Puck

A Journal of the Irrepressible

Archive for January, 2009

Seven Habits of Highly Effective Writers

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Daphne Gray-Grant has a great piece on Ragan, a site for professional communicators (read: PR hacks), about the kinds of things writers do to get the job done. I especially like #6, as procrastination is the hurdle I’ve had to deal with most often as a writing instructor and coach:

Write in small bursts. Creative work doesn’t require oodles of time. That first draft you need to write? It’s best done in dribs and drabs, a little bit at a time. Instead of procrastinating, effective writers persuade themselves to write a little each day, no matter how frazzled and frantic they feel. (Editing, on the other hand, usually needs space, time and quiet.)

About a dozen years ago, when I was writing a novel amidst three more-or-less full time jobs (including a technical writing gig for Broderbund software that bored me to tears), I adopted the motto “a sentence a day, even if it kills me.” The novel–and the software manuals–got done.

She also suggests separating writing from editing (great advice that I have a hard time following, a bad habit I freely admit slows me down), doing research before writing (again, great advice, though I’ve seen this abusued, as doing research sometimes becomes the excuse for not writing), and “dissecting” great writing “like a scientist” to see how it’s done.

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Written by Brian

January 31st, 2009 at 8:04 am

Posted in the secrets, writing

Sculpting Impossible Figures

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impossible figure sculpture“Impossible figures” are visual illusions that take advantage of the brain’s perceptual reasoning skills in order to form geometrical relationships that can’t actually exist in nature. As Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde explain in this article in Scientific American,

The artist M.C. Escher, for instance, depicted reversible staircases and perpetually flowing streams, whereas mathematical physicist Roger Penrose drew his famously impossible triangle and visual scientist Dejan  Todorović created an Elusive Arch that won him Third Prize of the 2005 Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest…. Several contemporary sculptors recently have taken up the challenge of creating impossible art. That is, they are interested in shaping real-world 3-D objects that nevertheless appear to be impossible. Unlike classic monuments – think of the Lincoln monument – which can be perceived by either sight or touch, impossible sculptures can only be interpreted (or misinterpreted, as the case may be) by the visual mind.

There’s a very cool slideshow that goes along with this article which explains how vantage point is exploited by sculptors in order to trick the brain into perceiving impossible figures in three dimensions.

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Written by Brian

January 28th, 2009 at 10:04 pm

ew, podcasting, and beasts on planets

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The Oxford English Dictionary’s December ‘08 list of new words includes “ew” (as in “yuck”) and “podcast.” Ew joins

a large family of imitative words expressing disgust or aversion, ew takes its place, alongside ugh, ough, auh, yah, pew, faugh, and many more, on the list of words which have attempted to tackle the age-old problem of how to represent in print what are essentially inarticulate sounds. Even within the scope of this one entry, many different opinions prevail as to how one should spell ew, as the variants section shows: we have found examples of euuw, euuww, euw, euww, ew, and eww, plus instances in which even more “u”s or “w”s (or both) are pressed into service: as many as 6 “u”s or 16 “w”s have been sighted. Read the rest of this entry »

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Written by Brian

January 27th, 2009 at 12:01 am

What My Cigarette Tastes Like

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I quit smoking five days ago, on Tuesday, after 36 years of smoking numerous cigarettes every day. That first day, I was scanning through the Boing Boing feed and came across this graph, which was originally posted here. Those first couple days were full of weird congruencies, reminding me of how bad tobacco is and how much I’d gain by quitting.

graph of how my cigarette tastes

As Harold commented, “Begs the question: How do you know what your dog’s anus tastes like?” Not sure the answer to that, but I’m not going to smoke a cigarette to find out.

The weird thing about quitting was the response I got from both my M.D. and a cognitive psychologist I visited for advice.

My M.D. was horrified that I had quit, “cold turkey,” as he said, without consulting with him to “make a plan.” Dude, said I, I have a plan (don’t smoke) and I hardly think that I’m going into that good night cold turkey. I had bought a box of 2 mg nicotine gum the day before. Later that same day, the cognitive shrink told me pretty much the same thing. Neither of them could grasp that they should be using the past tense as regards me and smoking. Throughout our conversations, they insisted on saying “when you quit.”

