Thank You AJC - Press for Tiny Bedtime Stories

I am as pleased as pleased can be to report that Suzanne Van Atten has featured Tiny Bedtime Stories in the Atlanta Journal Constitution as this week's "Quirky Book of the Week." I am especially glad that the article highlights two of her favorite stories. You can see the article here, and get more information about the book here. If you are interested in poetry that is a little more obviously poetry, you can see this, this, or my chapbook "Just Got No Hustle" here.

Reminder, re The Guess What Is in the Boxes Contest: I am out of town and will be off line the next couple days, so Round 7 probably will not start until next Monday.

Nothing yesterday, again. Sorry!

I don't have much to share right now, and it is looking like a full day. Best regards to all, and I will have a full post up sometime this weekend.

Tired day

Perhaps from so much Shakespeare yesterday. Now I can't stop trying to think of more fun things to Twitter. The syllabus of a great works course? Hitchcock's oevre (HT @andreakremer)? Now @russmarshalek has me thinking about RPGs and trading cards as vehicles for novels. So many fun things to think about. But now for bed.

Nothing yesterday, little today, again

Sorry - the new meds are actually fine, but that means more involvement in non-internet life.

Today I really mean it

I don't feel well again today, and I am interested to see how the new higher dose of seizure meds plays out. The only thing I am considering post-wise are a couple of things that have come to mind in the aftermath of writing the 7 things post yesterday.

The first is that I was not really raised atheist. Not religious, either. There is not really a word for it. We did not attend church, but moral, civic, and societal obligations were deeply stressed.

The other is that there is one more thing I am irrationally frightened of - space. There is nothing you could do to get me to go up in a spaceship. And yet I am a big fan of most space movies, even a lot of pretty bad ones.

Nothing yesterday, little today

I have some stuff to do, and not feeling well. I would like to respond to this post from Lee Stranahan that he mentioned on Twitter, but that will probably wait for another day. Need to see what I can put together that vaguely resembles an actual accounting of myself as a professional poet.

Addendum- I didn't even do that, but I have rested well, eaten properly, worked on Unless & Until, and did the 7 Things post, above. Can't commit, health-wise, to some things.

Wonderful Evening

The reading went really well. The folks at Wordsmith's were great - totally supportive and enthusiastic - and the audience had amazing energy. I don't read my work publicly very often and it was a boost to get so much positive feedback. The disc with the video of the Prelude to Unless and Until did not play quite as well in performance as it had on the wall of my apartment on the practice run-throughs, but that is always the way of it, and everybody seemed to dig it the most, glitches and all.

Laurel Snyder read beautifully. I really enjoy her work and it was a great performance - need to see her more often!

Megan I see very often, as we are near neighbors, but last night she was in fine fettle, full performance mode, and put on a hell of a show. Her new book, the Desense of Nonfense, is hot stuff, and she read selections from each section to give a sense of the whole collection.

Here is hoping there will be news of an Unless and Until website, more Anomity, more OPOYUL~, and more that is due for subversion to be identified at this blog in the future. For today, a recap is what there is, but it was a good show and worth recapping.

Not so much calling bullshit as, what -

Interesting post up at Kevin Kelly's Technium blog - "As if..." - [as if there isn't always an interesting post up at that blog.

But, because I am not interested in spelling everything out for me or for you, I will call something other than bullshit on the conclusion in that post. Just a crude way of saying I disagree but can't be bothered to really boil it down to fibers and bullet points.

Here is a quote from that Mr. Kelly's post:

In this Age of Metaphor, love will be the signal of real. One of the ways we will know when a thing has passed from "as-if to is" is when it earns unalloyed love from humans. When a virtual place wins the kind of full-blooded love that a real place on Earth wins. When a toy pet earns the same love as a breathing pet. When a synthetic actor earns the same love as a human movie star, when a virtual economy incites the same passion as the larger economy, when a global superorganism gains the same affection as a hamster.

Then it will no longer be as-if and it will just be.

Up until about a third or half of the way through that post I was very excited about the opoyuliness of it all. I am giddy at all promiscuous layers of fake-ness and imitation, of which theme parks aspiring to Disneyland is a good example but my favorite example is extruded plastic wallets that are molded with leather grain and fake stitching. I also like architecture that copies Greek temples, where the molded bits above the columns are copies of copies of the ends wooden beams that used to stick out over the stacks of material that held the roof up.

