cue the endless edits & amendments & revisions

This phase of things shouldn't be too bad.  Usually, after completely scripting a book (Painless, Denizen, Azure Pantry), I'll go into reread & edit line by line; testing the rhythms of dialogue, the pace of exchange, and fix all the Real Obvious Fuckups.  Chop.  Fill in.  Until the thing has defined itself satisfactorily, when I really Hear the words spoken, without reading them aloud.  The persistent problem with this stage, I've found, is the abundance of really obvious mistakes spellcheck doesn't get-- where there's an automatic linefill, some kind of substitution situation where you didn't mangle the word, you just mistyped so the processor can't hang any red lace on it...  A completely nonsensical sentence will sit there for weeks of revision with a Bad Error which I can't see because my brain's glazed over with all the other work that must be attended to.  It's embarrassing and a real argument for having an independent editorial voice, a reader who isn't the author, but at this phase in my professional personality as an Artist I'm no longer interested in sharing unfinished work with others, and I certainly don't want to hear "I'm going to read it, I swear" used as an excuse by ANYone, let along a friend, so why put people through it?  I'm not using fucking AI to read my scripts, so it's down to me and my OCD to find all the goofs and fine-tune the troofs I wrote while wearing my SmArt Faggot hat.  I don't think this one's gonna be too much of a problem because if I fuck up continuity between chapters it's only going to enhance the final effect THE KILL HOUSE is going for.  Art house is where it's at, and aggressive unconcern with a reader's comfort only becomes more attractive to me as I grow ever further estranged from John & Karen Q. Public.  I like Refn movies with no dialogue, and 800-plus page books about imaginary cities written with the structural conceit of a geometrical puzzle, whose primary Plot is fucking and who does who where.  So this book shouldn't be any surprise to anyone familiar with my psyche.  It's more cluttered & up its own ass with theory than this blog.

using every scrap

Never throw away that first draft.

I never throw anything away, actually.  There's usually a rolling frontier in any document in process, a place marked by five asterisks, where the roadwork is being done and things are being steamrolled and, yes, built.  After those * * * * * there will be cuttings:  any line that felt too good to destroy, but had to be excised, any passage where The Writer went off the rez and scripted something bizarre, any bit of bad indecision or fumfering that couldn't be finessed.

The first draft of The Kill House, it seems, was done in 2023.  I don't remember it being that far back, but then I don't remember writing 3/4s of this draft, so what the christ.  It wasn't a very good script, but there were some ideas, and there were some skits that could be salvaged.  And there was an ending.  An ending that came out of nowhere, really, that felt legit because it was a betrayal of audience.  I didn't know where the instinct came from but it felt right, so that's where I ended it.

And that ending was very probably why I couldn't forget The Kill House, or put it aside.  So today, after some thorough hard drive archaeology, I finally dug up the original 2023 script and copypasted the verbatim scene & stage directions into the finished Kill House.

Now it's fuckin' done.

Time to draw the bastard.

writing an ending / writing ONE ending

The blog goes live.  The blog goes dark.  The blog goes live again.

It should surprise all one of you that I have mental problems.  Not least of which is feeling coherent, or explicable.  I do not feel like a Complicated person, or a particularly difficult mind, yet--  ego being what it is, a cockleburr (poisonous, clingy, and a staining agent)  --it pains me to feel misperceived.  Often I feel as though my manner of speech, or the ways in which I express myself, annoy others, despite their (seeming) annoyance being completely beside the point.  The "point" being, well, conversation.  With the ones who get annoyed.  And if they get annoyed, I just stop talking to them.  I do try to keep it simple.

Which is to say, it shouldn't matter how people respond to my existence, as I don't really try to press my points.  Being neurotic is my problem, nobody else's.  When I say "I'm not a writer" it's honestly felt-- I write as expression, not profession; from compulsion, not financial motive.  Writing is something of an agony, to be honest.  I don't feel particularly creative or innovative even at my best.  But it's a trellis, isn't it?  Hang the words in the correct order and a Scene emerges from a sentence; Dialogue unveils itself as a cadence of call-and-response establishes itself.  I have to write to know what I'm going to draw, you see.

TL:DR is something I've been hearing people say for decades.  It's like "wall of text", or a therapist who's asked for a sample of writing responding with "You wrote a lot."  It's leading with a preference.  The preference being brevity.  Commendable, certainly.  But it isn't as though reading takes all that much time or effort, and there's a distinct sneer to the majority opinion that A Lot is Always Too Much.

When reading my own work, I sneer rather constantly.

