books

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Morgoth, Arda, redemption, morality, and blame (not the name of a law firm)

I was out sick yesterday, but the following is audio I recorded this morning about ideas of redemption and recreation in the world of J.R.R. Tolkien, especially as goes for beings and characters such as Melkor/Morgoth and Sauron and the like.  It’s a bit meandering, I fear, and it’s longer than other recent stuff has been, but please let me know if you find it interesting, and if you have any comments on the subject(s), or on such audio posts in general, I would be glad to receive your feedback. I’ll probably be turning it into a “video” eventually, for YouTube.  I don’t know, are those easier to partake of than the audio here on the blog?  Certainly the storage availability on YouTube is functionally unlimited, but I’m not yet anywhere near the limits of my personal storage here on WordPress yet, anyway.

This probably almost would count as a podcast, though I don’t know whether I feel comfortable arrogating that status to my measly ponderings.

Let me know what you think, please, and thank you.

Addendum:  Here is the link to In Deep Geek.  

I also highly recommend Nerd of the Rings.

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Peculiar thoughts prior to the 1st of 2 holiday weekends

It’s Friday morning, and I did not walk to the train today.  Neither did I walk back from the train yesterday evening.  I didn’t really think I was going to do the “yesterday evening” thing, and I didn’t really intend to do the “this morning” thing, because I didn’t want to push it after having taken a long time off since doing any longish walking.

I don’t feel fatigued or sore or anything, but there is some chafing here and there that tends to happen when I restart walking seriously, but which I somehow forget every time until it happens again.  There’s some flaw there in the code I’m running in my brain, it seems.  Then again, there are many flaws in my brain code, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.

I’m scheduled to work tomorrow, so I will be writing a blog post unless they cancel the work day because no one is going to show up.  As far as I know, though, I will be working, so keep a weather eye on the horizon.  If the workday is canceled, then I guess the next blog post I will write will be on Tuesday morning, since I think even our office is going to be closed on Monday.

I’m writing on my laptop computer today, since I have the time before the train comes, and I’m not sweaty and there are plenty of seats.  I’ve been trying to be upbeat and whimsical and so on in my recent blog posts, but I don’t think I’m going to do that today.  For one thing, those posts don’t seem to garner as much attention and readership as my despondent and despairing and hateful blog posts.

I’m not sure why that is.  Perhaps the things which I find interesting and entertaining and “positive” to discuss are not what most readers find engaging.  If one is to base one’s assessment on the “reels” that are shown on Facebook, which I’ve been sort of auditing lately out of (rapidly dwindling) curiosity, then people’s interests are very silly and rather pathetic, though they can often be quite funny.  Of course, it’s probably rather silly and very pathetic that I’m even indulging my morbid curiosity by looking at them.

I haven’t been reading any books at all for some time.  Just ask Kindle; it apparently keeps track of my “streaks” and “records” and whatnot.  That is ever-so-slightly disconcerting, but I know there are essentially no humans involved in keeping track of me personally—at least not with respect to my reading.  It’s all mindless, algorithmic stuff, and the algorithms aren’t all that good, it seems, because Amazon is pretty bad at recommending books in which I’m interested*.

Sean Carroll and Sam Harris are much better at finding people with ideas I want to explore; a good many of the books I’ve read in recent years have been by people I’ve first encountered in one of both of their podcasts.  I guess that’s not too surprising.  I’m interested in their thoughts, so I’m likely to be interested in people they find interesting.

I still haven’t set up my health insurance.  I have a real mental block about this, or an emotional block, or whatever.  I don’t know how much it’s going to cost, for one thing, but the real barrier is, I think, my self-hatred.  I worry that, if I get health insurance, I’m going to feel obligated in some strange way to take care of myself and try to maintain and then improve my overall health and lifespan.  But that’s only going to prolong my existence, which I don’t consider a win.

I’ve probably mentioned this before, but I have almost a fantasy of being diagnosed with some sort of inevitably terminal illness that will give me a short bit of time at least to try to connect with and say goodbye to people I love, and which will then kill me with relatively little mess.  It’s the sort of thing I think many people would want at the end of their lives (though they probably would want to put it off as long as possible) if the symptoms weren’t too unpleasant and could be palliated at reasonably low cost, so one wasn’t absolutely miserable in the time approaching one’s death.

