Brilliant

Enough said. Great website from Miranda July, whose movies (and now, websites) I absolutely adore. I will be immediately buying her book, which I also expect to like a lot.

Linky

Thanks to Neil Gaiman for introducing me to this via his blog.

That is all.

Ah ..... yup

So, there's no way around it. There's just not that much worth blogging about going on here in the Valley of Corn. There's been some personal stuff - that girl I was dating - well, that worked out sort of predictably badly. On the positive side, I think I actually succeeded in pushing her back to her ex-boyfriend. I should start a new sort of relationship counseling. I'll call it "Could Be Worse Relationship Services", and our slogan could be "Take What You Can Get". Anyhow, whoever you are, girl's ex-boyfriend, glad I could be there for you, mate. I assume the check is in the mail.

This is a short blog, because, like I said, not much is going on.

Something funny I saw on Kermit the Blog. I enjoyed it, and I'll be stopping by there more often to see if they're always so clever. Bye now.

Two movies ... one good and one ...

Okay, I don't curse all that much. I did at one point, but I now I find it much more effective to use my four-letter words sparsely. I find it gives them more meaning. So, please understand that I feel it's the best possible choice of words when I say that Spiderman 3 ... fucking sucked. To be more specific, the second act of Spiderman 3 fucking sucked. It was the worst middle of a movie I've seen in years, and the worst part about it was that I had just finished watching a really good movie about an hour before.

I had a date tonight. A second date, in fact, with a very cool girl that I really hope I can see more of. We went and saw The Namesake at a great little independent theater here in town. It was everything I expected - well written, beautifully photographed, well acted. It did all the little things right, the nuances. There's a great scene when a woman learns of the death of a loved one and just walks around the house turning on all the lights, realizing how alone she is, trying to bring some life into her house before she finally loses her composure. It's sad and sweet and beautiful.

Nothing about Spiderman was beautiful. Listen, I understand that I'm comparing apples and oranges here. One of these movies is a blockbuster, the other an independent. But I'm a comic book nerd, and I really liked the previous Spiderman movies. This one however, had nothing appealing. Aside from another great little cameo from Bruce Campbell, doing a brilliant fake-French waiter routine, everything was just so blah... The characters were either overacted or barely acted at all. The dialog was terrible. And there is a scene, about halfway through ... all I'll say is "Disco". It was the 2007 version of the rave in Zion in Matrix Reloaded, when all of us started to suspect that something might be headed in the wrong direction.

Luckily, my date was not subjected to this horror. After the movie, we hung out in a bookstore for a little while and then she went home. She lives in a different town, which is proving to be kind of tough. It makes it hard to have a beer together, which is something we both tend to do, when one has to drive 45 minutes home. Anyway, even if her stereo broke and she spent the drive home in silence, she still had a better ride entertainment-wise.

Now it is time for sleep. Tomorrow, for those that are cool enough to care, or lucky enough to have been born Scottish, is the Scottish Cup. Celtic and Pars. I'll be up insanely early in the morning to watch it here in the states. G'night.

A New Used Car, and Thanks, but No Thanks

Well, it's been a pretty full week here in the Valley of Corn, which has been blessed with remarkably good weather. I haven't seen a cloud in three days, meaning two things - first, I've become much more interested in my garden, and second, I've gotten nearly no real work done. However, I did manage to buy a car. The joy and rapture that is Craig's List came through for me once again, leading me to the car I now address as "Alice", a 1988 Chevy Corsica. I've always named any car I own after a woman's name with which I have no personal history, and I've always liked the name Alice for fairly obvious literary reasons, so it was an easy choice. This week, I also got a rejection letter in its most polite form, the "Thank you for your submission. It's a great piece but just not for us" letter. It was for an Earth Day related story, or at least one that I thought would tie in, and I kind of figured it had been rejected when Earth Day had come and gone, so it was no great disappointment. There is an art unto itself in deciding exactly where to send a story once you finish it, and I guess that's an art form in which I still need improvement. It was very nice to get personalized comments, though. That is rarer than most non-authors suppose. The vast, vast majority of manuscripts sent to editors are rejected, and almost all of those are thrown away or sent back with no comments at all, due to the time constraints of explaining why one piece is right and another is not. Editors are not English professors, and need all the time in their day just to read all the entries from crackpots like myself who think they can write for a living, so I do very much appreciate it when I get editorial comments, and make sure to take those comments very seriously.

