Last Day

Well, this is it. I'm going to University.

Today is my last day living at my own home. Next week I will be sleeping in another bed in another city in a building filled with noisy Mennonites. I'm a bit nervous and frustrated because my mom has been getting on my back for getting all my stuff together. She says I can take an entire container full of books with me, so I have gathered some of my favorites and a few books I haven't read to keep me entertained. Most of these books are mystery novels, but I'm also bringing all my Dostoevsky, since I think I should read more of the greats and Dostoevsky is considered great. Also I've been really into short stories recently and have been reading lots of collections. At least more then I usually do.

In other news, I have a new laptop. It has internet access and is smaller then most of my text books. I have transferred my novel to it, which isn't finished as I hoped it would be. I do think I'm pretty close, but unfortunatly I don't think I have the energy to write it as I once did. I'm worried that this was more of a Bush era novel, and with Obama and everything I'm worried the cynicism that gave it birth will dry out. I'm starting to think I should start the Big Novel soon.

So, I suppose I'll inform you all tomorrow how things went at University the first day.

Parkour Videos

I haven't made any youtube posts for awhile, so I decided to remedy that with this. It's Parkour, which is basically a way of moving through one's environment in wicked cool ways. I have decided this is Helen's equivalent of taking a morning jog.

Eraserhead Press

In my internet wanderings, I have come across a genre called bizarro fiction. I'm trying to decide if I could fit into bizarro fiction.

From what I understand, Bizarro fiction is a kind of ultra-weird punkish genre with no taboos. The word scatological is used alot, and I know what that means. Now, I write some pretty weird stuff, but I don't think I write stuff that's scatological. Does this mean I am not a bizarro style writer. I don't know. Everyone says my writing is pretty weird, but I don't know if it would qualify as bizarro fiction.

Anyways, that's not why I'm blogging. I'm blogging because I think I may have found a publisher for my novels. It is Eraserhead Press, which is a publisher of bizzaro fiction. I am thinking that after I'm done University I may try getting published there. According to there website, there market is the weird, anti-mainstream types who like there reading material to be weird and crazy. They are looking for good authors they can grow and nurture and help find a fan base. Because of this, they have few writers and competition is pretty stiff. I think that Eraserhead Press could be a good home for my work, but I'd like to check it out more. I'm probubly going to buy a few books, see how they are and if I like a couple then I'll go through there interview and see what happens.

If you want to help me see if I could fit into bizarro literature, go to Bizarro Central or Eraserhead Press. This only applies to people who have actually read my work.

One Week To University

Well, it's a week away until I go to University. To actually go to University. It's frightening and exciting and I'm confused. It doesn't help that I just came back from my Church thing were all the people who went to Chicago and that kind of set me off.

On the Chicago thing, a bunch of people at the Church I feel the strongest connection with went to Chicago to help the disenfranchised. I didn't go because it was just after Open Doors and I was pretty out of it at that time. My sister Delila went though. So they were in Chicago and they all went around helping people and they never got to stop or do there own thing. They were fine with that, but I would have freaked. They did get the address of the oldest Black-owned bookstore in Chicago, which I thought was kind of cool. I don't have the address on me, but if I find out and I'm in Chicago it's probubly on my list of places to go.

Alright, back to University. I've been feeling a growing and unamable dread about University that I don't really understand. Everyone is telling me that this is all part of going to University, but I'm still pretty nervous about it. I really wish that I just get it over with and move in. It's freaking me out.

On the subject of this, I will be getting a new laptop with internet access, so I'll be blogging to you from my single room at Conrad Grebel University College in beautiful Waterloo. Yes, you will all know my location. So that means that all you crazy freaks out there with unhealthy fixations will be able to watch me from across the street with binoculars. And to help in your unhealthy fixations, the twenty-third one of you who hands themselves into the police for being a freak will be able to get one of my used t-shirts, personally sighned by me. Yes, it's true. Remember to bring enough proof that you've been tracking me, or else you won't get it.

Well, I'll hopefully be updating you on events. Tuesday I go to the Dons and explain how they can help me with my autism, and explain to them why I kissed there ring fingers. Have a nice night people.

For all your Beatnik Needs

Of course, tenants of the Beat Hotel didn't have everything they needed at the Beat Hotel. Madame Rachou did not offer all of the necisities they needed. To get food the Beatniks would need to go out and fend for themselves. God, know I have an image of nature documentaries following Allen Ginsberg around.
"Observe the Beatnik, forced out of America by legal difficulties concerning the obscenity of his work, he finds a safe home for himself in cheep French hotels."

"Hey Peter Orlovsky, my long-time partner, who are those British guys behind us with the cameras?".

"I don't know, Allen Ginsberg. Ignore them and maybe they'll leave us alone."

