The rest of this week will be about moving towards the official launch for A Tree of Bones, which takes place next Saturday (June 2) at Bakka-Phoenix in Toronto. 3:00 PM. I hope to see at least some of you there...and BTW, would it help if I told you I'm going to be singing with a trio of local musicians currently known as the Band With No Name, lead by amazing filker Kari Maaren? We're going to do “Two Sisters” (Clannad version), “The Blackest Crow” (not the Angi West version, unfortunately, but it's growing on me) and—naturally—“The Red-Head Pistoleer”, along with a really fun version of Gillian Welch's “The Way It Goes”. Then they'll do a later set without me, covering things like “Ain't No Grave”, “The Scarlet Tide” and “Folsom Prison Blues”. Be great if we could arrange somehow to have somebody record it, so I could put it up as an .mp3 on my site—but one way or another, it's been a lot of fun getting ready for.

Meanwhile, I think I'm going to have to own myself defeated by the Ligotti story. Nothing I try is really catching fire, and the deadline is Friday, so...hmmm. I've already emailed the editor, but have yet to hear back; frankly, I'm not even sure more time would help. I want to go back to something I know I can write, just to get the taste of it out of my mouth.

In other news, I've been thinking a bit about the French Revolution, which I do now and then. I have this urge to try and write a poem from Robespierre's POV, mainly because most sources seem to think he had no interior life to speak of, which seems...unlikely, to me. His sensibility seems ultra-Aspergian, really; I remember one miniseries which had him powdering his wigs intensely while listening to Danton rant on, with this weird little smacked-cat frown. These guys were sort of pioneering the cult of personality, and there was a lot of contradictory input—it's odd to consider that at one point or another in his career, people both admired and decried Robespierre for being simultaneously objective to the point of theory about stuff that could (and did) kill people and capable of being moved so deeply that all his affect fell away immediately, leaving him naked and immaculate, a channel for Revolution. Compared to outright emotionalists like Danton and Camille Desmoulins, some people seemed to find Robespierre restful, pure, as though his commitment ran deeper because it didn't show on the surface. And there was also that almost superstitious fear people developed of his rhetoric—the idea that if he was only allowed to speak, to address the crowd, his words would take hold and hypnotize everybody, and he'd walk away scot-free from anything. This persisted to the extent that some people continued to believe he hadn't shot himself in the jaw at all, but that this was instead an intentionally-inflicted wound, calculated to derail his superpower: “The blood of Danton is choking you, murderer!”

Halfway through last week, I also finally located a copy of Trouble Every Day on DVD, thus allowing me to watch it again under considerably better circumstances than my last viewing (a partially-degraded videotape from Suspect Video which looked like it had already been copied from something else). The film continues to be evocative, odd and mysterious, calculated to produce dread and sorrow which simultaneously finding beauty in the strangest things; having seen it once, the very first shot—two people making out heavily in the back of a car next to the Seine—takes on a tactile sense of danger, just like Beatrice Dalle's insane overbite. Actually, all her teeth seem to be angled outwards ever so slightly, above and beneath, as though they're trying to form a beast's muzzle; she leans into the air, tasting it, like she wants to take a big bite out of whatever's immediately in front of her. And in later scenes, especially the bedroom denouement, we see that her “disease” makes her not only want to tear into people but also play with what's left...the death which results is lengthy, grisly, pivoting on the fact that human teeth are mainly blunt, that human nails are incredibly ineffective claws. It's a one-Maenad bloodbath, and the reason people don't fight back more seems to be that they're simply too amazed by what's happening; her pheremones overpower them, and by the time they realize what's going on, they've already been wounded too graphically to even want to survive.

Another thing I discovered recently, while researching the Heaven's Gate cult mass suicide—don't ask—is the Body's “doom-sludge” epic All The Waters Of The Earth Turn to Blood, which definitely sounds like it should be the soundtrack to something, though I haven't (as yet) quite figured out what. Zombies are too obvious. Part of the appeal of Sound Of My Voice for me was its whole cultish aspect, which hearkens back to the post-Jonestown fears of my youth; I remember watching movies like Ticket To Heaven and wondering what the exact alchemical combination of bad ideas and toxic thought-patterns would have to be for you to think that this was a good idea, elevating instead of degrading, a “love” that didn't have to be rooted in the corporeal, a new vocabulary in which “travel” translated to “death”. At any rate, here's a few tracks—check them out for yourselves, see what you think:







So, yeah. Sounds like I'm just full of stuff. Too bad it's not coming out further.

