Bohemianism: How, Where and Why to Hang on to It

I got a book about the Beat Generation from the library today. You can see it in what I'm reading at the moment, but if your reading this in archives the book is called The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963, by Barry Miles. It chronicles the Beat Hotel in Paris where a lot of important beat writers wrote some of there most important works. I'm also using this as the setting for most of the Jack Blackwright novels, since it seems like a better place, plus I can have Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs in them. I don't know if anyone has ever written a mystery novel that featured Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. Someone may have done Burroughs, and I know he wrote a mystery novel with Jack Kerouac called "And the Hippos Where Boiled in there Tanks." But I don't know if they where in a mystery novel.

I've just read the first chapter, which explains the setting of the Beat Hotel and the area around it, Paris in the late fifties and I'm starting to feel very jealous. I'm sick of living in this small town. I want to move to the big city and be a real bohemian writer. Hanging out in coffee shops, going to hidden bookstores to find rare books on Rosicrucians and stuff, writing experimental novels and stuff like that. Alright, maybe I wouldn't write experimental novels, but I am thinking about toying around with multiple perspectives. I know that's been done but it's all I've got at the moment.

The thing that is bothering me is I don't have any idea where to find this kind of atmosphere or even how to hang on to it. I think I had that atmosphere for awhile, but not at the moment. Maybe it's just because it's summer and everything is so hectic. I'll have to check in on it later.

I don't even know if I could survive in a bohemian environment. According to the book I've got, the Beat Hotel was pretty run down, contained rats, the toliet was a hole in the floor and the only reason it was kept up was because the lady who ran it kept on good terms with the police. I'm probubly worrying to much. I'm sure I could find a place that had a toliet and insint infested withr rats and junkies. At least not so full of rats and junkies that they'll crawl into my bed.

Also, I'm hoping that living in an old apartement with a bunch of books will help unleash my productivity. My muse is no problem, but my productivity lags.

Tagging is for suckas

Well, Steph tagged me for some seven songs thing that I don't see the point off, but I'm going to do it anyways because summer is usually pretty boring for me. Here's the basic jist.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring summer. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they’re listening to.

Right, here goes.

• Walk on the Wild Side, by Lou Reed. Hopefully this won't affect my summer in any odvious way since the song is about kinky sex, transvetitism, use of hard drugs and gay prostitution. Still it's an excellent song.
• The Velvet Underground & Nico, by The Velvet Underground & Nico. Okay, this is an album, but it is a damn cool album and it sounds best when you lisean to it as a total album.
• Blonde on Blonde, by Bob Dylan, again an Album. I'd half to say my favorite tracks on this one are "Stuck inside a Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," and "Aboslutely Sweet Marie." I've been puzzling over the line "But to live outside the law you must be honest," in the Sweet Marie for awhile trying to figure out what Dylan's suppose to mean by that.
• Look up the Sky, by The Pebbles, Japanese garage band I got on a compliation album of Itunes. This song makes me think of summer.
• Hotel Calfornia(Spanish Mix), by the Gipsy Kings. THE JESUUUUS!
• Highway 61 Revisited, by Bob Dylan. Again an album! Do I have any respect for the sanctity of tagging? No! Excellent album. Perfect from start to finish.
• Mother Mary, by the Foxboro Hot Tubs. Catchy song that will be on the soundtrack to my novel.

I will now tag George W. Bush, Quentin Tarantino, Charles Manson, George Eliot, His Imperial Majesty the Emperor Akihito of Japan, Michael J. Anderson and Alejandro Jodorowsky. Can't wait to see what they come up with.