All that said, it's been a hard time in my skull this week.  Upshot is, after straining to complete the script for THE KILL HOUSE for months, the whole thing arrived in two easy parts, across two mornings.  It's only the final chapter, and it's only eight-ish pages, but it took some struggle.  Partly because the whole book isn't contiguous-- all the chapters kind of hang on their own.  There are no straight lines or clear joins between sections.  It's the first time I've really tried to work this way with a piece of fiction.

And as with all the sections, it wrote itself.  I don't say this sarcastically, or as a handwave toward Process.  It's fair to suggest I am the editor and the final authority on whether the writing Is What I Wish It To Be, but as to creation it's dodgy where some of the bits emerge from.  The Bill Moseley lines lifted from 'Psychoreal', off OhGr's 'Devil In My Details' were in my notebook for months, waiting for ideal placement-- but where did the Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas riff, or the Keith Giffen-esque / Dave Sim page-of-word-balloons interior monologue emerge from?  Why did those impulses emerge where they did?  Why was this, 56 page, 8 chapter script, the final incarnation of all the impulses & snits of "inspiration" that clutter my notekeeping?

And why was THIS version the superior?  Superior to its initial "skit" form, or its abbreviated middle draught?  Why did it expand itself into this?  And why--

Why this ending?  Why not (any of!) the other endings?

THE KILL HOUSE is built of endings.  Some chapters contain more than one.  The whole damned book is Ending things, themes, characters.  As to why it worked out this way, I cannot clearly say.  Each ending is its own tune.  All the tunes, whistled together, end-to-end, forms the libretto.

Why?  Why?  Why?  I keep asking.  The answer, insufficient as it seems, is sometimes it's the art that calls the shots.  Not the shootist.

writing by accident

Yesterday was one of those where I committed a scene without meaning to.  I was writing something else, hacking bits together--  in this compositional phase of a script I refer to this as "roadwork", where patches get steamed out & fitted into a sequence  --when a morbid thought hit me.  A morbid thought adacent to personal experience.  So that was given room to grow, and next thing, three extra pages.  Going to hack at that today.  THE KILL HOUSE is now at 56 pages, pre-formatting & editing.

Some of "writing by accident" is discipline.  Write a little every day, whether intended for posterity or greater purpose or just farting around.  Eventually bits happen, whether intended or not, or accrete material as a result of scale & gravity, and next thing one knows:  writing.

In the midst of the unplanned Bit, comedic instinct appears.  Gestates, as the lines are honed, then breaks the surface of the roadwork.  Now these bits have to be shaped.  Line edits happen.  Read, re-read for flow.  The Bit has become a Sequence.  Toward the end of the sequence, unbidden, a joke flowers.  A pun, sobconsciously conceived & thrown into the mix.  Too much?  Or just right?  Where did all these jokes come from, anyway.  Weren't we just writing something serious?

This is where it's most important for me to trust instinct.  There was no outline, but there's a rise & fall to the action & dialogue, one I can sense the shape of now.  The verisimilitude I'm after requires human response, and a vital impulse in this craft, I've found, is making room for jokes.  Leave room for response.  The jokes grow all on their own.  Some of it may be the Editor's Mind, taking shots at the Writer's Tendencies-- the editor, with his red pen, can cook like it's open mic at an improv club  --but then there's the Writer, who's just trying to break tension with the Three Stooges (my Script Idiots, known as Motive, Plot, and Post-hoc Justification (patches plot holes)).  The writer just wants to sit all his little freaks together in the front row and run through the lines.  He didn't set out to make a big production out of it.  He needs his creatures to co-habitate, profitably.  The quickest way is to get 'em giggling.

I keep writing horror, because I've experienced enough of my own to need an outlet.  Part of writing horror is needing breaks to vent tension, deflate things, break it down and build it back up.  So there's a lot of dumb comedy in my work, and it would (I'm confident) be considered surplus to considerations in terms of page count or runtime.  But it's my shop.  I'm the letterer, too.  So I get to do whatever I fucking want.  And mostly I don't want to run a by-the-numbers, Serious shop.  I want to keep it moving, keep it organic.  The only way to get there, in my experience, is by trusting Accidents.

