nora at inkstain

So, I got jumped last Thursday.

In case you are wondering, here are some of the things that have been inspiring me for the zombie things and the things that have been influencing the writing style.

• Laura Podolnick’s “Dissertation On the Concept of Forever Starting Tonight, Explained in the Second Person, To an Ex-Lover, a Best Friend, and The Man in the Astor Place Subway Station Who Asked Me For a Nickel”. This short story is what got me started writing in the second person.
• The Mountain Goats. The lyrics from this band get me started on a lot of my stories. They’re another reason I write in the second person. While I pick up things stylistically from Podolnick, I think I pick up a lot of tone from Darnielle’s lyrics. These songs tell stories, but a lot of them are quite normal, and a lot of them mix the mundane with the life-shattering. Here are some examples of songs by them:
  • Moon Over Goldsboro:
    

    And a guy with any kind of courage
    Would maybe stop and think the matter through
    Maybe hold you still and raise the question
    Instead of blindly holding onto you
    But we crank up the heat
    And you giggle and moan
    Spend all night in the company of ghosts
    Always wake up alone

  • Oceanographer’s Choice:
    

    Well, guy in a skeleton costume
    Comes up to the guy in the Superman suit
    Runs through him with a broadsword
    I flip the television off
    Bring all the bright lights up
    Turn the radio up loud
    I don’t know why I’m so persuaded
    That if I think things through
    Long enough and hard enough
    I’ll somehow get to you
    Then you came in
    And we locked eyes 
    You kicked the ashtray over as we came to warn each other 
    Look at that
    Would you look at that?
    We’re throwing off sparks
    What will I do when I don’t have you to hold onto in the dark?

• A Softer World. It is no secret that I wish I was Joey Comeu. A Softer World is the brainchild of him and Emily Horne; she takes photographs and he adds text to them. They are brief and often absolutely beautiful and insightful. Here are a few of my favorites:
  • #9: She was so fluffy
  • #18: Go, emily, go!
  • #37: true dreams
  • #40: Meet me in the street. This one is about zombies.
  • #56: but no one says no to me This is the best assassin origin story ever.
  • #59: But I never told him about your best selling romance novels. This is also about zombies.
  • #77: when there’s no more room in pidgeon hell… Also about zombies.
  • #102: plz don’t leave me! 
  • #133: Oh man. What could happen next?
  • #233: there were like thirty scooters in that ice cream truck
  • #238: that’s how we keep going. we make the best of things.
  • #342: the tasty side zombies zombies zombies
  • #357: Is that guy even a student here?
  • And then there’s #284, which really does sum up a lot of the stories, and #234, which sums up the philosophy behind a lot of them.

There are probably more, but I can’t think of them at the moment. If you like the zombie stories, you might like those things too!

The Mountain Goats have a fictional codependent, alcoholic couple that lives in Tallahassee that gets an entire album (Tallahassee) as well as a lot of songs. All the non-Tallahassee songs have Alpha in their title, so they’re called the Alpha Couple. In an homage to that, I’m calling the boy and the girl on the boat that are running away from the flooded Albuquerque and the zombies the Beta Couple. Here’s another one.

“You told me that getting solar cells for the iPod was a stupid idea,” you tell me, grinning. We are tethered to the top of the cottonwood, our canoe bobbing lightly. We’re having salvaged canned pears, jerky and cheerios, your earbuds split between us, playing Explosions in the Sky.

“I can’t believe I saw them last week,” you say, cutting a peach with your spoon. “Or that someone good actually came out of Texas.”

I don’t tell you that most of Texas was destroyed in the first wave of bioagents. The heavy silence as you stare at your spoon tells me you already know.

We unfasten the boat and I rub my bare, sunburned shoulders. We’ll have to raid a Walgreens and get some aloe once we get to a city that isn’t as submurged as our home. At least the sun was going down– we watch it vaguely as it shoots the skies with the colors that the sky should, by all rights, have been for the past two weeks. Pink and orange and surreal.

A tire and a soggy cardboard box float past. We see a movement in the trees and you reach for the shotgun. I think of indie bands with their skin hanging off of their arms, knocking over their microphones and keyboards to get at their audiences. Bassists for brains.

Okay, so most of you are probably familiar with the Weezer song “Across The Sea” off of Pinkerton.Pinkerton was recorded in 1995, according to Wikipedia. That means that the 18-year-old girl is, by now, at least 31.

Weird, no?

(Largely this is an attempt to see if I can embed imeem songs in posts. If I can it will be awesome.)

EDIT: It looks like imeem breaks everything on my blog, so here’s a link to listen to the song.

Interesting thing on BoingBoing today: being an artist is sustainable when one has 1,000 “true” (read: hardcore) fans. Nice application of the Long Tail bit:

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name.