Busted Computers make me angry

My home computer, the one I usually use, has a real bad virus. We aren't going to use it for awhile and this is a problem for me. Not only do I not like using the older and slower computer, but my Itunes information is on the other computer. I can't recharge my Ipod on the other computer either. I still got some good battery power on it, but I don't think it can last much beyond Wednesday, and that's only if I don't use it.
The job search still isn't doing well. I looked around in the newspaper and I found ads to start a home business and work at a cosmetics store. I don't know if I can work at as a cosmetics store, and I'm unsure if I can do a home business. I'm thinking I may start busking, reciting poetry for loose change. I don't know if that can work. When I get home I'll be calling my employment specialist.
On another note, I am trying on writing more often. I'm hoping on getting ten to twenty pages done per day, not including blog entries. I think this is a good way to start and as I get more time to write, and better endurance I'll work my way up to twenty. This will take awhile of course, and I am also reading three books at the moment. I also plan on reading some short stories, since I could probably make some money off of that. Not much, but it would get me noticed. So far I only have "Godot is Dead," but I'll pick up a few books of short stories while I'm at the library. I have The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe beside me now. That should be a start. Also I have a bunch of science fiction magazines at home I could read. I haven't read science fiction in awhile and with the Robert A. Heinlein novel "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," I plan on returning to more. Specifically Heinlein, and Spider Robinson who is like a hippie-folk singer version of Robert A. Heinlein.
I'm starting to wonder what kind of mode my fiction will take. At first I thought I'd write science fiction, then I figured I'd write epic fantasy, now I seem to have abandoned my original concept of an epic fantasy realm. At the moment, the closest thing I have to an epic fantasy is the Hippie story(ies) and that hasn't event begun to be written yet. At the moment, I don't think I have any specific type, any specific genre. I'm just going to great works of literature that bend all genres. I might still write an epic fantasy, but I think it would be something like Stephen King's Dark Tower series. No elves or dwarves or hobbits or replicas of medieval Europe. I'm probably going to be more inspired by Islamic society of the Middle-East and India. But at the moment my two main concerns are The Last Dance Revolution and the really really big Hippie book that is going to be at least 500 pages. I'd go into more detail, but who knows what kind of dirty little plagiarists are trying to steal my ideas.
So, that's it for today I suppose. Below I have the Question of the Post. That is where I ask you your opinion about something. Read and reply.
Question of the Post: Do you enjoy reading about all the updates in my life? Do you find it helps give me a more personal setting? Do you think my life is boring?

Carnivale: It's Better Then Lost

Okay, it's the thirties. The Dust bowl has rendered the Mid-West a barren waste land. Why wouldn't make that the setting for the Apocalyptic battle between good and evil? That is basically Carnivale in a nut shell, but it is more complicated then that.

To elaborate on the plot, Carnivale tells the story of two different people on opposite ends of the spiritual line. The first plot deals with Ben Hawkins (the guy sitting behind the door of the truck in the picture) who's mother has died and his family farm stolen. Lucky for him, a carnivale has passed by and he gets work there. As we learn more about Ben, it's apparent that he has supernatural healing abilities, and receives various visions such as being chased in a corn field by a guy with a way freaky tree tattoo on his chest and World War One. As all this is going on, were told the story of Brother Justin (the priest to the right) who lives in California with his sister Iris. Brother Justin also has supernatural powers, such as making old ladies cough up coins and forcing people to commit suicide by showing them the worst thing they've ever done. He's what people who know this stuff call "The Usher." And Ben and Brother Justin have to fight it out for the destiny of the world. Oh, and Ben has to stop the first Atomic Bomb Explosion. If this doesn't sound like the coolest show ever to be seen on television, then I am not doing a good enough job of explaining it.

So naturally, this show having such an original concept, having such a good script and such a great cast, they had to shut it down right when it was getting real good. It only lasted two seasons out of it's six season run getting replaced with a show about Polygamists who weren't engaged in anything this vital or important. May whoever took this show from the air be damned to hell. I only wish Daniel Knauf, the guy who came up with this brilliant series comes up with a movie for the next part because I so want to see what happens next. Please Daniel Knauf, if your reading this by some miracle, MAKE THAT MOVIE! Or better yet, make a graphic novel and then a movie. I will help you in anyway I can.

So anyways, Carnivale. Get it, watch it, be amazed my it's amazingness and damn HBO

The Hippie Stories

As many of you may or may not know, I plan on writing a major series of books taking place in the 1960's. So far this is taking the form of one really big novel that's at least 1000 pages, or a series of four major novels. I think that the later is what I'll do because, A) It's less work and B) I don't want this to get to conveluted which four novels would lead too. This does not include the Jack Blackwright Stories, though both the Jack Blackwright books and the Hippie Novel will share characters. The Hippie novel could also be called a Jack Blackwright book, but Jack isn't going to be the main focus of this.

I've been wanting to write something about the Hippies for awhile now. There is something really mythic about them to my generation, and love it or hate it, the sixties had several major events in Western history. I was never a part of this generation, but I lisean to alot of the music from that time. Comparitivly, I'm really big on Beat Generation literature which was also an influence on the hippies, no matter how much Kerouac thought they where communists.

Lost my train of thought there, oh well. I don't want to give to much away. I should be consentrating on the Last Dance Revolution anyways.

My Sentence Is Up!

After five years I have completed my tenure of High School. For the next two months I am in limbo, preparing for University and hopefully getting some money.

