Category: Connections

Quite some time ago I gave Joey Comeau a little bit of money so he could keep going to college, and in exchange he wrote a little bit of his novella, Lockpick Pornography. Lots of people did the same, and after a while he finished it and did, in fact, keep going to college.

I finally read Lockpick Pornography for the first time today, and it is fucked up. There’s a lot of talk about gender being a societal construction, and also breaking and entering, and sex. The protagonist is a dick to just about everybody and in the last chapter the author totally calls you out and makes you ashamed of what you’re thinking.

But I liked it a lot.

THE BUZZBOARD

By far the most popular referral I have ever had to this site, or anyway one of its images, is some people who think my bad haircut two years ago was, in fact, a good haircut.

The IdiotCam©: Bringing People Together

I would like to see their webmaster’s face when he checks the referral logs

Oh man oh man. Neil Gaiman has discovered Jennifer Brummett.

This may not mean much to you, but it’s pretty glorious for those of us who endured her “reviews” for four years of DramaCentre (aka CentreDrama). Brummett is the Advocate-Messenger’s theatre “critic,” and the depth of research and literary acuity you see in that article was exactly what she applied to our work. I’m not trying to say we were de Sade at Arenton, but the things we did took time and thought and pain. Brummett could be replaced a rubber cup on the end of a stick.

It’s nice to have some validation that the woman has no business putting two words together, whether it has any practical effect or not. Dear Jennifer Brummett: Welcome to the interweb! I hope you like being the message boards’ new darling.

The first Anacrusis ad ever is running at Blank Label and its principal sites for the minimum of 20,000 pageviews. Judging by the run length of other ads I’ve seen on the site, they burn through that pretty quick.

The fact that I am paying to persuade people to come and look at something else I pay to make available is not lost on me. I always said I wouldn’t advertise for my work until I thought it was good enough for anyone to read it and like it. I held true to that.

I stated in an Anacrusis LJ feed comment-thread, last week, that Memento had more structural influence on my writing than basically anything ever. I realized later that that’s not exactly true; it did have a lot of influence, but before I saw Memento I was reading Margaret Atwood. Cat’s Eye, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake and Lady Oracle are all shuffle-structured books, although they tend to start at middle / beginning and finish at end / middle (whereas Memento starts at the beginning / end and ends at middle / middle). Orson Scott Card does a lot of shuffling within the corpus of The Worthing Saga, too; I actually read that in high school, so I guess it was really my first exposure to the style.

Of course, that’s omitting the randomly jumbled reruns of cartoons I watched as a kid, which seemed to come from different seasons at random–not that Thundercats drove a terribly epic tale, but the cast (to my perception) did expand and shrink on a daily basis. They weren’t doing it on purpose, though.

I’m not sure what single factor determines my fascination with these stories. My borderline ADD is certainly involved, which doesn’t imply a negative context: there’s something important and powerful about screwing with linearity, about building a narrative out of noncontiguous events. It makes individual elements of a story stronger, for one thing; there’s no room for laziness when every page has to give you something to take back to the larger structure. (Note that this is also one of the big reasons I like word-count fiction so much.)

I’m about a week late on this, but as somebody who’s been singing the “Clear Channel Sucks” song since 2001, I was fascinated to learn that they actually created a fake “anti-corporate” station in order to win back the listeners they lost by… being corporate. If there is any more flagrant evidence of a harmful and necrotic monopoly extant, I’d love to see it. What’s next? Ticketmaster sponsoring fake scalpers?

It occurs to me that they might already do that.

Anyway, there’s always Indy if you want your own interweb radio station that learns what you like. I can’t give it a glowing-eyes four-thumbs recommendation because, well, most of the music it plays is by people who wanted to get signed and couldn’t. Not all, but most. Still, I’m going to keep using it and see how good its collaborative filter gets; I’ll let you know if it does ever cross that golden threshold.