"I'm going to give them a copy of Jack's new novel On the Road. Hey, camera people!"

"Oh no, the Beatnik has seen us. Run away!"

"Hey, come back. I have free literature! It's really good!"

I am probably going to use this. I'll do something with William S. Burroughs to, but he'll probably just pull a gun on them.

Anywhere, here is a list of establishments not to far from the Beat Hotel where our heroes will attend without having to actually take part in French society to much.

• Ali Baba, a grocery store on the rue de la Huchette, where one could buy food up until 2 AM. Fruit was kept outside and protected by string netting.
  
• Café des Arts, a cheep restaurant frequented by arts students. The menu was a fixed three-course menu and red wine. The tables where bare and wooden and a flagon liter was on them, full of the aforementioned wine.
• Chez Jean, located in a passageway of the Blvd St. Germain, it was basically a Parisian dive-bar where the Parisian Bohemia and underworld lived in an uneasy alliance. The floors where saw dust. Since this is a mystery series this will probably be a common setting. Jack probably knows some weaselly-looking guy who knows everything that goes on in the crime world and is called "The Rat" or something like that. Sometimes a cellist or guitarist played there.
• Chez Raton, a small café that had to wind down the baskets of bread, which where hung from the room by rope to save room.
• Libraire Anglaise, also called the English Bookshop. Located at 42 rue de Seine, intersecting with the rue de l’Echaude. It owned by Gait Froge, a "beautiful, petite Frenchwoman."(Miles 21) She was a big fan of American and English writers and spoke with a cultured British accent. She specialized in Olypmia Press titles. The shop was almost triangular in an old building dating back to the 1500s. It was filled with self-published poetry and rare books, all piled up in the room. Parties for the launch of Olympia Press’ more literary books where held in her basement, which looked like a medieval dungeon lighted by wine bottles in candles.
• The Mistral, the only other really decent English bookstore, it was run by George Whitman. He came over to help with resettling war orphans and eventually settled into book selling. He bought the Mistral in 1951, which used to be an Arab grocery. It was larger then the English Bookstore, and had rooms for poets to stay at. Gait Froge believed that George Whitman worked for the CIA, and both had an intense rivalry. He didn't sell Olympia Press books.
  
• Olympia Press, Not actually a place, but it was a publishing house that would later print the first edition of Naked Lunch. It was most famous for printing banded books that the Americans and English thought where obscene, such as Nabakov’s Lolita, Jean Genet’s The Thieves Journal and pretty much anything by the Marquis de Sade. When they weren’t publishing books that where considered pornography, they where publishing pornography. I’m thinking that this may be an operation of the Pact of Lilith.
• Palette, an artist café "where one could meet a gallery owner to plan a show, hire a model, or buy drugs."(Miles 9)

That's all the real locations I could find in the book I got. I will probably be making up a few other places, such as the local Pact of Lilith safe-house, which should have a name like Our Lady of the Flowers, or something that sounds like a Catholic Church. Also, there will probably be some hidden away occult store somewhere.

Miles, Barry. The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963. New York, Grove Press, 2000

Welcome to the Beat Hotel

The Beat Hotel was located at 9 rue Git-le-Coeur, which is in the famed Latin Quarter, not to far from the River Seine. It closed in 1963 because it was basically a death trap. The toilet was a hole in the floor that had to be shared with everyone on the floor. Some rooms had little light. It was infested with rats. Cleaning was irregular and it smelt terrible. One description said it was like something out of Naked Lunch.
The owner at the time to Beats moved in was Madame Rachou. Her husband, who owned the hotel with her, died before Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orvlovsky and Gregory Corso, the first really famous beats moved in. She ran a bistro on the first floor where she stood on an upturned casket because she was so short. The Beat Hotel was her kingdom, and she took great care in protecting them from the police. The only police that could get by where the immigration police, who would come once every three months, take whichever foreigner they wanted and make him or her pay a tax. This could be avoided by leaving the country every three months for Belgium or the Netherlands.
Despite the fact that the Beat Hotel was just about as dilapidated as you can get without it actually collapsing in around you, it had one advantage. Madame Rachou asked no questions about your personal life. In the book I have on the Beat Hotel, it said that one could bring anybody home "man, woman or group". They'd have to sign there name in the guest book if they where staying over, but nobody bothered much. Also, various eccentricities where excepted. One artist lined his walls with straw. One artist who was called Jesus Christ, painted on the walls and wore sandals even in winter. The Beat Hotel was also the early home of Chester Himes, an African-American most known for his series of Harlem detective fiction, in a time where other hotels greeted him with open racism and hostility for having a (younger) white girlfriend.
In the context of the series, the Beat Hotel is a sort of crossroads in time and space where artistic and magical activity is at it's highest. This is concentrated in the Beat Hotel, and it's inhabitants go on a creative voyage. This more or less happened with the Beats. Ginsberg wrote most of Kaddish, one of his most famous poems, and William S. Burroughs finished Naked Lunch and Nova Express here. Gregory Corso also wrote his very controversial Bomb. I'm attributing it to the fact the Beat Hotel from 1957-1963 was on an apex of space and time.
I'm not sure when Jack moved into the Beat Hotel. I know it was before most of the other characters. I know that he was stationed here to protect the Beat Hotel and because he was burned out from fighting oppressive secret societies and Lovecraftian monstrosities. He may have lived at the same there at the same time as Chester Himes, and worked on a few cases before. Jack also works on the security of the Organization in Paris in general. He is able to get a few residents of the Hotel to work with him, most notably Max Quincy, and most of his case work would involve his work within the Organization, trying to spread there ideals through various sources and keeping the balance between the Throne and the Tractate, as well as occasional cases taken by patrons to pay the rent.