i know things about chicago

and it doesn't require an audience.  anymore than the things i now know about chicago require an audience.  i see a lot.  always have.  it's a runaway thing.  having my degraded vision restored by glasses makes it possible to study an entire nightworld which, for a decade plus, was receding into fog.  chicago is a marvelous vista in the dark, the vast accordioned silhouettes with their rave-pastel windows grown from obsidian coral, and the roustabout gloam below, with its shadow circuits...  i go chasing police torchlights and trolling nervous patrolmen, who can't seem to find the crime they're after.  returning i see:  swift as cliff swallows cruising cyclists stop and organize a threeway with a willing benchsitter, kneeling as i pass.  the giver presses his right hand on the kneeling recipiant's shoulder, signaling not to stop, as his riding partner traces the small of the giver's back from latissimus dorsi to heavy rhomboids.  the trio pick up the pace as i leave them in dark tangles of overlaid park bench slats & inky whispering eruptions of brush, and i think of the thin young thing who preceded the threesome-- sauntering with the lip of his pants tugged beneath his iliac crest, signifying with his eyes and sniffing loud.  men like them number in the unknowns, as infinite as the number of nights that have incubated in this centre of teeming industriousness and accomplishment, as up against itself as it is against the elements

i can't say i know these people or know anything about them:  but i know me, so i can extrapolate the endless varieties of explanations, and i know need like few may imagine.  it's decent material.  the stuff from which life is built, though it's rarely said as plainly and openly as these minor demonstrations.  chicago never sleeps, like some aquatic mammal alternating autonomic activities between lobes of the brain; forever in motion, negotiating currents and avoiding obstacles, as some fathomless aspect of itself dreams deeply of kindnesses alien to light and the smoke-reddened eyes of john and karen q. public

on the other side of the smudged chalkmark of the horizon, in ontario, there is fire.  i do not know it, but the fog that has seeped between my eyes and the dim beach is thick with toxins.  the air has taken on a pervasive flavor of dried, salted meat.  a trio of friends-- two dykes and a skinny male  --caper in the tide, and i balance my ass on the steel cable guidewire in the center of the pier, sketchbook angled on my knee toward the floodlights.  felt-tip nib dancing in imitation of life.  tomorrow (yesterday) i will have a cough, and a persistent flavor in my mouth, and my chest will feel heavy.  tomorrow (yesterday) i will worry about the way the particulate count has shifted the refractory index of light toward the red, and how the vacant beaches echo high desert.  (yesterday) the next day i will wear a mask, and curse myself for heeding the call to adventure, and the seven-to-eight cigarette hangover coating my lungs; and the-today-after [earlier than now] i will contemplate the couples swimming, heedless of the white and khaki film of ash scumming the tide.  i will not speak to these daytimers, maskless, dapping their cans of coca-cola together, who cannot see the flaccid, eyeless, carrion-white bass with the hole torn in its back, lolling against the rocks.  death does not require an audience.  merely opportunity.  it will occur to me that these maskeless daytimers should be warned, but-- surely they were.  i know things about chicago.  and so must they

us

 

& our 60 new friends

the burroughs folio: kammerer (1) dots & lines

Back to the OCD.

Line placement is key.  So too balance.  The first rendering of David Kammerer did not go well.  I got impatient with my own process.  This time has turned out significantly closer to the mark.

Brushwork next, INKluding fills, then lay on the tones.  This is the fifth of the eight portraits.  First in the actual series, as it will be printed.  I'm pretty close to satisfied.  I'm hoping the bubbles look right...

the lit bit - july 2o26

Dhalgren (1974) - by Samuel R. Delany

Figure this took more or less the same amount of time to read as my first go-round.

Overall, it feels Unlocked.  I get where Delany was coming from, and what the materials were, and how he mixed them.  Cruising was a huge turn of the key-- once I realized that this story of metamorphosis opened with cruising, it told me not only who the narrator was, but where the hunting grounds were.  

Obviously one part of that Big Answer was The 1970s.  The readership for this book, as I imagine it, was in two discrete parts-- the Delany fans, who were championing youth, intersectionality, and an adventurous imagination; and the closeted readership, who were not (I am fairly sure) exclusively cisgender nor inexperienced.

We queers had kind of emerged, in the wake of sexual liberation, but we weren't entirely accepted or understood by our communities, and so a great many of us were D.L.-dormant or selectively closeted.  A lot of us were eager to be seen, but the realities on the ground were... not dissimilar to today, really.  Bisexuals and non-denominational freaks were (and to a greater or lesser extent still are) The Queers to the "strictly" hetero- and homosexual spheres.  There's a lot of gatekeeping in the gay & lesbian communities-- a degree of it is necessary, to screen out sketchy creeps & users  --but there's also a component of that mentality that is inherited, or adopted, from the straightlaced.  Because when everyone is telling you what your spirit & body are ALREADY telling you ("Sex is sacred!  Sex is vital!  Sex is integral!") only they're using borrowed & purloined ideologies & terminologies, well, those Good Intentions are actually chaff, being thrown into your affairs, just to fuck with your radar.