Amended to add: Okay, the deadline's been put back by about a month, so I'm going to attack it again. There has to be something that comes out of all this, whether objectively "good" or not.;)

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So...it's been a long time. I don't really know why things went so wonky over the Long Weekend, although it just being that alone is often enough to screw me over. OTOH, Cal did get a cold, and I was struggling with some other thing I still don't really understand...maybe a recurrence of that vertigo virus thingie I get every couple of years. If so, it passed very quickly, for which I am extremely grateful.

At any rate: Finished and posted my ChiZine review of Sound Of My Voice, the new Brit Marling SF Weird film, here (http://www.chizine.com/sound_of_my_voice.php). Also did an interview with My Bookish Ways, here (http://www.mybookishways.com/2012/05/interview-gemma-files-author-of-the-hexslinger-series.html). And I spent a portion of today attempting to hammer away at that Thomas Ligotti-inspired short story I owe for June, but you know, Ligotti is haaard. I only know a couple of people who do him well, and I may not turn out to be one of them.

Otherwise, I've been spending a lot of time on Tumblr, most recently looking up the Decadent, Fin-de-Siecle, Rackham-esque fairytale illustrations of Edmund Dulac (http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/edmund+dulac). I even ran across a very particular picture of his that my Dad sent me as a card, years ago; I kept it pinned to my wall all the way through high school, and probably still have it somewhere: “The Woman He Could Not Leave”, from Dreamers of Dreams, 1905 (http://nightnightsweetprince.tumblr.com/post/21765429702/the-woman-he-could-not-leave-from-dreamers-of). So nice to see it again, along with all the rest—there are times I really do love the Internet.

And I've been reading a lot of Avengers fic, naturally, mostly Loki-centric. The stuff I like tends to admit that Loki is a dude who may not be fixable, and not so much a pitiable woobie as an arrogant jerk with a literal god complex who's just graduated from trickster to chaos-sowing destroyer of worlds, taking his cue from late-stage Siege-era Marvel Loki: “Oh, this is not mischief...mischief is a toy I've outgrown and discarded. This, this is mayhem. Watch and see.” Maybe even buck-ass crazy after his fall through the Long Dark, who knows? But much like Natasha Romanov, his is the gushing-red sort of ledger that a hug and some heartfelt apologies isn't really ever going to wipe clean, and since he also defines himself by his unrepentance, he's actually in a worse place than her, right now. Perverse (big) bastard, in other words, full of spite and self-hatred and high-toned bitchery; just the sort I like best, really. (The only thing I've been able to do any sustained work on, naturally, aside from Experimental Film, is “Vigil-Saga”, a story about Sigynn and Angrboda breaking Loki out of his punishment under the mountain...something that's not quite fanfiction and not quite anything else, not to mention definitely not coming with any sort of venue attached. Fun! Practical!)

Aaaaanyhow. Here's some recs, while we're at it:

“Simple, Not Easy” by Taraljc (http://archiveofourown.org/works/324204/chapters/522188), in which Darcy from Thor becomes Loki's much-kidnapped hostage/BFF of choice, gets him to take Xanax and start therapy, scoffs at his adoption issues and eventually goes on a double date with him, Sif and Hawkeye.
“The Saga of Hug Fortress” series, by theorytale (http://archiveofourown.org/series/18939), in which Tony Stark sort of tries to do the same, proceeding from the assumption that all Loki needs is a hug...of course, Loki does keep on killing people, which sort of harshes the mellow. But maybe he'll stop, eventually.
“Silvertongue”, by Epiphanyx7 (http://archiveofourown.org/works/407723?view_adult=true), which tries to reframe everything Loki does in The Avengers as part of a larger, necessary plan, and it really works, though in heartbreaking ways.
“Revelations”, by Astolat (http://archiveofourown.org/works/398023/chapters/654909), in which Thor dies, so Loki leads the Avengers down into Valhalla to get him back. This amy or may not be a good idea, but goddamn it, it's gettin' done.
“The Silver Tongue Silenced”, by Helennotoftroy (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8137803/1/The_Silver_Tongue_Silenced), shows Loki being gagged from the outside, as observed by the Avengers. Surprisingly astute, especially given where it got posted.
“Caught in the Middle” by moosewingz (http://archiveofourown.org/works/405714/chapters/669270), in which Steve Rogers and Thor bond over being the ultimate fish out of water, with a big side-order of Thor/Loki, often not exactly in the background. It's cute, in a city-destroying way.
“Zhashtar”, by episoltic (http://archiveofourown.org/works/407348?view_adult=true), in which Loki treats a hypnotized Clint Barton (Hawkeye) like his personal therapist, and doesn't like what he hears coming back at him. Emphasizes the whole “space aliens worshipped as gods” thing, which I like a lot.
“Refracted” by BeesKnees (http://archiveofourown.org/works/404300), in which Loki is saved at the end of The Avengers by a Thor from another dimension, causing both he and “his” Thor to think about things differently.

...that'll do for now, I think. Nothing too porny, either, surprisingly. Ah well; it's easy enough to find, if you go looking.

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Last night was the worst sleep I've had in quite some time. I woke up around 3:30 AM with acid stomach so strong I thought I was going to vomit (didn't, thankfully), stayed awake until it settled vaguely around 5:00, then woke again around 7:45 and spent the next hour crapping my guts out. No idea why. Nothing I ate yesterday seems to warrant it, so...just a week of pressure creeping up on me? Something to do with my period, which started on Wednesday?

One way or the other, I'm absolutely exhausted, and I still have to write a review for ChiZine while simultaneously trying to cobble together a Thomas Ligotti-inspired story for what will hopefully be this year's final anthology. Good God, I need sleep.

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Those of you here for the duration have seen most of this playlist before, but--"Music in A Tree of Bones: The Longest Post EVAR", here (http://musicatmidnight-gfiles.blogspot.ca/2012/05/music-in-tree-of-bones-longest-post.html).

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So: The best thing about Mother's Day was probably “having” to go see my Mom perform with the Toronto Echo Women's Choir at Trinity Square Church. This is a pretty good example of what the choir does, though not a song they actually sang on Sunday (http://youtu.be/UPnrOX6Qy0k). For the year my Mom's been with them, they've been specializing much more in various shades of folk vs. various shades of world music/fusion—their co-Artistc Directors, Becca Whitla and Alan Gasser, are experts in Georgian music, for example, and their featured guest vocalist was Suba Shankaram, currently artist-in-residence at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts and co-chair of the JUNO world music committee. Here's another choir at Words and Music Camp doing Sankaran's “This is Samba”, which crossbreeds samba with Indian vocal percussion (http://youtu.be/iX0jFnqXljI), which was one of yesterday's selections; some of her other groups include Autorickshaw (http://youtu.be/UrCH4rsV5J0), FreePlay Duo with Dylan Bell (http://youtu.be/JnMktsl9QbA) and Retrocity (http://youtu.be/Nc_-aHe-5LY). She's also performed with Bobby McFerrin.

My favourite tracks were “Mallari”, a tradition Carnatic temple processional preceded by an improvised alapana, “Wei Bulbul”, a tradition Arabic song arranged by FreePlay Duo, “Shen Khar Venaki”, a Georgian Orthodox hymn they also did the last time I saw them, “Sister My Sister”, by Sue Johnson, and “Give Me Wings”, by Ali Burns. To conclude, here's FreePlay Duo again doing “Mercy Street”, one of my favourite Peter Gabriel songs, which I think they got to perform for him once (http://youtu.be/bqNogs-F-ZI).