I started work on a new short story today for the Susurrus Press anthology "I Am This Meat". The title is a Vonnegut reference, which in itself makes it something I want to be associated with, and I really like the idea. It's in a pretty early stage, so I'll be curious to see where the story goes and whether it becomes something or not. Hard to say when they're young, what they'll grow up to be.

Scots Wahey!

Hey - I have not been able to post since the event, but I definitely wanted to blog about the SNP victory in Scotland. For those of you not keeping up with Scottish parliamentary politics (for shame!), the SNP is the Scottish Nationalist Party. Until fairly recently, the SNP was probably the third largest party in Scotland, but in the recent elections, they took the most seats in the Scottish parliament, wresting control away from the Labour Party, who currently control England's legislature. The one major policy of the SNP is Scottish independence, and they will likely be bringing a ballot measure to the people of Scotland to decide whether or not to leave the UK. As an ethic Scot, headed back to the old country this summer for the first time as an adult, I'm happy for Scotland. This issue should go to the voters, and if they approve it, Scotland can be truly independent for the first time in centuries. If not, if it's not what the people want, then that will be that, but Scots have a completely different culture than the English, and we've been lumped under the term "British" for too long. It's high time that the Empire, once spanning most of the known world, was pulled apart completely, until it spans not even the breadth of their own island.

Alba Gu Brath. Scotland forever.

Cinco de Mayo Puppy Watch

One of our finest annual traditions here in the Valley of Corn, the Cinco de Mayo pig roast has returned. As usual, this particular little piggy (who probably should have stayed home) is being prepared as we speak. Last year, I ate what I believe to be a personal record amount of food in a one-day period. I wasn't measuring, but that was a lot of pork for a man to eat, no doubt of that. This year, however, I have decided to bow out of this festival of gluttony and will instead be watching my friend T's house and dog. She is a lovely Rottweiler with the softest ears of any dog alive in the world, period. I was just remarking to a girl I met yesterday how much I missed having a dog, and when the offer came along, I thought "Well, since I wasn't remarking to a girl I just met how much I missed eating pork, I guess I want this more." So, other bellies will have to swell just a little more for my absence. Maybe I'll get a pork chop from the store and recreate the event in microcosm at T's place - then I can have the best of both worlds.

Introduction

How do I start this blog? I've run, and continue to run, a number of blogs around the various interwebs, mostly on soccer. I'm familiar with the blogger's routine of shuffling through the daily news sources to find those few gems worth expanding on, but this is different. This is about me. So, I guess I start with an introduction to me. My name is Ian, and I'm a displaced east coaster, living now in the moist and cloudy confines of the Willamette Valley in Oregon. My formal training is as a scientist, a biologist to be exact, and I have spent the past four years working in northwestern Alaska studying seabirds and the little sea creatures they eat. After that project lost its federal funding, and after a few unwelcome changes in my personal life, I decided to seek therapy in an old habit, my writing. I've always been a huge reader and consumer of both poetry and prose, and wrote a lot for my self, but never thought I could write for the public. Mostly I was just lacking confidence in my work, and thinking that 28 was a little late to start a second (or more accurately, fourth) career. But, in the meantime, I was writing more than ever - pages and pages every day, notebooks every month, and some of it seemed to be better than before. It seemed as if the events of my life in recent years had focused me a little, and made me a little bit more interesting of a person, which I think of as an absolute prerequisite for being a good writer. I don't think I'm a good writer, not yet, but I think I'm getting better, and I'm happy to say that I have recently gotten my first acceptance! A poem of mine, called "You Are" was accepted by the online magazine Chantarelle's Notebook, a small but pretty well-known little website which has published some pieces I've really liked. That will be coming out in August, by the way, and I'll certainly blog about that here. This is my semi-public journal, where I'll talk about my writing, my life, traveling (I'll be in the UK for a good bit of the summer), etc. I hope it's enjoyable to read, or at least, if it's not, that it doesn't take too terribly long. Thanks for coming.

In addition, I am in the process, with a few friends, of putting together an online journal of our own. It will be called 1097 magazine, and will be exclusively dedicated to showing off the talents of new and emerging artists, authors and musicians. I'll be talking about 1097 a lot on here, and the site will eventually have a link to this blog.