I don't believe anybody is 100% anything besides themselves.  Everyone travels their own road, and arrives at their own conclusions.  That is not a comfortable conclusion for the majority of us, particularly those of us who would like to believe the best of our fellows.  We don't want to believe there are Users and Bad Actors among us, stealth agents for the christo-fascist agenda, weirdos who harbor genuine concern over caucasian birth rates.  Perhaps we do not want to believe this because-- whither utopia?  Perhaps because we crave the notion of a people unified by charity & largesse of spirit.  If humanity is, as we queers so wish to see it, a calculus-- a process, not merely Of Change but Of Being Changed by process --then the terms being definite (or not) are part of the equation.

Perhaps the unchangeable, the normies, the straights, the idol-worshipping dotards, are always going to be with us.  Perhaps America-- the Mythic america, the Idea of america, the Sales Brochure cannily folded between the bars of our cribs, the america of potentially incalculable virtue & barely choate utopian instinct --is the greater problem.  Because it isn't just religion, or capitalism, that's the bug in our program.  It's the fundamental bullshit that blinds us, literally.  It's the fundamentalist tendency.  The one that's addicted to false binaries.

America is THE land of false binaries.  Two parties, two genders, two polarities.  Rich & poor, blessed & accursed, high & low culture.  We carry these notions of Absolute Good and Absolute Evil everywhere with us and (intentionally or not) slather these assumptions all over.

We particularly treasure being able to use these assumptions--  whether it's Rebel Forces versus Tyrannical Empire, or Invisibles versus Myrimidons  --to construct alternate Americas within the greater geographical confines of this thing we recognize as society, on this continent.  Consequently there are as many Americas as there are sub-genres of science fiction.  There is america for the law-abiding, and america for the criminal underclass; america for the wise, and america for the deplorable.  America the beautiful, and america blackpilled.  American pastoral, and america-built-on-bones.

But, to return to Science Fiction...  America perhaps most resembles that.  America most definitely is a fiction, and its nature, as an evolv(-ed/-ing) nation-state, is absolutely indebted to science.  America is wedded to a certain idea of process, and believes that process-- let's call it capitalism --to be synonymous with Progress.  America is vast, and in its vastness there is a foolhardy tendency to believe its resources inexhaustible.  Science fiction was one of the major social indicators, over the 50s, 60s, and 70s, that ingenuity, adaptibility, & a knack for invention were proof that we Knew What We Were Doing.  No science fiction, no space race, right?  And space was the place we were going.  We were going to take our successes, as one nation under god, indivisible, straight the fuck over that final frontier.  Fer shure.

Now let's retrench to Delany, and Dhalgren.  Because the science fiction in this book is a fiction about sciences, social & practical.  Sex undergirds ALL that-- point of fact, Delany seems to be saying rather explicitly that sexuality IS the science whereby we may understand ourselves.  Sexual chemistry is the engine of growth in the artificial heart of urbanism.  If you can't get along with your fellows, you can't co-exist, let alone propagate.  And since the advent of psychology as a science with a little 's', it's become axiomatic that sexual identity is a fundamental component of the human psyche.  There are more sexually aware, and active, people in major urban centres than anywhere else in the country.  It's not just a numbers game:  it's how things Actually Work.

But of course cities train humans to exist within them, therefore American cities teach their inhabitants to be schizoid about their desires.  Our educational system is not, contrary to the pledge of allegiance, indivisible, nor under god.  Liberty & justice are at best tertiary concerns to the fact that this shit is Too Big To Fail.  And that's what urbanism was finally starting to do, with the advent of the 70s:  caucasians were realizing their racial caste was imaginary, but they weren't necessarily waking up to it, whereas non-caucasians were wider awake than had ever been permitted; women were realizing their power need not be limited to interactions with men, and the realization was starting to make the greater masses of men shit scared; and the queers, darling, were realizing themselves.

I know, blah, blah, blah.  I do this every time.  I talk about a book by not talking about the book.

(At least this time, not by talking at bible length about myself.  Much?)

The big concept of Dhalgren, to me, is that Delany realized american urbanism was a science-fictional state, and that living in a science-fictional state, in a major metropolitan city, stresses & reshapes the sexual individual.  Cities force change.  The modern american city, at the time of Dhalgren's publication, was in crisis, with infrastructure breaking down, racially-charged rioting, and scarcity being accelerated by (purposefully gamed,) asymmetrical systems of commerce.