Anyhow. I'm really knackered overall, like I need a weekend to recuperate from my weekend. But I got a couple of good insights into the mechanics of the next section of Experimental Film (as well as its eventual denouement), and I need to post at least one more Music At Midnight post for tomorrow, which is (as we know) Release Day! Along with writing at least two more short pieces for June, and a film column, and taking Cal to the dentist tonight to make a date for multiple extractions, since at least one of his snaggly new teeth is slanting straight back into his mouth, which is distracting and probably painful. At some point, I should also betake myself to HMV and spend my Mother's Day giftcard, not to mention picking something up for my Mom's birthday (also the 15th). It's busy times, y'all.

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...at Music At Midnight: "Fanfiction And (Not Vs.) The Hexslinger Series", here (http://musicatmidnight-gfiles.blogspot.ca/2012/05/fanfiction-and-not-vs-hexslinger-series.html). Perhaps a bad idea, but oh well.

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Four days to Release Day! As we all know by now, A Tree of Bones comes out May 15 (also my mother's birthday, as it happens), so I've spent the last two days doing ChiZine stuff in support of it, both obliquely and overtly. Wednesday, I attended the latest ChiZine Reading Series at the Augusta House, in Kensington Market; Thursday night, I read at Zelda's, as part of a reading series called The Beautiful and the Damned. And now that I've finally held genuine copies of my new book in my hands, I can tell you that it's both beautiful (natch) and far huger than I expected...so big that David Nickle was holding up his truly immense new book Rasputin's Bastards right next to it and literally comparing sizes, like: “Is this bigger than mine, or just as big? ...no, I think mine's still bigger.”

At any rate: I've also done fairly well on the new book, Experimental Film: A Novel, over the last little while. It's a strange one. For one thing, I'm treating the main character as basically me, because it's that tactical decision which has allowed me to at last break through the notes-to-prose conversion block I've been stuck behind all this time. This means that some of the things she's talking about, as well as some of the details of her current situation, strike pretty close to home; I showed the first section to Steve and asked him if he was upset by it, but he says no, it's more important for me to keep going. And God knows, I can always go back and “fix” it later, right?

Anyhow. Saturday is the Serial Diners' annual Reading of Single Pages, which also functions as founder Jason Taniguchi's birthday, while Sunday is going to be fairly crazy, because of Mother's Day...that trade-off of “oh, so now you're a Mom, so people have to be nice to you, at least one day a year” vs. “but you still need to do stuff for your Mom, and your in-laws, and what have you...” Which means it's going to be a quite hilariously stuffed schedule, as I careen from yoga in the morning to the Bellefire Club at noon, then over to Trinity Square Church to see my Mom perform with the Echo Women's Choir (at least this time I'll remember to sit against the wall on a folding chair, rather in the pews), then meet Steve, Cal and my in-laws for Mother's Day dinner, at a restaurant halfway between where we live and where my sister-in-law lives. While I'm sure it'll be fun overall, my heart-rate's already elevated.

Okay. Back to it, whatever “it” may be...

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It's raining like hell outside, which will make going to pick up Cal fun. I also have a ChiZine Reading Series to attend tonight, after working out, where I can pick up copies of A Tree of Bones (so that's cool). Did a blog interview yesterday, which should be up sometime soon. And I wrote probably 1,000 new words on Experimental Film: A Novel today, only some of which was notes. All in all, it's been a far better day than the last few. Perhaps a corner has been turned.

After yesterday's suddenly burst of inspiration, I also opened up my "New Poetry Collection" file and took a look. The poems which could make up said new collection are, currently:

Nobody Sleeps
In the High Places
Lie-Father
Redcap
Mad Boys Make No Kings
Haruspicy
The Drowned Town
Litany of the Family Bean
A Batch of Golems
Onion Boy
Ed Gein at Night
Verse Found Scratched Inside the Lid of a Sarcophagus (Dynasty Unknown)
Clown Considered as a Memento Mori
Tantalus, Reaching Upwards
Speedometer
Minotaur
Jar of Salts
at the moment I am living in a haunted house—
Song of the Mother
Mrs Margery Lovett, Her Book
A Last Dispatch from Erebus, 1848
A Container of Ashes
The Dream of the Astronaut
The Glass Mask
Bad Fathers
Bits and Pieces
La Monadologie
Sacred
Build Your Own
Invocabulary
The Black Telephone
Calving
Hymn to Mut

Plus a bunch of juvenilia which may not be as bad as I think it is, and certainly hasn't been published anywhere as yet:

Manifesto
Two Darknesses
Soliloquy
Come to Disappear
Metropolis/Babel
Not Enough
Obit
A Pledge
In Like a Lamb
Lunatic
Never-Never (One Land, Two Voices)

So, hmmm. Not sure what to do, if anything. Just keep adding to it, I guess.