University Angst

It just sort of kicked in today. I'm going to University. That is really scary.

It's not like I'm going back to school, because this is an entirelly new school in almost every concievable way. I'll be living there, I'll have more work and I'll, I'll, I have no frame of refrence for it. The entire thing is making me feel sad and alone.
What if I can't find any friends at University? I'm an odd guy and what if I can't find someone to be a real close friend who I can talk really deep stuff with. Come to think of it I don't think that I have any friends I can talk really deep to at the moment. Well, no I've talked deeply with people, but most of my friends havn't been envolved in that kind of talk. Which is good, sometimes it's okay to talk about non-deep stuff. But I suppose I have this fantasy that when I go to Univesity I will hook up with all kinds of other artsy people and start a scene. We'd watch avaunt garde movies read Surrealist manifestos and stuff like that. Could just be part of my fasination with the Beat Generation but this is generally what people like me do when they go to University right?

The Organization

One of the most important aspects of this world, which doesn't directly concern the creation of characters which you guys have a problem with is The Organization that Jack works for.
The Organization is a catch all term for a secret society that I have been working on. The Organization has many other names, but that doesn't matter much considering the fact it is more of several different secret societies, and in some cases supernatural beings, working in tangent with themselves. At anytime there could be hundreds of sub-organizations within the Organization, ranging from political movements, mystical secret societies, creatures of urban legends, paranoid newsletters and artists colonies, among various other things.
The goals of the Organization differ from organization to organization, but they ultimately come down to the same things.

1. be a sort of nationless Intellegence agency, protecting beauty, truth, love and all that stuff that makes life grand.
   
2. Keeping Heaven (The Soverign Throne) and Hell (the Shadow Tractate) in check.
3. Reconciliation between the two forces.
   

Throne has been under control of When I say Heaven and Hell, I don't mean in the traditional sense. The Yazan, who is a blind, obese, eunuch, protected by his three daughters. The Shadow Tractate is ruled by Ilsetan, who despite having sight, being very well-built and still having his genitals intact, is basically Stalin in a weird liquid metal insect suit. Both of them are insane and want to force there own order upon mankind. The difference would be somewhere between eternal torment under a harsh religious dictatorship and eternal torment under a secular dictatorship. It's hell either way.
As I have said, the Organization is separated into several different secret societies. Here is what I have at the moment.

• The Rosicrucians, based on the actual Rosicrucians, they are a highly secret society of Gnostic Alchemists who follow Sophia, who is sort of a goddess but not really, I'll explain her more later. The Rosicrucians are one of the major groups within the Organization.
  
• The Sciriptomancers, The Scriptomancers are wizards who gain there magic abilities primarily through the art of writing. This can be used as creation, or can be used as a form of prophecy, or other uses depending on how experimental said Scriptomancer is. There are also versions of this for painting, called Pictomancers. This is not an actual organization, but alot of famous Scriptomancers, such as William Blake, James Joyce and William S. Burroughs are with the Organization. I don't know yet if all writers are Scriptomancers, or if all are and only a few are actually any good at it.
  
• The Howller Family, The Howller Family is one of the primer groups working within America. The Howller Family appear on the surface as a family of African-American/Native Americans, but in reality are a supernatural race of beings that in there natural state look like giant owl-like birds with human faces. Along with being one of the major factions in America, they more or less have there hands in every aspect of the Organization in North America, they are also the protectors of a sort of Beatnik Narnia. The Howllers, however are bound to this world where they are given more freedom then in our own. If a Howller becomes to caught-up in the affairs of our world they loose there connection with said Beatnik Narnia. This can be accomplished by killing someone from our plain, or falling in love with a woman from this plane. A descendant of a fallen Howller can exhibit supernatural powers and become a true Howller, but this can become harder and harder with each generation.
  
