A sense of urgency (2)

"You've read Michael Ampersant's outrageous new novel Green Eyes, admit it!"

(Artwork by Bob Bienpensant)

Scribble, scribble, scribble, Mr& (2) --- Dracula (2)

(This is about Part II of the Green Eyes. Go here for previous post. A weeklong "King Dracula" contest will enliven the Georgia Beach Festweek, central to this second part)

Let's interupt us briefly here and go do something to justify the header and talk about vampires.

The various tribes involved in the competition will share the general inclination of play-acting vampires, but differentiate according to specific traits. Well, what could those traits be? Lets got to the source then: "Dracula," by Bram Stoker.

We naively thought the idea originated with Stoker but got it wrong, of course. Wikipedia tells you that:

Vampires are mythological or folkloric beings who subsist by feeding on the life essence (generally in the form of blood) of living creatures, regardless of whether they are undead or a living person/being. Although vampiric entities have been recorded in many cultures, and may go back to "prehistoric times", the term vampire was not popularized until the early 18th century, after an influx of vampire superstition into Western Europe from areas where vampire legends were frequent, such as the Balkans and Eastern Europe, although local variants were also known by different names, such as vrykolakas in Greece and strigoi in Romania. This increased level of vampire superstition in Europe led to mass hysteria and in some cases resulted in corpses actually being staked and people being accused of vampirism.

And while we are at it --- you see, it's actually useful to do this, forcing some measure of discipline upon a vacillating author --- lets quote some more from another, newly discovered Wiki page, a really unbelievable page that provides a matrix of vampire traits crossed with sources (folklore, fiction, media), and differentiates between a totality of 32 traits:

Skin color, fangs, reflection, shadow, (physical) attractiveness, stake (would it kill them), sunlight, decapitation, drowning, fire, silver (bullet, possibly), garlic, holy symbols, running water, invitation, arithmomania (we don't even know what that is), immortality, enhanced strength, enhanced speed, unnatural healing, flight, shapeshifting, psychic powers, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, fertility, means of reproduction (bite, transfusion, consumption of vampire blood), demonic possession, diet, effect on victims and OTHERS   --- WANSTW (write a novel, see the world), arithmomania is an obsessive-compulsive disorder inducing subjects to count objects or actions, and pyrokinesis is a word coined by Stephen King, referring to the ability to create or control fire strictly by thought (we'll get to Stephen King soon, by the way, perhaps 3 posts down the line).

Bela Lugosi, the original movie Dracula

Ouuff.

Scribble, scribble, scribble, Mr& (1) --- Dracula

We've started the research on part two of the Green Eyes and are wondering how to get our mind around various issues, such as (1) vampires, (2) the end-of-the-word, (3) X-factors (America-got-talent or whatever), (4) Romeo & Juliette, (5) murder, in particular murder by poisoning, (6) amnesia and/or the loss of identity, (7) pageants, (8) Ebonics, (9) verse meters, and (10) orgasms, in particular female ones.

Right.

The idea is that John and Alex will stay together, so we cannot repeat the love-story-construction of Part I. Let's hope we'll get some mileage out of Alex's mysterious post-suicidal personality (he's suffering from serious amnesia, has no recollection of his personal past), and, in particular, out of his sexual ambiguity vis à vis John --- Alex had been informed of his homosexual orientation, more or less accepted the information, experimented a bit with straight sex, and is now living with an anxious John, a narrator who doesn't quite understand whether Alex is just trying to be nice to him, or trying to be a bit too nice. Ideally, Alex would have shed his depression but maintained most other parts of his personality, but that's perhaps too much to ask for, as John understands himself. From the point of view of the further story, Alex will have to walk a fine line between ignorance and insouciance.