Unfortunately, we usually do not get to choose, and we often get no warnings.

Well, actually, in a sense, we all get very long-term warnings.  Any sensible person is on constructive notice from an early age that someday death will come for them.  I suppose most people try to avoid thinking about it, but that doesn’t make it go away.

It’s interesting occasionally to think of the various other animals in the world and wonder how many of them ever recognize, at anything other than a rudimentary, acute, fight-or-flight response level, that they are going to die.  I think very few of them do.  Perhaps the cetaceans do, since many of them are both very intelligent and social, and they appear to communicate to some significant degree.  I’m not sure how much even the other great apes (apart from humans) actually recognize their own individual mortality.  I sometimes suspect that elephants know, but I’m not sure what gives me that impression.

If there are birds that are aware of mortality, I suppose it would probably be the corvids.  I guess it would be appropriate if ravens knew about death.

Huh.  That may end up being the substance of my pre-holiday message, ironically enough, though there really isn’t any substance or any point to what I’ve written today.  Of course, that’s probably entirely appropriate, since there is no apparent teleological substance to life itself.  It just happens, and then it stops.  This may be true even of the universe as a whole.

That’s okay.  Something doesn’t have to have some external purpose to be worth happening.  Just as one can enjoy reading a book or watching a movie or show, or listening to a song, that has no deep message or purpose or meaning other than itself, one can—potentially—enjoy a life without any meaning other than its own existence.

If only I could put that set of ideas into practice.  Alas, we here return to the faulty code I’m running.  If only I could update that more readily.  Goodness knows I’d do something more useful than Google and Microsoft and all the others do with most of their updates.  I may despise myself, but I do think comparatively highly of at least some of my capacities.

You would think that would give me at least some sense of satisfaction, but unfortunately it makes me feel worse about my character and nature.  And that seeming contradiction bring me back to lamenting my buggy code, and thus I appear to be stuck in a meta-level loop, or a perhaps in an old, Basic-style “Return without Gosub” error.

Oh, well.  Have a good day please, and if I don’t write anything else before then, I hope those of you who celebrate it have a Merry Christmas.

*YouTube has a better track record with video recommendations, but that’s deteriorating gradually, or I am, or both.

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Would YOU want to visit Cape October or Murder Beach?

I’m back at the train station this morning, writing as I wait.  There seem to be fewer people waiting at this time than at comparable times earlier this week and last week.  I cannot say anything more broadly, though, since the new train schedule has thrown any generalizations awry, and made the detection of legitimate patterns (as opposed to constellation-style perceived patterns in the random) tricky at best.  It will require more time and observation to learn if there really are tendencies to be seen in the number of people waiting for the train at a given time in the morning.

I left work early yesterday, because I was really starting to crash.  I ate and then fell asleep by about 5:30 pm.  I then woke up around 9:30 thanks to some irritating noises from outside, and I decided to watch some music reactions to songs from OK Computer.

At that time, I carried out a notion that I’d considered in the past:  I got up and, in addition to singing, “danced” along with the songs.  I use “scare quotes” because my dancing is never going to be considered an art form, though it is at least a bit of exercise.

Since I was alone, I was more than able to “dance like no one is watching”.  If anyone was watching—spying on me, perhaps, for some inscrutable reason—well, they got what they richly deserved.  Possibly they suffered the fate of those who have dared to glimpse Yog-Sothoth or one of the worse forms of Nyarlathotep:  horror and madness.  At the very least, they would be at risk for PTSD.

“Dance like you’re listening to the cosmic flutists that eternally entertain Azathoth” might not be a catchy expression, but in my case, it probably applies.

Still, it was kind of fun—I got somewhat melodramatic because I was singing along to the music as I danced.  I also tend to air drum at various points while dancing, because it’s all part of the rhythm.  Anyway, I went back to sleep not too much after midnight, and actually woke up to my alarm playing Good Morning Good Morning by the Beatles.  That’s a remarkably rare occurrence.