• The Beautiful Ladies, AKA The Scarred Angels, AKA The Furies, AKA The Little Wrathful Ones, They appear as very beautiful women who hang out in cheap hotels, shoot pool near train stations, read Bukowski and Genet, drink large amounts of whisky that any normal human would pass out with the first bought, and look like they could take down men three times they're size. No one knows what there really called, and most of them are called the Beautiful Ladies or the Scarred Angels. They do a lot of direct fighting against the Soverign Throne and the Shadow Tractate, mainly by hunting down and eating "Transgressors." Most members of the Organization try to avoid them, since they purposefully make themselves look like hard-cases. They are all probably all pretty really nice girls at heart.
• The Pact of Lilith, Off-shoot of the various Christian heresies that came up in the Middle Ages, the Pact of Lilith appeared sometime before the Enlightenment. While not strictly a combatant, The Pact of Lilith specializes in putting safe-houses for other members of the Organization, and spreading information for other Organization members. These Safe-Houses tend to look like very well-hidden brothels that look kind of like the set of Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain.

Those are all the sub-groups within the Organization. As mentioned before, they're are probably several other groups, some of which may not even be active today.

Meet Jack Blackwright

Steph has informed me that August is National World-Building Month, when writers all over the world come up with worlds to put there stories in. I have just checked the blog, Word Building Month: Participants, where they have my name. I'd like to say hello to all the World Builders.

From what I can see of my fellow World-Builders, your all concentrating on fantasy worlds, such as Tolkein's Middle-Earth. This is all well and good, and I'm going to be doing a bit of that at some point, but that's not the world I'm going to be writing about.

Instead, I will be writing a series of mystery novels about an Irish sorcerer named Jack Blackwright (That name may change because it's to close to the name of comedian Jack Black, which isn't what I want with the character). It's set in Paris during the time of the Beat Hotel, which was home to such great writers as Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. Jack lives in the Beat Hotel where he runs an off-beat private detective agency that utilizes a unique method of sorcery in his investigations. I have already written two short stories, but they are short and ignore most information on Paris.

The Jack Blackwright Stories are intended to be a mixture of historical mystery, occult mystery, conspiracy literature, absurdism and a tribute to the Beat Generation. It will be based on an actual historical period as well as various tributes to the work of Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs.

Now that I got that down, I'll get to introducing you to the main characters.

Jack Blackwright
Age: 39
Gender: Male
Nation of Birth: Ireland
Occupation: Sorcerer, Private Detective
Jack Blackwright is a man with a mysterious past. During his college years he was excepted into a mysterious secret society he refers to as "the Organization." For the last ten year or so, he has gone on several missions for the Organization that he defines as "Some of the weirdest shit that you’d ever think to see in your life." To recuperate, he has moved to the Beat Hotel where he spends most of his time seeing the sights of Paris and hiding in his apartment reading James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Despite this, Jack usually finds himself caught between the worlds of Paris’ crime, bohemia and occult circles.

Maxmillian Quincy
Age: 25
Gender: Male
Nation of Birth: Canada
Occupation: Actor, Mime, Writer
Max Quincy is the Archie Goodwin to Jack Blackwright’s Nero Wolfe. A self-proclaimed Dandy, Max has come to Paris to write and study mine. He moves into the Beat Hotel because of the cheap housing and quickly becomes embroiled in Jack Blackwright’s twilight world. Max is largelly based on a friend of mine, who like Max is a dandy, actor and smokes tobacco from an opium pipe.

Allen Ginsberg
Age: 31
Gender: Male
Nation of Birth: America
Occupation: Poet
Allen Ginsberg is one of the three main Beat writers, along with Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. He is the author of "Howl" and "Kaddish." Allen Ginsberg saw American society as to conformist and materialistic, and spent a lot of time in Paris getting his friend’s published and seeing the sights of Paris, along with other Bohemian types of activities such as writing poetry (Kaddish was started when he was in Paris) and sex. Jack originally considers Allen Ginsberg, "that annoying little American man who won’t shut up about his friends," but warms up to him when he finds a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, on Apollinare’s Grave.

William S. Burroughs
Age: 43
Gender: Male
Nation of Birth: America
Occupation: Writer, Junkie
William S. Burroughs is considered one of the three main Beat writers, along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He wrote "Naked Lunch," and "The Soft Machine," both of which where published while he lived at the Beat Hotel. William S. Burroughs was into all kinds of weird stuff, such as Mind Control, Scientology, Drugs, Destroying the Constraints of Language, Gazing into Crystal Balls and Cut-ups. I’m pretty sure that he was daemonically possessed, and that his writing is a way of exorcizing his demons. He may also be a member of Jack’s Organization, through his long years in Tangier.