The feeling of being cut of from School is kind of strange. There's a great emptiness in my life now that school isn't there. I don't know what it is I'll do with myself while I'm unemployed. I've been talking with my LEADS specialist and she's given me some ideas on next steps I should take. She says I should look through the newspaper and Job Bank of Canada to find work. I think I'll check out Job Bank and see what I can find.

Just found it, the only thing I could find is Taxi Driver. I can't drive and the environment is to faced passed for me. I guess I should check the newspaper next. I'll do that later today.

Since it's Summer, I should develop a summer reading list. At the moment I'm reading Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison and Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut. I figure that to create a summer reading list I'll need to find every book I have on my shelf that I havn't read and read it. Also I'm trading books with my Church pastor. She's going to give me books about Christianity and I'm going to give her books like On the Road, by Jack Kerouac and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, by Tom Robbins.

My mom says she'll take me to the University of Waterloo every week so we can map out routes and acclimatize me to the area. We'll find routes to my Aunt and Uncle's who live in Waterloo, the video store, used bookstores and anywhere else I might need to go.

The following are all the books I feel a pressing need to read.

1. Watership Down, by Richard Adams
2. Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler
3. Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany
4. Tales of Neveryon, by Samuel R. Delany
5. The Fall of the Towers, by Samuel R. Delany
6. Tapping the Dream Tree, short stories by Charles de Lint
7. A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick
8. Notes from the Underground, by Fyodor Dostoyevesky
9. The Original Illustrated Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle. Short stories and The Hounds of Baskerville
10. The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco
11. Deathbird Stories, short stories by Harlan Ellison
12. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
13. Riders of the Purple Sage, by Zane Grey
14. The Novels of Dashiell Hammett, by Dashiell Hammet. consists of Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key and The Thin Man.
15. To Sail Beyond the Sunset, by Robert A. Heinlein
16. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
17. Revolt in 2100, by Robert A. Heinlein
18. The Cat Who Walks Thorugh Walls, by Robert A. Heinlien
19. Time Enough For Love, by Robert A. Heinlien
20. Friday, by Robert A. Heinlien
21. Expanded Universe, by Robert A. Heinlien
22. Variable Star, by Robert A. Heinlien and Spider Robinson
23. Conan the Adventurer, by Robert E. Howard
24. A Thief of Time, by Tony Hillerman
25. Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
26. A Voyage to Arcturus, by David Linsey
27. Insomnia, by Stephen King
28. The Eyes of the Dragon, by Stephen King
29. The Shining, by Stephen King
30. Hearts in Atlantis, by Stephen King
31. The Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux
32. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Tales, short stories by H.P. Lovecraft
34. Remembrence of Things Past, by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. Volume One, consisting of Swann's Way, Within A Budding Grove and The Guermantes Way.
35. Midnight's Children, by Salman Rushdie
36. The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie

This list is by no means over. I just realized how many books I own that I havn't read yet. I need to really get to work on them. I hope that I can finish most of them by the end of summer.

Can Someone With Asperges Syndrome Be A Great Novelist?

I've been thinking about this recently. The thing is I don't want to be just a writer, I want to be a writer who is remembered centuries after I've died and is studied in universities. I want to be one of those great writers that people make reference in there books. The problem is I don't know how I can go about doing this as A) someone who is working withing genre fiction and B) an Aspie.

My Autism is one of the things that is making me worried. I don't know how I'm going to write about human interaction if I can't even understand it. Parody and Satire are probably going to be prevalent, and my books are probubly going to have some postmodern deconstruction of how humans interact. Also, Jane Austen has been diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome and from what little I know of her she writes alot about human interaction.

I also heard that James Joyce may have had Aspergers. Unlike Austen, I have read Joyce. It was a short story in an English class called "Araby." It was pretty good, and that Joyce is a writer I mean to check out, at least Ulysses. Finnegan's Wake I'll skip, most likely, because of how unreadable everyone says it is. Other writers who may have had Aspergers Syndrome are Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka, Mark Twain and H.P. Lovecraft. I don't know about being compared to H.P. Lovecraft, since he was a racist New England bugger with a rather dense style and always ended his stories in italics to emphasise the creepiness of his stories.

The problem with this is that all these people are dead, so we can't make a proper diagnosis. Without actually sitting down with these people (which would have been a problem with Dickinson because she was a recluse) we'll never know if they had Autism or what.