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Here's the official LJ entry about my second ChiZine film column, on The Asphyx vs. Photographing Fairies, here (http://www.chizine.com/the_asphyx_vs_photographing_fairies.php).

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So apparently, what happens when I go see a movie twice in a row at this stage in my life (and really like it both times) is that it knocks me on my ass so completely that I spend almost two whole days barely able to string a sentence together. That was The Avengers, folks, on Friday and Saturday. And now it's Monday, and most of my brainspace is still taken up with remembering all the stuff I liked about it while simultaneously being annoyed with people who didn't like it, most specifically the people who apparently went in expecting to “ragespike” (TF?) over the fact that it was written and directed by Joss Whedon. Who's a bad person, mmmkay, and wants feminist cookies and kills characters “for funzies/lulz”, 'n' shit. Jesus Christ. As someone who really never gave much of a crap about Buffy or Angel (and enjoyed Firefly, but no more or less than any of the other cancelled shows I own), I get that I'm apparently working from a position of non-partisan uninformedness here, but I've got to admit, what I was concentrating on was how goddamn nice it was to see something not written by committee and driven by a person who truly does seem to love all of those characters equally.

So no: Pace was not a problem for me. The fact that the Chitauri were a literally faceless army for hire was not a problem for me. Loki busting out an amusingly antiquated sexualized insult was not a problem for me. Captain America, nice Catholic boy from 1940s Brooklyn, turning out to think that there's only one God and “I'm pretty sure he doesn't dress like that” was not a problem for me. The fact that the mind control which comes out of a staff it's been demonstrated from scene one that Loki is learning how to use on the job can be either derailed by someone hitting someone else hard in the head or deflected entirely by the fact that another person has an arc reactor stuck over his heart was not a problem for me. None of that was a problem, because I got what I went in wanting, in fucking spades: I got to see these demigods, huge freaks, snarky geniuses, well-meaning lab experiments and semi-normal but ridiculously competent people with intense personal issues become a team under pressure, with all their inherent power disparities and character flaws still intact.

Anyhow. Ask me specific questions in comments if you want, because I guess that's pretty much my Avengers post. I have lots of Loki-centric fic impulses, but I expected that; it's not going to stop me from continuing on with Lackadaisy, though, if you were worried. But I can't really do much of either as yet, because I have two very specific deadlines, a reading appearance, a very full weekend (friends on Saturday, Bellefire Club on Sunday, followed by some sort of Mother's Day thing) and Launch Day coming up, as well as the immediate necessity of trying real hard to rough out an actual outline for Experimental Film: A Novel. At least I'm finally done with the Meme of Alphabet, though, which makes me feel semi-productive.

Okay, back to...something.

Amended to add: This is my favourite post thus far on The Avengers, especially when it talks about Loki (http://no-detective.livejournal.com/290769.html). 'Nuff said.

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...which I saw last night with friends, and will see again tonight with Steve (not that Steve's not a friend): I loved the heck out of it. Pretty much perfect, no complaints. I've seen a couple of people saying they can't "like" Loki because of things he does in this, to which I would say: Doing unforgivable things for sketchy reasons is sort of Loki's thing. I've never gone full woobie with him, and never will--he's an ass behaving assishly, and nothing he does in future will ever completely "make up" for the stuff he does here. Then again, you could canonically say the same for Black Widow, both in the comics and the movie. Which is one of the reasons I like them both.;)

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I've obviously been pushing myself pretty hard to get through this Tree of Bones pre-Release Day Meme of Alphabet thing (which is finally complete, thankfully—I'll still run out of countdown stuff by May 5, but at least I won't have to pull two to six paragraphs on a very particular mix of subjects out of my ass every day anymore), so blanket thanks to everybody who commented on my no doubt crazy-sounding last post, and sorry for the radio silence. Really, my life is not even vaguely as bad as I'm making it sound, so I'll try to be a lot less grim, while actually updating every once in a while.