So, Mr. Kelly was talking about the "As if" society and discussing when it becomes real. He says it becomes real when we as individuals love it. NO. Nothing becomes real. Computers or networks or such might become real when they love us, perhaps. When they are a "they."

Hey! I am going to name drop! After a decade or so of minimal and sporadic email correspondence, I finally met Mr. John Hodgman in person at his Atlanta signing for "More Information than You Require." I hope to buy him a beverage someday and have an actual conversation because his work and the emails we have exchanged strongly suggest to me that I would enjoy conversing with him in person. Even so, that might turn out to be untrue. Because, as we both agreed in the minute or so of interaction at the signing table, "E-people aren't real." Ten years of interpersonal awareness doesn't change that. Blogs don't change that. Twitter won't change that. Second Life and World of Warcraft won't change that.

E-people and E-things exist in our heads. Like mathematics, the platonic cave shadows they cast in our heads might be internally consistent and useful - whatever the internet equivalent is of calculating the specs for a bridge that won't fall down - but you are never going to know until you know. And, most of the time, most of what you will be knowing is yourself, whether you realize it or not.

Day 7 and all that

I am back home from Minnesota. It is cold there, and it just trips me out that so many people live in wintry places and just put up with it.

In lieu of anything really on point, it occurred to me the other day to write about two images I use in my head for my own convenience. One is the hopper. The hopper is the basket for topics I am ready to speak about. I suppose it is like the hopper on a pitching machine. The topic is in the hopper, and it will shoot out of my mouth or onto this blog. The other is the big lazy susan. Projects I want to do are on the lazy susan. There might not be one in front of me at the moment, but there are many out there, spread around the circumference, and when I think of something that goes with a given potential project I can just put it on the pile. If it comes time to do a project, just pull on the edge and pull the project to right in front of me.

On the lazy susan and hopefully soon to be in the hopper is my part as one of the opening acts for Megan Volpert's book launch this Saturday at Wordsmith's - on the square in Decatur - TIME CORRECTION - THIS EVENT BEGINS AT 5PM - And I am probably going first, because my bit is the only one with techie stuff.

Yes! Third time is the charm -

I am hereby posting for a third day in a row. Haven't Twittered today at all (except just a tiny bit) because (1) I don't feel well; (2) I am preoccupied; and (3) the energy I have had has been devoted largely to Wii. Check me out! I am au courant!

With regard to the DIY book discussed in the last post- I am enjoying the section on music much more than the section on poetry, which was what set me off yesterday. There is some good information on pirate radio in the UK (more specifically, in international waters near the UK) and on the relationships between Zine culture and Riot Grrrl - showing that in many ways the public perception of Riot Grrrl everything was inaccurate. Interesting. BUT I think the author of DIY needs some brush up on American music history- there is a paragraph or so leading up to skiffle taking off in the UK that does not make sense, although the big picture is as accurate as really needs be.

Delusions of Banjer today, for the first time in a while. Thank you, Bad Livers.

The Only Thing That is Difficult

The only thing that is difficult is putting your pants on over your head. In theory, it is possible and would even be easy that I could do at least one post every day for a year (excluding Jan 1st, which I missed).

It is calculated future disappointment for me to set out projects like this. If I do this one, several days will read "'Here Is a Post for Today' - A post for today." Just so you know.

What to say. OK. I read a book yesterday and am reading another one today that have me a little riled up about online communication. The one I am still reading has an obvious connection. "DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture" by Amy Spencer. The rise and evolution of 'Zines and other DIY anti-mainstream self-produced culture. It is pretty interesting stuff - tracing threads from Dada to punk to queercore to riotgrrl to crafting. I recommend it, at about 100 pages in.

The other book, the one I read yesterday is a less obvious candidate for "get somebody riled up about actively participating in communication online." The book is "Love All the People" and is a collection of all of Bill Hick's words - sets, interviews, notes, sayings, articles. Highly recommended. He was a fire and brimstone preacher/shaman who was visible in this dimension as a stand-up comedian. He is a personal hero of mine.