How do you find unity within that?

Why, you find it by looking for it.  Maybe you find it by asking your neighbors.  Maybe you find it by accepting a name, or rôle, or position.  Maybe it was already there, waiting for you to seek it.

Dhalgren is, after all, a quest novel.  But perhaps a unique quest novel, in that it asks whether the quest necessitates a hero.  If the quest is just going out and getting laid...

Yeah, folks, I'm not getting to a Final Point with any of this maundering.  Dhalgren is a fascinating little thing.  It can be infuriating, even.  The text is unstable to the point of disintegration, and interminable if you're short on patience (or just not fond of logic puzzles), but it's brimming with self-awareness and a real zest for asking Why, Goddammit, Do You Think It Has To Be This Way.

I don't believe in the great american novel.  I think the great american novel is a rosy bucket of balls.  But Dhalgren is definitely one of the great lowercase-'a'-merican novels.  It does so by breaking the definition of science fiction as being stolidly Science-y, it restores sexual honesty to the generally muddied and messy state of city (& communal) living, and it asks, over & over again:  "Do the categories matter?"  Do the classifications apply to you?  Are "you" who You think you are?  And what is that, exactly?

Dhalgren is exactly nothing.  It does not contain every possible variation of every possible formula for what can be; in fact, it doubly refuses the Joycean dead-end of Ulyssess, with its white male hero(es) in their eternal peregrinations in a city whose imaginal limits are determined by colonialism & cultural "wisdom", because it neither requires nor accepts ANY SINGULAR INTERPRETATION as a genre work.  Dhalgren is not utopian, dystopian, or even queertopian.  Dhalgren is, exactly, no-thing.

Dhalgren is Bellona.  And Bellona--  goddess of war, leveler of cities --is the greatest american city that never was, viewed from within the event horizon of its author's experiences in Great American Cities, viewed from as many angles as may be found within its borders.  These are plainly marked, if one may see through the fug of words to perceive them.  There are multiple points of view, and multiple bolt-holes through which to See, what Dhalgren is about.  And... ultimately?

It's problematic.  Its problems are america's problems.  They are not American Problems, exclusively.  But they are the terms by which Delany's equation may be read.

Which solves the puzzle well enough for me.

What's it about?  It's about 801 pages.

The Vampires (1971) - by John Rechy

A sadean exercise in "satanic" excess that turns into a tedious psychodrama real fast.  Opens with some genuine descriptive verve & some nice phrasing, but by the end it's all clipped stage directions and obvious dialogue so I'm not sure why Rechy wrote, or chose to fluff his Grove Press portfolio with, this.  It's pointless except as some sort of harebrained moral fable.  Also, excess of incest.  Pass.

 

Hamster Dam (2o18) - by Quentin S. Crisp

 

Hard To Be A God (1964) - by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

the mytho-literary calculus of considering cruising ÷ the dérive = a night journey, or, i am why you hate blogs

(sundry notes regarding queertopian artfaggotry)