So, the final question is, does my status as a person of Autism impare my skill as a writer or not. I don't know. There is alot of stuff that says it does. I'm on the outside of allmost every social group I'm in, so that makes me a good observer. Also, since I have absolutley no understanding of social norms, I am the perfect person to judge and critic them. Even if none of the people mentioned actually had Aspergers Syndrome, I hope to become the first universally acknowledged great Austistic writer.

I'd appreciate if someone could comment on this and give me suggestions. This is very important to me.

The Fall

I found this off because of my constant watching out for any information on Alejandro Jodorowsky. He had nothing to do with this, but it has a Jodorowsky sort of vibe about it, even if it has an actual plot and real dialouge and characters that arn't there just to represent metaphysical concepts. The guy who made this, who's called Tarsem, did another movie about going into the mind of a serial killer. That movie is called The Cell and I can get it in town.

I Wish I Wasn't Such A Nice Guy

So my sister calls me from School and says I need to run over some information on a court thing based on Othello. I'm really ticked off at this because I don't see how this is my responsibility. I'm angry at this and see no point of doing this for a person who has been more or less an annoying, judgemental and under appreciates me. But when she has forgotten something I'm the first person she calls. And what do I do? I run the paper over for her. Mind you, I'm still annoyed as hell at this, but I could have just left it there. It's her own fault for not remembering to bring it, I don't see how I'm supposed to help her escape from the forces of Karma.

I guess I'm just a nice guy. For most of my life that is what I have been, I have been a guy who does what he's told and helps people and stuff like that. Even if I where to become the head of an international crime syndicate I would probably still be a nice guy. I'd probably be overthrown in about a week, a month tops, but I would still be a nice guy even while I'm stroking my cat and telling my henchmen to go cut of some guys face and leave him over a bridge with bricks in his pocket.

It's not that I don't like being a nice guy, I just don't like my sister Delila, who is usually a major pain in my nether regions, taking advantage of that. I don't like it when anyone takes advantage of me. I just find this entire incident annoying.

Growing Dread in the Koi Pond of My Life

I'm starting in find my home not as homely anymore. I don't know whether it's the stress of summer coming or if I'm just growing to big for my current koi pond or if I'm just nervous that I need to actually work and stuff. All I know is that I've been feeling a sense of, I don't know, dread and nervousness. Everyone is so busy and I feel like I'm being forced out in the suffle. Also, in the middle of the night my bedroom dosn't feel like my own. I know that sounds crazy, but I just don't feel like right. Maybe I'm just on edge or something, but I feel really nervous recently.

I think it may have been my mom cleaning. I think I get the whole reason for cleaning, but I still don't like it. She pretty much came in and rearanged my entire closet and I really don't like that. I also still have a box full of old books I want to sell and I don't think I'm going to have a place to sell them in awhile since everyone is so busy.

I was hoping this could be longer, but I guess that's all I've got today. Maybe I'll have more later today. Maybe not.

Video from Steph's Blog

This was Steph's favorite entry in Eurovision. I like it to because it looks like something from a David Lynch movie.

I don't want to work, I just want to read all my books all day

School is going to be over soon. I want it over now. I feel tired and stetched out and I just want to sit down for a long time and read without worrying about homework. I have a killer book list this summer and with University just over the horizon I don't know if I'll have much chance for personal reading I'll get done.

What I need to do is get a big reading list and work on that. I just don't know if I can finish it in two months. There are some pretty long and so are some of the books. Also, the chances of me getting a job have increased for the summer. I don't want to go into to much detail, but it will affect my time to read.

I'm starting to wonder if the Last Dance Revolution may be dead or in need of a rest. I feel I need a distraction from it, or at least to give it a linear narrative. Maybe I'll do both. I'll come up with an idea to work on over the summer while redoing the Last Dance Revolution. I may need to completely overhall the plot.

In the meantime I may need to figure out what to write over the summer. Possibly I'll try writing the first Jack Blackwright novel. I'm thinking that for the first decade or so of my writing career I'm going to write stuff like that mostly. Stuff like Jack is going to be my meal ticket while I'm working on what I hope to be my important novels such as The Last Dance Revolution. So I may just write the first Jack Blackwright novel and then maybe a few stories. I'm still trying to get the hang of Jack's universe. Since I'm not using fully traditional fantasy subjects, or at least ones that are hidden or in roles that one would not usually expect them, it may be a hard sell. Also I'm going to have to do alot of reaserch on London during the 1960's. I guess a trip to the library will be needed. I figure that a few other stories will also be needed to get the world in any cohesive order. I'll probubly be working on the novel for awhile.