Well, the obvious connections between me and him are Georgia, religious upbringing, dedicated smoking, and terminal cancer totally unrelated to smoking. He had less than a year after his diagnosis (pancreatic metastasized to liver, advanced stage IV). I was anticipating less than five years at diagnosis (right temporal mixed glioma, low stage III), but that was almost eight years ago.

His modus of righteous fury and catharsis could never be mine, but it is tremendous and wonderful. It is not a matter of "agreeing" with everything he says, and I don't laugh at everything in his set, but he was righteous and motivated and true to his self. I hope I can be as well.

He did not understand why it was so difficult for the American media to grok what he was up to - his audiences were often totally on board. He was huge in England.

It was inspiring (and a little wearying) to read his work and be reminded so forcefully of my own abortive lunges toward more public avenues for attempting reclamation of some particularly noxious cultural waste. I had a recommendation lined up from Kenneth Koch for applying to MFA programs and then realized I would never write what I need to write if I went through academic channels for poetry. I repeatedly attempted in high school, college, and out in the world to get involved with video, writing, and comedy scenes and found that attractive women who did not want to date any of the guys there (and were funnier than the guys there) rarely get an invite to the next meeting. Many women do get into the scene, and I do feel that I have a personality issue that conflicted with the folks I tried to interact with. And yet, and yet, and yet. I still believe that American culture needs the cleansing fire from somewhere, and not nearly enough people are producing it.

I am trying to find them, they must be out there. It could be prose, it could be poetry, and there is probably a great deal of it in what is called (hilariously) comedy. I follow these guys on podcasts and Twitter and they are talented and funny, but they are guys (not adults), and it seems they are in a bit of a "Warmed-over-Bill-Hicks" rut, like they heard his words but never listened to what he was saying. I am not sure whether they are listening to anyone but each other. Makes me want to throw my shoes at their heads. Oh well.

Average Productivity + Public Appearance

I have been Twittering and not blogging. It is not unusual that I not be blogging, so Twitter is a plus there. Not much to report, except that I have at last completed the first of four sections of the big multi-media collaboration with Julie Puttgen and Jim Carlson. I will be presenting the prelude of the work at Megan Volpert's book launch for The Desense of Nonfence at Wordsmith's Books in Decatur, GA on January 10th at 2pm. Also appearing at the launch shall be Lara Glenum. Cool!

About this Person

My limited and probably naive efforts to raise public awareness of Tiny Bedtime Stories lead me now to address an issue I might otherwise avoid. If I am going to pester strangers and ask whether they would like a copy of the book, it seems appropriate to give some account of myself somewhere publicly accessible. Am I, JS van Buskirk, a real person? A weirdo? What is the big idea?

Yes. I am a real person. “JS van Buskirk” is an assumed name I use for creative work and online things, but it is my name for those purposes. I have been using it since sometime in the late 90's. It is difficult to remember exactly when I started. JS van Buskirk was the name I used for the first OPOYUL~ website (now gone) and for the first large-ish complicated art project I undertook. Perhaps that project will rise from the ashes one day. JS was also the name I used when I started a performance series here in Atlanta called INFO DEMO - a knock-off/homage to Mr. John Hodgman’s Little Gray Books Lectures. I was interviewed for Creative Loafing while that was going on - you can read the interview here.

Much of Tray’s interview is still fairly accurate, although I no longer have the fancy downtown office. I have a non-fancy downtown office and I work for the government. The brain tumor is still an issue - after surgery, chemo, radiation, chemo, and now chemo again, plus an increasing dosage of anti-seizure medicine. Keeps life interesting. I have not done much to increase the OPOYUL~ knowledge-base in recent years and I no longer produce OPOYUL~ trading cards for Art-O-Mat machines. You can print some out for yourself at the main site, if you like.

I write poetry more often these days than I did for a long while. The big project now is a collaboration with artist Julie Puttgen and composer Jim Carlson. It should be pretty fantastic. We are hoping to have the multi-media feast consumable by audience in August/September of ‘09. I need to get cracking, having written only about 1/4 of my portion. There might be a website for the project between now and then that will give tidbits.

I am a little weird, but not a weirdo.

The big idea is that I do things I enjoy doing, including giving out copies of this book I am very proud of.

It is very windy today

I am deleting the other 'blog, because it is not happening. There are health concerns and other things I would like to work on when I have time and motivation to work on them.

