)

Of course, it probably isn’t possible to communicate the depth and extent of this truth until you have been through it. The words are mere knowledge until converted into understanding by experience

Filed by billy at 9:45 pm under language,the moose
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So, now you have decided to embark on a path of ruin, despair and madness anyway, the question remains: How do you write a novel?

Do it every day.

That’s basically it. Write every day.

Every single day.

Forget your romantic stories about Kerouac on amphetamine in an attic for two weeks churning out On The Road. Writing is an exemplar of the parable of the tortoise and the hare. The tortoise will finish the book. The hare will burn out. The muse may strike, or it may not. If you wait for it, you will be an gray old bunny by the side of the road, with three chapters in a desk drawer, wheezing about how great your book would have been.

Writing, beyond a certain point, is craft as much as inspiration. One moment of inspiration can take two years to realise. That is a novel. Put your ass in the chair every day and write. That is writing.

There is no right or wrong way to write a novel, but assuredly, all the advice contains at least this truth: write every day. (Think about what you do every day. Eat, sleep, breathe, shit. Things that keep you alive. You need to add writing to that list.) Engage with the novel, the world, the characters, the ideas, in some way, every day. Make a little progress, every day. Nothing feels worse than returning to the page after a week at the point you were with no progress made. Except coming back to it a month later and realising you have to put the entire book back in your head before you can even write the next scene.

Got that, yet? Write every day. That’s how novels get written.

Twice a day is better.

Filed by billy at 1:45 pm under language,the moose
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Someone asked me if I had any advice for someone thinking about writing a novel. (As a word up to anyone to whom I am anonymoose, I have written one novel, and am most of the way through a second. Unpublished so far, but haven’t tried to get published either. So: further than many who want to write, less far than anyone seriously published.) This might become a few posts.

The first thing that springs to mind is “Don’t do it unless you have to.”

Fo’ real.

Writing a novel takes a long time. Writing a good one probably takes longer. Writing your first novel will probably take longer than any other novel, because there is so much to learn.

Writing is work.

Unless you are willing to spend a decent chunk of every day for a year or more slaving away over a manuscript that will most likely never be published, don’t do it.

If you are motivated by an expectation or desire for fame, fortune, or immortality, don’t do it.

(From my research into the industry, it can be best described as a medieval fortress, with archers and pikemen, moats and crocodiles, burning oil and portcullis, designed solely to keep the horde of manuscript waving authors away from the editors in the castle sanctum, who with great trepidation pick a manuscript off the pile, skim the first few pages, groan and throw it down the chute to feed the pigs. And even if you get in to the editor, you discover she is on a torture rack operated by the marketing department in shadowy black hoods, muttering prayers to economic forces beyond anyone’s control, and who, from the entrails of sacrificed writers, divine what is hot right now.)

Unless you have some kind of physiological necessity, some overwhelming drive to put your soul onto paper, don’t do it.

Unless you are prepared to confront your psyche totally and honestly (for there is nowhere to hide – you fill the blank pages with yourself, and what is not in you, or has not passed through you, cannot make it to that page), don’t do it.

Unless you really have to write a book otherwise you will die, don’t do it.

That said, writing a novel is an incredibly rewarding process. But unless you are willing for the process alone to be your reward, don’t do it. Anything else is a bonus.

Filed by billy at 2:29 pm under language,the moose
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Here is a really handy trove of William S Burroughs quotes. The following are the ones that struck me.

“Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it ‘creative observation.’ Creative viewing.”

“In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen.”

“In homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, so you are identifying with the other person completely. In heterosexual sex you have no idea what the other person is feeling.”

“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.”

“How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.”

“In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas . . . a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.”

“The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that’s just ridiculous. It’s as bad as the church. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint. I believe that if you run into somebody in the street it’s for a reason. Among primitive people they say if someone was bitten by a snake he was murdered. I believe that.”

“Madness is confusion of levels of fact. . . . Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels.”

“If you rap your knuckles against a window jamb or door, if you brush your leg against a bed or desk, if you catch your foot in a curled-up corner of a rug, or strike a toe against a desk or chair, go back and repeat the sequence. You will find yourself surprised how far off course you were to hit that window jamb, that door, that chair. Get back on course and do it again. How can you pilot a spacecraft if you can’t find your way around your own apartment?”

“We must find out what words are and how they function. They become images when written down, but images of words repeated in the mind and not of the image of the thing itself.”

“Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.”

“There is no line between the ‘real world’ and ‘world of myth and symbol.’ Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.”

–

Fascinating.

Been listening to him read Junky lately. The really enthusiastic and overjoyed way he reads the part where he’s in Mexico and they get legal access to more good quality morphine than ever before for a tenth of the price it would be in the US is something else; an euphoric and emotional break from the usual scratchy death-drawl.

