quietprofanity

- Learned that Normie is still alive ... Liz Osborn apparently divorced Harry and took the son with her. What's this world coming to? Anyway, I don't feel like doing the fanfic now. I'm sorry, guys. :-( That was my big driving point, and part of the fun of fanfic is trying to fix things within the "rules" but by now it's kind of like playing that game in A Separate Peace.

Dan Slott looks like he's making lemons into tasty lemonade. Lots of people want to drink but ... eh, I'm still annoyed. I feel like Annie Wilkes being unable to get over Rocketman. (Except I don't have an urge to chop Joe Quesada's foot off. No, really. I don't. I don't lack that much perspective.)

- Also got an idea for LoEG in anime times ... Eva can be demi-Lovecraft Gods wrapped up in armor and that's why Shinji and Asuka are crazy. Lupin III and Cutey Honey can pursue Allan and Mina. Eastasia was Japan lying, saying they won the war and they send the kids on an island to kill each other. The world looks like Tokyo-3 and everyone has a persocom. Also jokes about why the country can't manage to kill a giant lizard.

But then it kind of felt like too much work ... and kind of corny. And I can ape anarchist themes but I don't think I can really turn the medium on its head the way it deserves to be turned. Oh well.

- Why do I want to ape anarchist themes, anyway? I'm not much of an anarchist. I don't really think I have much of a unique worldview. Other than, like, the world has internal rot. But not in this Don DeLillo sense where evil suburban commercialism has sucked the life out of us. Just because your neighbor might attack your kid doesn't mean the fun birthday party you shared with your other neighbor doesn't have any meaning ... if you catch my drift.

- This last weekend was my own personal Shakespeare weekend. I watched my four-hour Ken Branagh Hamlet, and then the commentary, and then the documentaries, and then the previews (Olivier's Othello make-up makes him look puke green or purple ... not very black), and then I read about half of King Lear. It made me a little crazy, I think. But I'm having fun.

- Dad bought the dogs over to visit. It wasn't as disastrous as I expected.

- Dear Romance Novel Community: The Smart Bitches and Nora Roberts' hardball line on plagiarism has made me respect the romance novel community far more than this bleating about being nice does. That Mrs. Giggles is saying this really makes me boggle.

- I HAVE ONLY 40 UNREAD BOOKS! YAY! YAY! YAY! :D :D :D

- Oh, I like ... have a pet now. He's a fish named Reggie and since he's a beta he hates me. But I haven't managed to kill him yet, so that's a good sign. This was all my Dad's idea; since we as humans eat fish (I actually ate fish TODAY) keeping others as pets shows a sign of outright lunacy as a species. But oh well.

How do I liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive without you? I want to know. How would I breaaaaaathe without you, if you ever go ...

Seriously, dude. Where else can I look at all the books I haven't read and then add them up on the Himbo's calculator and come to the conclusion that, "No, you shouldn't buy anymore books!"

I'm liking the bookpile contest, though. Favorite entries include: this, this, and this. This is also good for a little pile, and this has nothing to do with anything, but it's cute so I'll allow it.

In the meantime, I've been reading this blog. I always loved Augusten Burroughs' passages about his brother, who is a genius, mechanophile with Asperger's syndrome, and it seems like they were pretty damn close to the truth. John Elder Robison doesn't have the mastery of the English language of his younger brother, but every once in awhile he comes up with some real gems.

Racoons have invaded his sister-in-law's house
It was time for action. Magnus stepped to the fireplace, grabbed a log, and threw it at the larger raccoon. It hit him in the rear, and he turned around for a moment.

His gaze at Magnus said it all. I am not a beaver, nitwit! I do not eat logs. Throw me a cake! And then he turned and devoured Magnus’s brownies.

And about Augusten Burroughs' book:
I was stunned to read some of the things in my brother's book. For example, my brother told how Bookman molested him at 13. I had never known that. But I sure knew Bookman had tried to do the same thing to me, five years before!! I felt very bad, reading my brother's story. If only he could have come and lived with me, I thought as I read RWS. But at 21, my age when RWS happened, I was virtually homeless. I was on the road with bands or squatting in my girlfriend's apartment. I had no way to take in a 13-year-old brother. And I had no idea.

I was afraid to let any of my customers see the book, but I was proud of my brother so I put the book on our counter and cringed every time someone bought a copy.

They are never going to speak to me again, I would say to myself, every time someone bought a book. But that didn’t happen.

Instead, people told me how inspired they were. They told me about their own bad childhoods, and how impressed they were that my brother and I had come out of ours OK. That experience gave me the courage to write my own story. My brother's stories proved to be very inspirational to many people, to my great surprise. Even now, four years after RWS was published, people walk into my automobile business and tell me how my brother's book affected them.

He's writing his own book, titled Look Me in the Eye about his life with Asperger's. Although he knows he's gotten his foot in the door because of Burroughs, he says that his experiences, being 8 years older than Augusten, are much different. (He hates when people call it "Running with Asperger's"). I'm looking forward to it.

On another note, I also found Augusten's mother's Web page at margaretrobinson.com. She sounds very like he described, too. If she writes a memoir, I don't think I'll be buying it. Her written bio on her page is ... special with its time jumping and weirdness about her looking into the water and I know the beauty of life and ... yeah ... no.

More and more I think the "He made it up!" stuff isn't true.

I also read this, which ends with this paragraph:

In the desperate circumstances of the time, it was excusable to be angry at what Wodehouse did, but to go on denouncing him three or four years later -- and more, to let an impression remain that he acted with conscious treachery -- is not excusable. Few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and Quislings. At best it is largely the punishment of the guilty by the guilty. In France, all kinds of petty rats -- police officials, penny-a-lining journalists, women who have slept with German soldiers -- are hunted down while almost without exception the big rats escape. In England the fiercest tirades against Quislings are uttered by Conservatives who were practising appeasement in 1938 and Communists who were advocating it in 1940. I have striven to show how the wretched Wodehouse -- just because success and expatriation had allowed him to remain mentally in the Edwardian age -- became the corpus vile in a propaganda experiment, and I suggest that it is now time to regard the incident as closed. If Ezra Pound is caught and shot by the American authorities, it will have the effect of establishing his reputation as a poet for hundreds of years; and even in the case of Wodehouse, if we drive him to retire to the United States and renounce his British citizenship, we shall end by being horribly ashamed of ourselves. Meanwhile, if we really want to punish the people who weakened national morale at critical moments, there are other culprits who are nearer home and better worth chasing.

Somehow this feels relevant to our times ... but I can't put my finger on why ... so maybe it's not and I'm just projecting.