In the morning yesterday, I saw a Readers Wildlife Photos post on WEIT in which the pictures were taken in Cape May, New Jersey.  My thoughts traveled down peculiar lines, as they are wont to do, and it occurred to me that there could be “capes” named after various months—if indeed Cape May is named after the month and not something else entirely.

I ran through several months and they worked to varying degrees, but of course, once I got to “Cape October”, it occurred to me that this would be an excellent name for a horror story, or maybe even a murder mystery.  Perhaps it was a long spit of land with a hill at the end that had been first been discovered and colonized by those who went on to become Ray Bradbury’s “Autumn People”.

It could even be the beginning of a two-parter, paired with another title that occurred to me a long time ago:  Murder Beach.  That one’s easy, because I’ve often thought that Myrtle Beach sounds almost like “murder beach”, and I was amazed that no one—as far as I could find—had written anything with that title.

I do this sort of thing rather often:  I think of fun titles that sometimes lead me to write stories.  I won’t say it’s my usual way—normally I think of the story first—but it does happen.

Of course, I haven’t begun writing nor even plotting any of these stories, and I haven’t gone any further than a sort of plot summary for last week’s rom-com idea of Up-dating.  As I think I mentioned last week, I see the latter story as more of a screenplay than a book, but I haven’t written a screenplay since high school, and the one I wrote then wasn’t really in official screenplay format.  It was just a “play” with some thrown-in camera and other descriptive directions in parentheses.

It was, according to my friend Joe, a movie that was not worthy of its excellent title—Night Vision.  He was far from wrong, as was usually the case with Joe, but I had tried to write a screenplay that I could actually produce with the equipment at hand:  a VHS camera belonging to the father of my friend Jim Leone.

It never went very far, because it turned out that wasn’t really enough equipment to make and then edit even such a cheap movie.  It could be done now, I’m quite sure, with the readily available and cheap-to-free video and audio mixing software, to say nothing of the ubiquitous, high-quality video cameras, many of which we carry around in our pockets.

I did write some music for Night Vision, including a main theme that I still know by heart, and which is quite pretty, I think.  Oh, and I did a horror/bad guy’s theme for it that was grown from the kernel of Chopin’s Funeral March played backwards*.  That’s pretty good, too.

So, I still have no complete dearth of creative ideas.  I just lack the will to make them, including to write the many stories that still lie waiting in my head.  Maybe, if I were regularly able to get a total of nearly eight hours’ sleep, like I did last night, I would do better.  Certainly I feel a bit more chipper today than I normally do in the morning.

I suppose if there were some wealthy patron who commissioned some or all of these works from me, I might be able just to sit down and crank them out, since the actual process of writing isn’t that difficult.  But I sincerely doubt that’s going to happen.  The only thing making it more likely than winning the lottery is the fact that I don’t play the lottery, and any probability at all is greater than zero**.

Anyway, we’re getting close to my stop, and I’ve already written quite a lot this morning, so I’ll wrap this up.  I hope you’re all having a decent run-up to the oncoming holiday storm of Christmas and New Year’s and various other solstice-adjacent celebrations.

If there are any wealthy people out there interested in sponsoring me to write any of the above-mentioned stories or screenplays or whatnot, please, get in touch.

*This was, supposedly, what the carousel from Something Wicked This Way Comes played when it was running in reverse and thus making people younger, and that’s where I got the idea of using this as a theme for my villain, Jameson Summers, who was in a sense returning from the dead.

**I suppose that, in principle, one could win the lottery without even playing it, if for instance someone bought a ticket and gave it to another person as a surprise or to pay a debt or something along those lines.  That is an extremely unlikely event, and when layered atop another independently extremely unlikely event—the ticket actually winning—it seems still perhaps less likely than a wealthy patron deciding to sponsor my writing.

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The blogs of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo.

Hello and good day, everyone.  It’s Thursday morning, the last Thursday of May (2020 (AD or CE (Gregorian calendar))), and—at least where I live—people are starting to go back to work.  We can only wait and see whether this will be something that large numbers of the population will regret or not, but I can certainly sympathize with their desire.