Stuff I'm looking forward to: Friday, which brings The Avengers. One of the things I've been doing reflexively far too many times a day is checking “loki” tags on Tumblr; I guess I still can't get over the fact that the ship I'm interested in somehow emerged from Thor as that fandom's juggernaut. This basically never happens, which is why I'm so determined to enjoy it. (Ironically, while recently lurking on someone else's flist, I happened to catch a post in which one of their friends was complaining about there being “only” 82 fics for her particular fandom on Archive of Our Own: “This fandom is even smaller than Person of Interest!” Funnily enough, this caused me to stop, snort, then laugh long and loud, with a side order of bitter.;))

The other thing colonizing large sections of my brain, meanwhile, has been any and all advance media on Ridley Scott's Prometheus, which looks frankly amazing. I'm in that state where I don't necessarily want to spoil myself, but I also get the feeling that even if half the things I think might be true about the film's story turn out not to be, I'll still enjoy the hell out of it, and possibly find some way to re-use these ideas later on.

And what else? New Caitlin R. Kiernan story, outlining what was going on inside Albert Perrault's brain before his fatal accident, here (http://subterraneanpress.com/index.php/magazine/spring-2012/fiction-randomandom-thoughtshoughts-beforeefore-aa-fatalatal-crashrash-by-caitlin-r-kiernan/). New Francesca Forrest story in an exciting new venue, here (http://giganotosaurus.org/2012/05/01/tilia-songbird/). I get to spend at least part of tomorrow figuring out which one of the movies I've seen recently I'd like to review for ChiZine. Etc.

Things are fairly good. I think they'll likely continue so, especially if I work hard to make them.

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G for Gangsters, H for Hex City, here (http://musicatmidnight-gfiles.blogspot.ca/2012/04/meme-of-alphabet-part-4.html). Enjoy.

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Lackadaisy Undoing, Part 3
Fandom: Lackadaisy
Mordecai Heller/Viktor Vasko

( Read more... )

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A Meme of Alphabet, Part 3--E is for Enemy, F is for Faith--is up, over here (http://musicatmidnight-gfiles.blogspot.ca/2012/04/meme-of-alphabet-part-3.html). Enjoy. I'm now up to...K and L, I think, and am feeling fairly good about getting this stuff squared away a few days ahead of time. Now, if I can just manage to make myself do some genuine work, in the interim...

In other news, my P.A. ad just went down, so I'm trying to arrange interviews with the few people who actually responded. Given how hard I've been trying to manage this scheduling crap for myself and how crazy it seems to be making me, it probably would be good to have somebody else to help me with it. That said, I think the choice is fairly clear, barring any unforeseen personality clashes.

The night before last I watched a chunk of my PVRed copy of Equinox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equinox_(film)), the apparently seminal Denis Muren 1970 FX-travaganza which somehow managed to net a Criterion DVD release. Made for $6,500, it obviously had quite an influence on later filmmakers like Sam Raimi, since certain elements are extremely reminiscent of The Evil Dead. That said, however, the film has its own pleasures; there's an assault scene between Asmodeus and the hero's blind date involving a spooky hypno-ring, some amazing sex-faces and a Surprise! Cross! Attack! which must literally be seen to be believed. The whole movie is up here (http://youtu.be/Ab9v-Pjngh8), and said sequence starts around the 00:35 mark, so check it out.

Amended to add: Oh yeah, and one of the idiot picnickers is played by Frank Bonner (Herb Tarlek on WKRP in Cincinnatti), while Ed Begley, Jnr. was the assistant cameraman. This is prime SoCal cheese, guys.

All right. Back to the grind...