I had already read that one should pick a “special day” to quit. Tuesday, of course, was the day that Chief Justice Roberts fucked up on giving the oath to President Obama (oh, joyous words!), making the day pretty damn special for me and millions of others. Quitting Bush, quitting smoking: makes sense to me. Gaining Obama, gaining a smoke-free life: ditto.

The thing about quitting is that the nicotine replacement therapy is more expensive than smoking (well, in the short term, obviously). The 2 mg gum is about 75 cents per piece. So, in search of a cheaper remedy, I contacted my insurance company. Turns out, Washington citizens are entitled to free or low-cost replacement therapy–but I guess you have to be insured, which I am. So I called Group Health and they connected me with a “quitting coach.” I had a 20-minute conversation with Tommy the Coach and he, at least, was enthusiastic that I had quit. Tommy the Coach read me the prescribed use of the gum: “You must chew at least 10 pieces per day” (about the same as the number of cigarettes I’d been smoking for the past year or so) for 30 minutes per piece. I said, “Sure, will do,” with my fingers crossed. I’ve been chewing more like four pieces per day, as I break them in half to avoid the nausea that results from a dose of nicotine entering my blood stream through my stomach rather than my lungs.

So far, so good. I figured it’d be a lot harder than it has been. The worst thing has been what I’ve been describing to friends as “the phantom limb”: the one that keeps dragging an imaginary cigarette to my lips. Makes sense, though: I’ve just amputated a habit I’ve been indulging in for 36 years. The neural pathways are deeply ingrained with that motion. But the weird, uncomfortable sensation of the phantom limb is already fading, thank Goddess, and my brain, old dog, is apparently still capable of learning new tricks.

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Written by Brian

January 24th, 2009 at 12:08 pm

Posted in drugs, the secrets

La Dolce Vita by Fellini

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review by Brian Charles Clark

La Dolce Vita – “the sweet life” – slices seven days out of the life of journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni). We get adultery, murder, suicide, an orgy, a strange and monstrous fish, a castle darkly lit, and several goddesses of the silver screen.

This wondrous film by Federico Fellini is the watershed, if not the masterpiece, in his transition from realistic to more free associative, dreamy and artistic films. Always more a poet than a storyteller, Fellini flexes his episodic skills to create characters by synergizing vignettes, creating a sum greater than the parts.

What emerges are memorable characters wrestling with the universe about the meaning of life. Fellini had a knack for shooting on sets and locations at once particular – and deeply imbued with a sense of place – and archetypal. He also had a knack for working with photographers – in this case Otello Martelli, whose career began in 1919 – capable of photographing dreamscapes with great depth and clarity.

Rubini thinks his existence is bleak. He feels trapped in a meaningless life and marriage, and seeks to emulate Steiner, an older man and an intellectual. Steiner tells the younger man,

Don’t be like me. Salvation doesn’t lie within four walls…. Even the most miserable life is better than a sheltered existence in an organized society where everything is calculated and perfected.

And Marcello agrees, saying to one of the screen goddesses (Yvonne Furneaux), “A man who agrees to live like this is a finished man, he’s nothing but a worm!”

Directionless and desperate, Rubini refuses wormhood emphatically, instead rampantly pursuing the sensuous and the sensual with animal vigor. La Dolce Vita is filled with memorable scenes (like the wading sequence in the Trevi Fountain which carries the myth of Artemis espied in her bath by Aktion to its sexual conclusion) and is, at three hours, transporting enough to warp time.

Originally published on Curled Up With A Good DVD.

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Written by Brian

January 22nd, 2009 at 10:59 pm

Posted in film, reviews

On Joanna Russ

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Sometime in 2002, I responded with a proposal to a call for papers on Joanna Russ from British science fiction scholar cover of paperback edition of On Joanna RussFarah Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn accepted the proposal on the condition that I not write about The Female Man, Russ’s most famous novel – and pretty much the only thing of Russ’s anyone reads anymore.That was fine with me, and I proceeded to write a paper that touches on pretty much everything but The Female Man.