It does make me a bit worried, though. I’m a member of fandom, which would make be a fairly hardcore fan, but I’m definitely not someone who could be counted as a “True Fan” of anything I’m a fan of. I’d love to see this idea applied to webcomics, where one would have to switch out their entire wardrobe to be a “true fan” who’s bought everything in the Questionable Content store.

Many BoingBoing readers seem to think the entire idea is overly optimistic, though:

“In the Big Rock Candy Mountains, there’s a land that’s fair and bright,
The handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every night
Where the boxcars all are empty and the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees and the cigarete trees,
The lemonade springs where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains”

I am listening to the new Mountain Goats album. I’m on the second song and it’s already fucking amazing. Yay.

Since my last entry was, by all accounts, somewhat dire, I’ve got a little update for ya’ll on what I’ve been doing lately other than getting robbed/fired:

• Work doesn’t end until the end of June, so I’m still doing that. Also, I’m not totally fucked as far as that goes and out of a job right this second.
• Fucking around on my new laptop. I am, right this second, sitting in the Student Union Building at UNM. People randomly come in here and play piano, which is awesome, so I’m listening to a guy playing now.
• Drawing. I’m still learning the whole oekaki thing and though I’m not exactly exceptional my digital art skills are coming a lot quicker than my dead tree art skills ever did– probably because I’m mostly just learning how to translate the dead tree into a digital form. Shadows on faces are hard, and so are hands, but I’m picking it up. The picture up there is one of what I would look like were I in my favorite video game series.
• Class blogging. This one’s pretty nifty, since most of UNM still seems to think that WebCT is the best thing since, I don’t know, Lotus 123. Big governmental institutions like UNM (and, uh, the City and stuff) tend not to be the first people to jump on technological trends even if they’re good for the institution, and seeing some UNM professors take advantage of the stuff being offered online (for free!) is pretty awesome.
• Working on the novel. I’m doing a total rewrite– it’s setting is moving from 2300 AD to a modern alternate universe ‘Burque– and I’ve got a lot to do on that. It’s really fun, so far. I’ve joined a writing group and we’re all editing each other’s NaNoWriMo novels, so I’m stretching my editing muscles with that– it’s been pretty helpful so far. Here’s a brief quote that sort of summarizes the setting: As Sythe got closer, he saw what the fuss was about—one of the Frontier’s workers was attempting to attach a large piece of concrete sporting a “Pay fine inside the Frontier Restaurant” sign to their airship.

Free air guitars! Rock! Someone should do this in Burque.

Pretty fantastic mashup, I think.

I haven’t had much to say lately, but I kind of felt like writing a music post. Here’s what I’ve been listening to lately:

• Universal Hall Pass: Mercury. It’s lighthearted pop-style indie stuff– a Pandora recommendation, of course. It’s got a bit of a J-pop thing going on, but in English. Also, it’s the only band I’ve listened to recently that I had to both look up the lyrics for and then look up the definitions of the words in the lyrics. I recommend downloading “Tutelary Genius”, “Katrinah Josephina” and “Special Agent” if you want to check them out.
• Kaiser Chiefs: Employment. British punk revival with a really obvious Clash influence. I recommend downloading the fantastic “I Predict A Riot”, which is one of those “grown men saying lalalala” songs. It’s really catchy.
• Enon: High Society. More catchy indie-pop. “Sold!” is fun, with a nice beat and fun lyrics. I actually bought it because I downloaded and liked “In This City”, so I guess that’s worth checking out too.

In other musical news, I came to a realization lately that was both startling and amusing in relation to Alkaline Trio. I never put a lot of thought into their lyrics before– they’re appropriately witty, cynical, dark and Satanic for my tastes, but I recently was listening to Crimson and I sort of realized that they really aren’t writing about anything for a while. I get a feeling from their earlier work that they are writing based on experience, but at this point they seem to be stringing together phrases that sound cool.

The thing is, though, that works really well. I’m okay with that. Check out “Mercy Me” (”I took a long walk straight back home/ I could’ve walked back to San Francisco”) and “Emma” (”A poinsettia in poison rain/ Traded true love for insult and injury/ Washed it down the drain/ With one silver bullet and two vicodin”) for examples of that, and check out “Message From Kathlene” (”You’re going away but you’re not going far/ So if he decides to leave you alone and crying/ You know I’m still here, the faithful one, waiting for a message from Kathlene”) and “Fuck You Aurora” (”Best wishes have been made for you/ You never had no say, it’s true/ You’ve got to be the cutest gravedigger I’ve ever seen”) for examples of the older stuff. Then listen to “Radio”, look up the lyrics, and realize that yes they are really saying that and yes Alkaline Trio makes a shitload of money off kids that are buying albums purely for the sake of scaring their parents.

Mostly, they’ve been twisting up legend and common sayings (”Hold your breath/ Walk, don’t run through the graveyard”) lately. It works. It sounds damn cool. It’s catchy, it’s fast and light enough to not be depressing.