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...is up, here (http://musicatmidnight-gfiles.blogspot.ca/2012/04/meme-of-alphabet-part-2.html). C and D. Today I try to finish as many of the rest of them as I can--I'm already past E and F--so that I can be all caught up and move on to other stuff.

Also: The cover for Hauntings, coming out March, 2013 from Tachyon and edited by Ellen Datlow, is up over here (http://www.tachyonpublications.com/book/Hauntings.html?Session_ID=new). It'll feature a reprint of my contest-winning short story "Spectral Evidence", and puts me in some fairly august company generally, so I'm well-pleased.

Other than that...I feel a bit like I'm under a ridiculous amount of stress, and it's making me act out; already did something pretty stupid yesterday, then spent the rest of the night trying to make myself feel better about it. Now I'm exhausted and my back hurts. Time to bury myself in work!

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May 15 is the official release date of A Tree of Bones, so it's countdown time. Here's the first iteration of a Hexslinger Alphabet Meme, over at Music at Midnight (http://musicatmidnight-gfiles.blogspot.ca/2012/04/meme-of-alphabet-part-one.html). Enjoy! These will be going up, along with other stuff, every day until R-Day.

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...which is amusing and probably apropos, since one of the things I have to do in the very near future is to try and write about 500 words on speculative poetry for a Locus magazine roundtable (May 1 deadline). I guess my standards for poetry tend to be that A) these are the ideas so small they won't even fit a short story or a piece of Flash Fiction, B) the rhythm and tone suits itself to the subject matter and C) it needs to be paced in such a way that you could read it out loud, if you had to. Also that my poetry tends to be speculative in nature because my writing generally tends to be speculative in nature; I think I can count on one hand the poems I've written that were "about" something "real", and at least two of those were about Cal.

Anyhow:

CALVING
(For H.P. Lovecraft)

Finally, when it begins, the red hours
must grow long. The light goes out
one slow sliver at a time. The ice
peels off in eras. Underneath,
fleshy flowers loll and gape. There are
no words to tell, no eyes to see
such sights with. Knowledge spreads,
cancerous. Our hearts puff up like tumours
in its shadow, bloom, and burst.

With a roar like fossils fighting, the ice
splits crossways, and deep things surface.
Out of the blow-holes comes
a thin piping from the hollow earth's core:
echo-chamber, squeeze-box, tympanum.
It's a house of tricks, a fractal cluster,
mirrors made from mirrors.

Springtime comes on a harsh out-gasp.
The world begins to ripen and crack,
to rot. Old growth subsides.
The newness rages, spreading hairline,
until there are no more straight edges, only
cracks which breed strangeness,
split off new floes to float downstream,
their sloppy passage raising waves
which drown continents.

Breathe in your fears again, swallow hard.
Then breathe back out warm gusts
of disbelief, denial. Exhale, exhale.
Each puff a shape from this
forgotten alphabet, a name-made name,
underlaying daylight. The strange pulse
of stars, or a cold wind blown between
the spaces where things should be.

Your lack of faith maintains us. We wake
to rise, and take our waking slow,
yet steady. Forever breathing out—
the same words, always: Sooner still,
and sooner. Soon, soon, soon, until...

...Now.

The weekend went well. Mom came home from Florida, took Cal for Saturday night, so Steve and I ended up opting to see Guy Maddin's new film Keyhole at the TIFF Lightbox, which I'd never been to before. The theatre is, frankly, amazing, and so was the movie, though in a very different way. Here's a link to the trailer, if you want to check it out (http://youtu.be/56_Kot2DS-c). I warn you, however, that it makes the film seem far more coherent than it actually is.

On Sunday, meanwhile, we met Jason Taniguchi, his wife Jen Judge and their children, Evan and Kira, for lunch at the Eglinton mall Pickle Barrel. This was my first time seeing Kira at all (she's maybe...eight or ten months?), so that was cool, and moon_custafer and green_trilobite also came along, so it was quite the party. Kira is a fascinatingly mellow little girl, though she apparently doesn't sleep much, which is freaking her parents out. Cal mostly ignored Evan but was happy to parallel play with him on/in various Loonie-ride cars, a merry-go-'round and a $300.00 playhouse outside of Toys 'R' Us. A good time had by all, though like most social stuff, it knocked me out for the rest of the day and part of the next.