Filed by billy at 9:12 pm under consciousness,language,quotes
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This is a pet interest I have been following idly for the past few years, and a fine example of spin.

from Opium Harvest at Record Level in Afghanistan (3/9/2006)

He said the increase in cultivation was significantly fueled by the resurgence of Taliban rebels in the south, the country’s prime opium growing region. As the insurgents have stepped up attacks, they have also encouraged and profited from the drug trade, promising protection to growers if they expanded their opium operations.

“This year’s harvest will be around 6,100 metric tons of opium — a staggering 92 percent of total world supply. It exceeds global consumption by 30 percent,” Mr. Costa said at a news briefing.

He said the harvest increased by 49 percent from the year before, and it drastically outpaced the previous record of 4,600 metric tons, set in 1999 while the Taliban governed the country. The area cultivated increased by 59 percent, with more than 400,000 acres planted with poppies in 2006 compared with less than 260,000 in 2005.

From this it appears poppy growth in Afghanistan is the Taliban’s doing. (Drugs are BAD. The Taliban are BAD. America is GOOD.)

This is a remarkable memory lapse from the NY Times. Or we can just call it propaganda.

To point out how disengenuous this is, let’s compare this with a few years ago. All the following quotes are from the New York Times. Note the dates and progression.

“Taliban Poppy-Growing Ban Will Measure Afghans’ Fear
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
KHOGIANI, Pakistan, Nov. 15, 2000— Zulmai Khan has planted wheat
instead of poppies this year, and expects his income to plunge to
$400 from $10,000. [...]
If the fields are awash with crimson poppies next spring, the reclusive Mullah Omar’s claim of absolute authority will be debunked. But if his edict is obeyed, the world’s biggest source of heroin will be cut off, reinforcing the Taliban’s hold over a country ravaged by 21 years of war and lawlessness.”

” A U.N. Aide Says Taliban Is Reducing Poppy Crop
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 8, 2000 — The United Nations’ top antinarcotics official said today that the Taliban government in Afghanistan appears to be succeeding in slowing significantly the cultivation of opium poppies for the first time since the radical Islamic movement seized power four years ago.”

“Taliban Seem to Be Making Good on Opium Ban, U.N. Says
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 6, 2001 — Initial
results from a survey of opium-growing
areas of Afghanistan in recent days indicate
that the Taliban may have succeeded in
sharply reducing the annual poppy crop,
astonished United Nations narcotics-control
officials say.”

” Taliban’s Ban on Growing Opium Poppies Is Called a Success
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
UNITED NATIONS, May 18, 2001 — The
first American narcotics experts to go
to Afghanistan under Taliban rule have
concluded that the movement’s ban on
opium-poppy cultivation appears to have
wiped out the world’s largest crop in less than
a year, officials said today. ”

Note further that Afghanistan had been a centre of poppy production since the 1970s, producing about 80% of the world’s poppy.

(It is also worth noting that in 2000 the fact of the Taliban’s “governing” of Afghanistan was far from certain to the UN, while in 2006 the NYT is happy to ascribe them governance and responsibility for the opium crop of 1999.)

So, entirely left to their own devices, the Taliban effectively ended decades of opium/poppy production in one year . They did this – destroying the countries prime cash crop – during a several years long drought.

The Taliban have some hard-assed morality. They took their war on drugs seriously.

Meanwhile, there are pretty well documented strong and important links between covert US forces and the illegal drug trade (see for example The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, or Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance.)

So the Taliban destroyed poppy production over 2000/2001, presumably disrupting the CIA’s drug trade, among other annoyances. (Those annoyances were largely rectified by placing the puppet leader Hamid Karzai in power. Karzai was formerly an advisor to Unocal, the company who wanted to put a gas pipeline through Afghanistan, which the Taliban refused to allow. Under Karzai, it’s all go.)

They were invaded by America in late 2001, as the first largely unrelated target of opportunity of America’s post 9-11 “war on terror” carte blanche on unjustified invasions, ostensibly to capture ex-CIA operative Osama Bin Laden.

Could it perhaps be that the Afghani people are returning to grow poppy because it is the number one cash crop available to them in an unstable war torn region? Could the actions of the invading US imperial forces be contributing to the resurgence?

Yup.

“”By focusing aid funds away from development and poverty relief, failed counter-narcotics policies have hijacked the international community’s nation-building efforts and undermined Afghanistan’s democratically elected government. Poppy cultivation is a food survival strategy for millions of Afghans, and the United States’ and the United Kingdom’s poppy eradication policies are fuelling violence and insecurity.”- (from Opium war jeopardising Afghan future, report says,Guardian, 5/9/2006) (moose’s emphasis)

I have no pithy conclusion. Question everything.

Filed by billy at 8:52 pm under language,politics,the world
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