My Self-Published Book!

My collection of Tiny Bedtime Stories is now available at Blurb.com. They were originally written on Twitter to ze frank's @bedtime account. Now they are edited and illustrated and for sale at cost. It is all pretty satisfying, really.

An Assignment for Anyone

I am quite occupied with various real life tasks and still only just getting started on a very large collaboration with Julie Puttgen and Jim Carlson . I do not know how much will be posted here, because the priority is to get the various elements moved about and completed bit by bit among the three of us. Julie has completed a series of 24 paintings (several are up at her site now). I am writing a story that features each of the paintings and connects them in a single overarching narrative. Each chapter includes a song. Jim Carlson is composing incidental music for background and setting the song texts to melody and accompaniment. Julie will then take the completed text and music and animate the full story. In theory, at this early stage, the result will be (1) a dvd or download playable at home with the animation, me reading the story, and the music and songs all cued in, and (2) some kind of live performance in front of a video screen, with music and possibly live performers accompanying the reading of the text. This is going to take a while, but it is fantastically exciting.

Apparently, I can write narrative, as long as it is fantastical.

In the meantime, I am re-reading Jacques Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadence" and considering the end of Western Culture as it has waxed and waned over the past 500 years. What's next? I would like to be in on it, whatever it is.

I am in the middle of the section in which Mr. Barzun describes the various Utopia books of the 15th and 16th centuries. It reminded me of a thought I had the other day. Here is the assignment, if you should choose to accept it. The United States of America is a dead ringer for Plato's Republic. Yes or no? I think it might be, or at least it could be a provacative comparison.

So go to it, somebody. I think 1-4 people see this blog, and I have high hopes this assignment will appeal to somebody.

Hey - Maximum Fun

My man Randy Prunty and I will be attending the MaxFun Con next June 12-14. It will be awesome. John Hodgman is Keynote Speaker. Some day I will get to buy Mr. Hodgman a beverage and tell him he does a good job at what he does, and that will be the second coolest thing I have done in my life.

(The most coolest thing I have done in my life is pretty damn cool, so I don't believe it is a slight to Mr. Hodgman to say "second" coolest.)

Hopefully, there will be people there who are interested in the more purely ART end of the creative spectrum, as opposed to the entertainment end. If there are such people there, I will be trying to meet them. Maybe I will attempt to become famous between now and then, so that interesting people will seek me out.

A week and a day

I am not yet prepared to do my stint at the Decatur Book Festival, but I shall be. The schedule is up, and I will be on at 2:30 pm at Java Monkey a week from Saturday. For some reason, I keep thinking it will turn out something like the Monty Python sketch in which a man who believes he is Trotsky pulls out a feather boa in the middle of a rousing speech and goes into a French cabaret number.

Say hey, Mr. Senator Kennedy, sir -

Right. This is an outburst of the kind of thinking and feeling that I normally endeavor to save for therapy appointments or venting to friends.

Senator Ted Kennedy had a big seizure and was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. This catches my attention, even though I am doing my best to ignore as many Senators as possible at least until after the '08 presidential election. I have a malignant brain tumor myself, diagnosed after I had a big seizure. Sen. Kennedy and I have some other stuff in common - disrupted legal careers, excellent government health insurance, we're both alright for rich white people. He is way richer and far more powerful. I am younger, healthier and better looking.

I have a much better brain tumor than he does though - operable (near-full resection in 2001), right temporal. That it is on the right side means that post surgery I have a little more trouble finding my car again after I have parked it, and don't always recognize that I have met someone before. My language is fine. I still have my words. They implied I had 5 or so years to live when I was diagnosed at 29 yrs old, and these days (at 36 yrs old) I am thinking I have a decent shot at making it to 45 with a reasonable number of marbles intact. The scientific literature I have perused describes my kind of glioma as "indolent" (albeit capable of speeding up at some point).

Sen. Kennedy is old and has some other health problems. His tumor is in the left side (words) and seems like it might be pretty aggressive. That is all bad news. The article I linked said maybe 3 years survival for him, but didn't really go into his possible loss of function. It might be very bad and difficult, and all the treatments attack the rest of your body along with the cancer. That really sucks for him and his family.