I haven’t yet written anything for Iterations of Zero this week.  I could post one of a few bits that I’ve already written; I have two pieces primed and ready.  However, those essays are rather dark and somewhat negative; they have a sardonic and grim character, and that’s not what I want to get across right now.  I’m trying very hard to be positive (this despite appallingly wet weather, even by south Florida standards, which is making my chronic back pain flare up something fierce*).

So, instead of using either one of those articles, which I’ll save for later, I think I’ll make a post embedding my five original song “videos”** which are up on YouTube.  I’ve said before, half-jokingly, that I have roughly half-an-album’s-worth of original songs recorded and produced, and I’m inclined to work toward another half, just for shits and giggles.  But it would be nice to have more people tell me what they think about the songs before I put a lot of effort in.  I have received good reviews from those who have listened so far (and they weren’t all family members).  Considering the limitations under which they were made, I think the songs have come out remarkably well.  Still, I’m definitely my own primary audience thus far.

This isn’t so terrible; it’s nice that, just as I enjoy reading my own stories, I also enjoy listening to my own songs.  But I do face a serious obstacle in that I’m built or was trained or raised in such a way as to find self-promotion extremely difficult, and even distasteful.  Some large and loud part of me finds it unseemly to tell people, “Hey, listen to this song that I made,” or even, “Hey, you should read this book that I wrote.”  I’m also terribly embarrassed to be in the same room as someone listening to one of my songs.

I think I would benefit greatly from awakening just a little bit of the Trumpian spirit that must surely lie dormant within me.  When I’m honest with myself, and can push past my cringing, I really do think the songs are pretty good, especially considering what I have to work with***.  And in all honesty, I think my stories and books are quite good, and if it wouldn’t be just supremely cheesy, I’d go on Amazon and rate them each five stars and give them dazzling reviews.  That’s probably what Kanye West or The Donald would do, but I don’t know if I’m capable of it.

Speaking of my books, I’m about seventy pages from finishing the second to last run-through of Unanimity.  This means that the final turn, with layout, cover design, etc., is fast approaching.  I’m tempted to say that I feel like Frodo finally reaching the Plateau of Gorgoroth, but Unanimity is definitely NOT like the One Ring.  That is to say, I don’t consider it a cursed or dark or deadly burden of which I’m eager to be rid.  Quite the contrary, I love it dearly****.  But it has been a helluva journey through spacetime and through mindspace and workspace and whatever other phase space one might conjure to describe the process.  It’s certainly taken longer in proper time than the journey portion of The Lord of the Rings took‡, though the main-arc events of that book, from “A Long-expected Party” even just until “The Scouring of the Shire” last at least a good seventeen or so years, if memory serves.  Correct me if I’m wrong†, please.

With that good and exciting news, I think I’ll wrap things up for the week.  As always, I wish you all the best of all possible things, both short-term and long-term, both deep and shallow.  And though it is true that, if wishes were horses, we’d all be hip deep in horseshit, that wish is nevertheless entirely sincere.

TTFN

*Do you hear that high, plaintive, irritating sound, Mr. Anderson?  That is the sound of the world’s tiniest Stradivarius playing a doleful tune.

**This is in scare quotes because the video portion of these songs is just a fixed shot of the Iterations of Zero symbol.  It’s simply a fact that YouTube is one of the best, most available means by which one can spread an audio file and make it available, in principle, to the largest possible audience, but to use it, you need some kind of “video”.  There is no comparable “YouWoofer” or other stereo-speaker-titled venue for purely audio tracks for people to share, though podcasts are certainly all the rage.  Likewise, Facebook lets one upload videos as one wishes (true to its name, I must admit), but if there’s a way to upload purely audio files to the platform, I’ve yet to discover it.  Ditto for Twitter.

***Cue the “back-alley” doctor scene from Tim Burton’s Batman, in which the nascent Joker first sees his new face.

****And you will, too.  Believe me.  Everyone agrees with me.  No one’s ever done a book like this before.  It’s huge (it really is).

‡Or brandybuck or even gamgee.  Ha ha.

†I know, I know—I?  Wrong?  I!?  Don’t be absurd!

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Thou know’st we blog by wit, and not by witchcraft; And wit depends on dilatory time.