Monday night I met theengineer for dinner, which was also fun. And while I do sort of feel like I've done my seeing-people duty for the rest of the week, I'm trying to push past that.

Okay, there we go. Back to today's roster of genuine work: Promo stuff for A Tree of Bones that I plan to start cross-posting, the poetry thang, email, Experimental Film, Input(ting) All Notes. I have deadlines, after all.

This entry was originally posted at http://handful-ofdust.dreamwidth.org/456004.html. Please comment either here or there using OpenID.

...which I also forgot about, like so many other people. Maybe its hour has passed? At any rate, what I've got is a poem I forgot I'd written, and found by accident. Warning: This may be fairly obvious.

THE BLACK TELEPHONE

It rings in the night, inside
your closet, under your bed. In that
spare guestroom you never use. When you
pick up the receiver, you smell
someone else’s breath. The dial-tone
skips like a heartbeat. At first,
only dead air. Then some vague
water-logged words, unfathomable.

This is the drone of bees, the slur
of shifting earth, of silt. This is
the underground din of termites
dug deep and murmuring, hunger-drunk,
a crowd-wide madness of consumption
that will leave them homeless, dead
in sheaves, the wood gone to wax-paper,
a killing-jar hive.

Communication comes at a price. Language
infects. The wire spreads its blight, its vector.

Where are you calling from? You ask.
A distant voice answers, speaking no human tongue,
with no human tongue. Nothing you recognize.
Yet you reply courteously, patiently, telling it:
No, I don’t know you; I can’t make out what you’re
saying. Who? No one here by that name. What? No;
I don't know. How did you get this number?

What do you mean, 'what number'?

And there's a real post to be made, but probably not tonight. It's been raining all day, a slow drip torment, sapping everything. I can barely keep my eyes open.

This entry was originally posted at http://handful-ofdust.dreamwidth.org/455900.html. Please comment either here or there using OpenID.

Yesterday I went to The Black Swan, a pub near Broadview and Danforth, to see CZP's own Helen Marshall read her poetry at Hot-Sauced Words. Her co-reader was naturalist David Day, author of Nevermore: A Book of Hours, in which he channels his feelings about various extinct animals into elegaic obituary poems--also amazing, so I picked up a copy. There was also an open mike in the beginning at which Sandra Kasturi read and another at the end, during which audience members were encouraged to read prompt poems they'd written during the show. This was mine, which ended up winning both Best Poem and Best Performance (though I'll point out that I actually tied with two different people, in both categories):

INVOCABULARY

The small shall become great, the crooked become straight, and though blind, I shall see.
--Desumiis Luge.

At this very moment, what I'm avoiding most of all
is laying a curse on you.
I've thought about it, a lot, and really,
it's far too much trouble
for far too little reward. So I sit here
smiling pleasantly,
avoiding carving your name with my fingernail
into a sheet of soft lead, then melting it
over a fire. On no account
will I drip wax into water and see
which of the resultant
lumps looks most like your face, then
drive pins into the places
where your eyes should be. Neither will I bury
your cat alive in a cemetery at midnight,
or weave your hair into a nest for birds
to fuck and shit in. None of that.
The worst part of my own forbearance is how you
frankly don't even seem to notice how much effort
it takes for me to avoid making
my thoughts real, killing you long-distance,
sending black words down into your blood to bloom
like microbes. Nevertheless, I refuse
to spit into your food, to lick your spoons,
to show my vagina in your shaving mirror, in hopes
that its reflection will strike you blind. To take
photos of you while you sleep, then burn them.
You can't make me, no matter what you do,
or don't.

The title comes from the fact that I later told Sandra: "It's sort of creepy how easily I thought of those potential curses. It's like it's just some sort of alphabet I'm really, really familiar with." To which Helen, standing nearby, replied: "Well, it's kind of the vocabulary of your work, right?" Right.

Also, my success seems more a testament to the shocking power of saying the word "vagina" out loud in a room full of mildly drunk people than anything else, really. But hell, I'll take it.;)

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