Connubial bliss --- the flip side

Erotic painting

(A friend from the East Coast sends this picture:)

We don't want the smoking gun to be an entitlement mushroom cloud (Tom Tomorrow)

(Hat tip: Paul Krugman) 

(And here's a corresponding tidbit from --- no, not from the Green Eyes --- from our Freedom Fries novel, 1st Chapter:)

Samuel Fisher sits in one of his many Eames Aluminum Chairs at the big, empty conference table while Betty Bartholomeo is ushered into his splendid office. Crossing through the double crystal doors into this ulterior world, Betty smiles the smile of corporate worship, while Fisher reciprocates in kind.  He waves her lightly into the chair next to himself, turns his head, and points with his chin to a gargantuan screen on the opposite wall, where the famous Reverend Falwell is holding forth: 

“…we make God mad, I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians, who were actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, people for the American Life, all of them, who tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen’.” The Reverend lowered his jowls accordingly.

The famous tourist destination --- Korea (6)

The venue is located nearby, between our village and Seogi-po, the second-largest town here on Jeju Island, on the coast. A popular tourist destination, we have to go see it. Parking lots, tour buses, people. Lots.

 We ask where "it" is. Somebody points down. We descend past this charming tea house into an over-designed park.  

Waiting for you...

...to finish Michael Ampersant's outrageous new novel "Green Eyes," and finally come to bed.

(Artwork by Bob Bienpensant)

Connubial Bliss --- Korea (5)

By sheer serendipity we find ourselves climbing the road hugging Mount Halla, Korea's highest mountain at 1,900 meters, a somewhat listless volcano that hasn't harmed anybody in quite some time and defines Jeju Island in a sort of materialistic way, almost vulgar-marxistically so --- Jeju wouldn't be there without the volcano, Jeju in fact is the volcano in geological terms --- so we climb Road 1139 and have already reached an altitude of 1,000 m when Michael has the idea that Chang could get carsick on this sinuous path across the high altitude forest, and we U-turn and descend again. Mentioning car-sickness wasn't perhaps the best idea, Chang is starting to think about his stomach and the stomach thinks back and new, or slightly altered, thoughts feel provoked by each turn. Thought-provoking, that's what this road feels, thought-provoking.

Mount Halla

Anyhow, the worst is over when we hit a stretch of road marked by red cross-stripes. They are well-done, these stripes, each marking is slightly raised, creating a bump per mark and accentuating our downward glide in this floating American-suspension car in unmistakable ways, warning us of impending danger. We wonder which danger we're facing, no stripes mark the upward leg of the road. We cross perhaps 5-10 marks per second, thus reverberating downward in a three-dimensional alert space, visual (red stripes), proprioceptive (the position of our limbs) and auricular (vibratory humming). This goes on for a while. After two kilometers or so you would assume we've been warned enough, but the stripes won't go away, one stripe following the next with unrelenting stamina, stripe for stripe for stripe. Ever tried to count to 100,000?

"You could have invented these stripes," Michael finally says to Chang.

Aries (Jezza Smilez)

So you think you’re trapped in a poorly-written fan fiction: A modern teen’s guide (reblogged)

Lokfire has this cool post on her website Hollywood Hates Me we've been allowed to reblog:


Lately, you've noticed your life is filled with grammatical errors, punctuation mistakes, poor spelling and way more deviant fetishes than you're used to. Does that mean you're trapped in a poorly-written fan fiction? Almost certainly! But to find out for sure, please use this handy guide as a reference.

1. Do you often get the feeling you're a Mary-Sue type stand-in for someone else? Like, maybe you're just an average girl with the character trait of "clumsiness" so people won't think you're perfect, but all the hot boys in town love you.

 "You killed my father, prepare to die?"

2.When people around you talk, do they often resort to overblown romantic cliches? Perhaps they say things like "You are my life now" or "I can't live in a world where you don't exist."

Trick question! This just means you're hanging out with a sparkly vampire.

How about Jeju? --- Korea (4)

(Christine, our friend from Switzerland writes:)

I found time to read your manuscript [Green Eyes]... It is very interesting and easy to understand. I even can understand more about gay's reactions and sexual practices. Well, the story is captivating and we always want to know more. Important is that you don't get bored with it.

We wonder if you are OK in Jeju and how is the weather and temperature? Are you in a hotel? How does Chang feel?