CREATOR: gd-jpeg v1.0 (using IJG JPEG v62), quality = 75

Okay, so…

It’s another Thursday, and I again don’t have any goal or point in mind as I begin writing this weekly blog post.  There’s not much new to communicate, except to say that certain previously mentioned things are now more imminent…as, I suppose, should always be the case if any progress is being made at all.

Specifically, I’ve almost finished my design for the cover picture for Free Range Meat,* and plan to have that story out and available for purchase on Amazon (Kindle format only) before August arrives.  It will be available on Kindle Unlimited, like all my short stories, so those of you who subscribe to that will be able to read it for free.  This may or may not be the case with Unanimity when it becomes ready for publication.  The paperback version of that book is going to be sizable, and it’s probably going to be in “trade paperback” format, since in smaller form it would be quite a fat book and/or have quite small print.  I’m not sure how I’ll settle that issue.  Of course, Unanimity will also be available for Kindle.

On other fronts, I’ve been semi-obsessively laboring over the mixing and production of my latest song, Catechism, as I think I mentioned last week.  I’ve learned some new things about the process since I made Schrodinger’s Head and Breaking Me Down, and part of me aches to go back and completely redo them, but that impulse isn’t strong enough—for now—to engender action.  It’s just such a time-consuming process, and when I’m doing it, other things get pushed relatively to the side, including actual, regular practicing of the guitar and even my editing and writing time.

As I’ve said before, this would all be easier and happen faster if I were able to write full time, but since rent must be paid and food must be eaten if I’m to continue writing at all (at least, for more than a month or so), I’m afraid I have to pay those opportunity costs.  Oh, well.  I’m hardly alone in this.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make before I interrupted myself is that, because I’m learning as I go, Catechism is almost certainly going to be better produced and mixed than were my earlier efforts.  Whether or not it’s a good song is a judgement from which I have to recuse myself, being biased as I am.**  It’s peppy, certainly, and nothing like as dark as Breaking Me Down…though not as light-hearted as Schrodinger’s Head either, I have to admit.  I think my composition skills are improving along with my mixing and production skills, and hopefully that means the music is better.  In any case, I kind of like it; I guess that’s got to be worth something.

One of the slightly annoying facts about getting close to putting something out that’s not my main art form is that, as I finish, I get these gnawing and nagging ideas of more songs to do, and I have to resist jumping immediately into such pursuits.  Though editing and all related business is going fairly well, there’s no doubt that it’s been at least mildly slowed by my other activities.  And I have so many more stories to write once this one is done and published.  I have a novella to finish, tentatively titled Escape Valve, and ideas for many other short stories that would be fun.  I also have Neko/Neneko to write, and Dark Fairy and the Desperado, and Changeling in a Shadow World, and more beyond that.  I want to write the sequels to Mark Red, probably after doing a second edition of that novel.  Also, I plan to publish a hard copy collection of my short stories, tentatively titled Dr. Elessar’s Cabinet of Curiosities, which I may have mentioned before.

I really need to win the lottery (which is vanishingly unlikely, especially since I don’t play it), or to find some rich benefactor somewhere.  If anyone knows such a person, I’d be deeply grateful if you’d send them my way.

And with that thought, I’ll call the blog post good for today, and get back to those other things that won’t let me go.  I hope you’re all enjoying the summer, if you’re in the northern hemisphere (and that you’re having a decent winter if you’re in the southern).  As is always implicit, I’d welcome your comments and feedback about anything you feel like commenting on, as long as it’s in good taste…or in bad taste that I happen to share.

TTFN

*A copy of the draft of the central image is at the head of this blog post.  Yes, it’s supposed to be blurry.

**This does not always take the form of bias in my favor, by the way; I think I’m not alone in being especially harsh in judging my own works, which makes it difficult to promote them enthusiastically.  I occasionally long for the unbridled narcissism of a Kanye West or a Donald Trump.  Well…not really.  But something at least a little closer to such a state would probably serve me better than my frequent and sometimes vicious self-condemnation, overlaid upon a baseline of irritating—and rather ironic—pomposity.  Que lástima.