It was a long road, full of switch backs and revisions, but On Joanna Russ has finally been published Wesleyen University Press. Edited by Mendelsohn, contributors include Samuel R. Delaney (it’s too bad he and Russ never conceived a child), Tess Williams, Gary Wolfe, myself and a host of others.

My essay, the last one in the book, is called “The Narrative Topology of Resistance in the Fiction of Joanna Russ.” In a nutshell, I try to show that narrative is a space of gendered topology; in other words, that fiction is a landscape of cocks and cunts. Russ certainly resisted that landscape. Her writing is a macrophage ravaging the immune system of mainstream science fiction. I tried to take a snapshot of the action (a highly academic one) to capture the lesions, superations and oozings of consciousness through space that I found in her work.

Thank goddess I had Delaney’s great essay to guide me. After the book is available, I’ll post the essay.

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Written by Brian

January 15th, 2009 at 11:20 pm

Buddha Machine

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buddha machineAs a drone lover, I rejoiced to learn about the Buddha Machine. It looks like an old transistor radio and plays a variety of looped recordings performed by fm3. An iPhone app is available from the fm3 site, as well as some loops. Click the play buttons at random intervals to stream dreamy ambient music. The free loops include synth washes, piano and electric guitar, all quite lovely.

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Written by Brian

January 13th, 2009 at 10:31 pm

Posted in mp3, music

O Squidgy Galaxy

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Good news from Harper’s weekly email:

o squidgy galaxyScientists discovered the “magnetosphere,” a layer of ions and electrons surrounding the earth described by one physicist as a “warm plasma cloak,” and a study suggested that the Milky Way is traveling through space 100,000 miles per hour faster than previously thought, meaning it will collide with the galaxy Andromeda far sooner than predicted. “The galaxies will be dramatically stirred up,” said Gerry Gilmore of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University, “but they are very squidgy, so they will stick together and eventually all the stars will die out, and it will become one huge, dead galaxy.”

“Squidgy” is Brit English for “soft and squishy” and “maybe a bit fat,” according to the Urban Dictionary. But in the case of colliding galaxies, I think it may mean “zorch strokin’, fast and bulbous.” Just a guess.

In any case, another delightful union to look forward to.

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Written by Brian

January 13th, 2009 at 10:11 pm

Virginia Lee Burton – A Sense of Place

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Virginia Lee Burton a sense of place DVD coverThe multi-talented Virginia Lee Burton is best remembered for her pioneering work as a children’s picture book writer and illustrator. Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel remains a steady seller for its publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, since it was first published in 1939. She was first and foremost a graphic designer who, in her home of Folley Cove, Massachusetts, taught the locals how to design and block print fabric.

From a photographic point of view, Rawn Fulton’s film Virginia Lee Burton: A Sense of Place is boring: for all Burton’s geometries, the drama of angularity that plays throughout her illustrations in her books and the print designs that Folley Cove Designers still sells, the camera simply pans across pages and fabrics with plain-Jane horizontals and verticals, penetrating the material with slow zooms, the old in-and-out. It works, but it’s dull. Continue reading on Curled Up with a Good DVD…

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Written by Brian

January 5th, 2009 at 9:58 pm

A Hole in a Fence

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review by Brian Charles Clark

A hole in a fence DVD coverOur image of Brooklyn—of New York City in general—is of wall-to-wall people. But, as filmmaker D.W. Young discovered, there are plenty of wide-open spaces in the city. You just have to know where to look. Like through a hole in a fence.

The hole in question gapes in a fence surrounding an abandoned industrial area in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. A home for the homeless and a canvass for graffiti artists, the open space behind the hole in the fence becomes a sounding board for a young architect (Benjamin Uyeda) and filmmaker. In A Hole in a Fence, Young explores issues of class, urban development, the renewal of nature and a host of other issues. Continue reading on Curled Up with a Good DVD…

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Written by Brian

January 5th, 2009 at 9:54 pm

Posted in film, human rights, reviews