So what is my problem? I don't hate Sen. Kennedy. I like him fine. I like his Irish whiskey nose and general legislative bad-assery, to the extent that I know anything about politics. I am not glad he has a malignant brain tumor. Nobody should be glad about anybody having a malignant brain tumor.

My problem is I am angry about some bullshit. The bullshit in that article and in all the other articles I read that reminds me of how angry I am about my own tumor. The bullshit in the articles that is pissing me off right now is the "He's a fighter" bullshit. I have a brain tumor - listen to me - SHUT UP. SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.

Now listen:

Cancer doesn't care if you are a fighter. Your family cares - it helps keep their hopes up. Your doctors care - it helps them face you honestly and be good doctors to you. So, there are good reasons to be a fighter and it will probably make the whole process easier for many people.

BUT. I'll say it again, louder: CANCER DOESN'T CARE IF YOU ARE A FIGHTER.

I thought one time I wanted to learn how to fly a plane. My dad had done that for a while, until all the kids were born and he decided that being able to pay the mortgage and giving up a potentially fatal hobby were both good things. He sat me down and said I could only go for flying lessons if I understood that the plane was just a hunk of metal. It doesn't feel, it doesn't love me, it doesn't want to fly. It is matter with mass. Gravity works on it. A plane is a hunk of machinery that wants to fall out of the sky. Flying a plane is just keeping it from falling.

I eventually decided against lessons. And, cancer is cancer. It is not a demon or a bad mood or an enemy that shall be defeated with the right attitude and plucky can-do spirit.

Anyway. I am pissed off by all of those quotes in the articles about Sen. Kennedy's brain tumor about how he is a fighter. So - "Yeah cancer cancer, but he's a fighter, so everything is cool"? Or - "Let's start pretending he's already dead and he died with his boots on. Go us!"? Or, "He will survive this because I want him to and he deserves to live more than other people do!" To heck with those guys, except his son, who does have a right to say that - just like my Mom has a right to say it about me.

And for that matter - by all means, pray. Baptists, Methodists, Buddhists, Mennonites, Hindus, Catholics, Jews, and Presbyterians have all prayed for me at various stages of treatment and I have lasted a surprisingly long time in surprisingly good shape. I try to let everyone know that I appreciate their support and am keeping up a good attitude. That I am FIGHTING. It makes the people I care about feel better, but the way people outside the real personal situation of cancer talk about it sometimes just pisses the hell out of me.

This is just the luck of the draw. For all I know it is the Marlboro Reds that have been holding that sucker at bay all these years.

Fun with Signs in Tennessee - Part 2!

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So - Julie Puttgen sent me this photo of a sign she sees on the drive to the Nashville, TN, airport:


Her comment essentially was, "Is this OPOYUL~ or what?" And, "This bothers me in a 'so what is the subconscious part' kind of way" (of which more later). The sign says

• 1) "Sherriff's Correctional Complex" [fair enough, I can't see anyone without a 'correctional complex' achieving the job of Sherriff];

• 2) "Offender Re-entry Center" [?! We need some subject/object clarification here]; and

• 3) "Metro Animal Control" [?!!!!! Julie entitled the photo "Animal Offender" and I laughed, but now that I think it through, the implications of the sign taken as a whole could be much spookier -- I still want to do that graphic novel about all the abused suburban animals rounding up a bunch of humans for their own Death Race 2000.]

It is OPOYUL~Y in a hard to pin down way. There is something very simple and obvious to be communicated here, but at the same time is aimed only at people who have specific business there and already know exactly what is going on. So, the official/ formal/ appropriate words are superfluous as to their intended audience and meaningless to everyone else. The new term I am making up right this moment for such an unsatisfactory usage is contralogism. It is efficient and often necessary to perpetrate the old contralogism now and then, especially in the legal field, but it hurts a little to see language flapping uselessly/meaninglessly beside the road that way.



The "so, what is the subconscious part" is something mentioned in the very useful book The Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker. A man goes to a psychiatrist and says "I think I am subconsciously avoiding having sex with my wife." The psychiatrist, very psychiatristily, says "Why do you think that?" The man says, "Well, every night I watch TV until an hour after she goes to bed, and then, if it turns out she is still awake, I go back and watch TV until I am sure she is asleep. I figure I must be subconsciously avoiding the possibility of sex with her." The psychiatrist then asks, "What's the subconscious part?"