 We have very cold weather. Lot of snow was falling in France and England. Here in Solothurn we had -6° this morning and 1° during the day. We have almost enough and wait for spring.

How many hours do you have more in Korea?

 (We answer:) 

Thanks, Christine. Yes, we are very OK in Jeju, even though the promises by Der Spiegel haven't materialized yet. How do we mean? Well, Der Spiegel, you know, every reader of Infinite Jest knows it, the German news magazine, they had a recent story on Jeju where they write about

(a) fertility rites with phallic stone statues on which we so far missed out (the rites) and

Jeju haru bang, (local stone statue, judge yourself)

Bureaucratology

Good Morning!

I Write Like ... David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest 1)

Cool, folks, cool. We blogged about the I Write Like web page two years ago when it compared a simple blogpost of ours to William Shakespeare --- well this sentence already tells you something must be wrong with said app, but we didn't push the issue since the corresponding link had soured in the meantime.

Today, rummaging through Infinite-Jest-blogs in search of pictures, we rediscovered the link under a new web address, and tested it on more pertinent material from the Green Eyes. The app works as expected, there's a window where you paste your text and click a button. An analyzer compares your text to its data base (Bayesian statistics, neural networks, you name it), and returns the name of the author you resemble most (it always comes back with an answer, it never says "Go Away," or "Bah," or uses similar expressions you know so well from your correspondence with the leading publishing houses).

OK, so, we start with the Prologue of the Green Eyes. Not Shakespeare this time, but...

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

 ...Horribile dictu, we never read H. P. Lovecraft, can't even properly place her/him. It must be Wahlverwandschaft, then. We taught Artificial Intelligence so we know a thing or two about neural networks. How stable might the application be, we wonder,  what would be the outcome for the next piece of text, Chapter 2 (you know, Chapter 1 has been relegated to an appendix)? And the answer is...

The price of vengeance --- Korea (3)

So we’re on this BA flight to Seoul and grab the Daily Mail, the British tabloid.

“The Price of Vengeance” --- that's the boldface headline of the Mail today and we don’t recognize the faces. “Vicky Price is shell-shocked,” though, and “Chris Huhne may receive a lighter sentence for pleading guilty.” Expressions like "Hell hath no fury," and the Greek saying "a woman and the sea are the same in danger," dance before your lying eyes (Vicky is Greek).

All this has little to do with Korea, except that’s eternal and universal and we have to write it down so we can use it in the next part of the Green Eyes. The entire first 11 pages of the tabloid are about Vicky & Chris & collateral damage & even the boobs on Page 3 have to defer to pictures of a Greek wedding “where Huhne gave his stepdaughter away [although] the MP had already begun a fateful affair with his bisexual aide.”

The view --- Korea (2)

(We've arrived on Jeju Island:)

Thesis

Antithesis

Synthesis

 (People who've followed the 2002 worldcup may recall a venue being located on Jeju; we're located right next to it) 

Touché

Fewer people would listen if his name were Adam Smith, but here it is what he has to say, Tyler Brûlé, the well-named editor of the Monocle Magazine and columnist of the Financial Times:

HOW ABOUT SUBSTANCE?

And the occasion? Well, anything could be the occasion, because nothing, nothing has ever ruled the world as much as marketing in all its ugly emanations does these days.

Tyler Brûlé

In Brûlé's case --- not sure he would like us to call him Tyler --- in Brûlé's case it's  --- and now we are interrupted by a chain of events reported under Connubial Bliss  --- in Brûlé's case it's  --- and now we could dwell on the fact that it wasn't so much an event as the absence thereof, like, like Conan Doyle's dog not barking in the night --- in Brûlé's case it's  --- it's perhaps a lucky coincidence that we're not writing a column in the FT but a simple blogpost  ---  in Brûlé's case it's a conversation with a friend who has started writing for this "large-ish news organization," finished her first story, and is now spending her time on getting the message of its publication across via "a media channel" (Facebook, probably). And then he asks:

Invariant under rotation?

(A friend from the East Coast sent this picture:)

(He didn't actually, he sent this one:)

(Well, you know us.)