panel to panel transitions have been less on my mind as i work increasingly ONLY in single panel images, no longer concerned with greater page or presentation, those variables having been ruthlessly determined to be fixed & beyond my artistic control, so no more really fucking cute games involving page layout or movement of bodies (or directed flow of dialogue) at diagonals intersecting with the Focal Points of BLAH FUCKING BLAH.  the panel is the Non Submersible Unit, just as the sentence is the emotional core of the paragraph, to entirely misquote gertrude stein, bless her dead ass.  you work on each panel equally; no panel takes priority.  every panel is another part of the story.  the only one that was a Big Deal was figuring out the very first image.  once i had that, the rest was flow.  the script is very interesting to me right now as i build it; there's a renewed sense of surprise & invention in the moment-to-moment of my experience as i write.  when the characters surprise me, or do something other than i originally intended, it's always a treat.  when it occurs in an erotic context it's especially intriguing to me, as i generally don't consider myself that inventive or horned-up enough to write Pornography.  sex is a very Literary thing to me, as it's an internal-- or perhaps most aptly --interior state, a state of Being: "outside" of (the bog standard linear perception of) time.  sex is also an artistic thing, a preoccupation bordering on obsession, in how to present it in my art without looking like more of a weirdo than i already am.  i feel judged enough on all number of things:  actually putting my sense of sexuality out there & cojoining it to my artistic impulses, that requires raw courage of the average joe.  i'm not average, or normative, in a great many senses; not because i have outre tastes or behave like a weeaboo-- like that even matters anymore, living as i do in both a culture, and sub-culture, that's too far gone in jerking it publicly to judge nothing ol' me for my dull hangups  --but because i haven't had the experiences (or built up the bank of experience) that the majority of gay men have.  mostly i haven't had the opportunity, or the physical, sexual courage, to celebrate my body or my desires the way most queers my age have.  i have limits, and my hangups are to do with my face.  i want to be exhibitionistic.  i want to be proud of my body, and to show off, and to feel Present and Real in my physical being-- to be myself.  but i can't, because i have the Wrong Face.  i'd like to have pictures taken of myself, to be in videos, to be a cute little freak like all the other cute little freaks up and down my beach, to hang out with my equally fucked up friends and be vain and do the selfie thing and talk endless drama about how hard it is to have a good time and still earn a living selling underwear and whatever...  but i'm not that, and i think that's all well & good but also my brain never shuts off unless i'm fucking or making art or lost IN art or bicycling or maybe exercise, yoga, if i'm lucky, so i can't check out and pretend people give a shit how i look or particularly want to fuck me anyway because i have the Wrong Face.  so i spend a lot of time window shopping, daydreaming, and writing little erotic "skits" that ultimately get refined into parts of stories.  i think they're smutty but i also believe they're good writing for the kind of story i want to tell (ultimately, a positive one), and honest interpretations of human experience.  so yeah, i dunno....  judgy old queen writes litporn instead of giving in to a lifelong urge to behave like a hedonistic ho.  newsflash, or something

point being, thinking about time, pacing, presentation.  the beats of the story.  the music of the experience.  because sex & musicality aren't--  though dancefloor culture would have you believe otherwise  --exclusively driven by beats, and time is queer.  time is queer, in sex, and in how time expresses itself through art; time is a suspension, in comix:  each unit, each panel, considered as a "whole" moment, an integer of time, is a Monad, the nucleus of the atomic circumference of the greater story:  so too is the Self whole, in the heightened awareness of sex that comes from being both embodied and outside concern with restraint or convention or table manners.  not to get all wittgenstein but the world is all that is the case, and if you're in the world, and in the moment, it's all about balance, ultimately.  set, and setting.  i know i overthink shit and i yammer and nobody cares but this is what is always happening, and it's why i make art, and comix, and it's why i blog.  because otherwise these would be the substacks NOBODY WOULD READ, because who needs to read my pseudophilosophical daisy chains anyway.  *i* don't.   (i just keep compulsive notes)

somethings i write in notebooks like this, and brother, the typos would make samuel delany wince because at least he had dyslexia as an excuse

anyway.  where was i.  oh yeah.  the panel.  i spent a long time thinking about dick tracy, this past winter, and it all comes down to the panel.  that box is a microcosmic unit of perfect potential.  i get why the modernists were obsessed with its structural utility.  i've spent most of my life thinking about little boxes, what to put in them, and what order to put them in.  i've gone through a lot of notebooks.  and i'm never gonna be done with filling 'em.  i have been haunted by sequences of squares my whole life, almost as much as i've been haunted by lettering.  i have a pattern seeking mind.  and the panel:  the panel IS the most powerful thing there is.  it can be a page, or multiple pages at once, even as it may only ever be but a sliver of story.  there is an awesome malleability to what may be done with it.  i don't know if i recognized that before my recent meditations on chester gould's art, and comic strip art writ large.  i believe i knew it, that it was in the fundamentals of my toolkit, but i don't believe the fundamental Facts of the art had explained themselves to me, before indulging my OCD and studying the shit out of dick tracy for like four, five months

incidental to that insight, i've always had a fixation on the comix page as being analagous to the architecture of the physical space in a story.  of it being an architectural cutaway of a building, or the dimensions of the panel conforming to the space of a stairwell.  it's a Will Eisner stagecraft thing.  my favourite frank miller comix make use of the conceit.  everybody lauded the hawkguy comic for doing it, everybody loves it when frank quitely does it...  it's a real boss move, taking the little boxes and using them to capture the feeling of bodies moving through a Lived Space.  you see where i'm going with all this stuff, right?

the erotic potential of cities, capturing life in little boxes, putting it all on array like windows in a building and building the story pane by pane, glimpse by glimpse.  lighting the windows the right way, so you can find your way back to them, to stare in again, and marvel at life & how it is lived, in all its curious detail

i'm nearly done re-reading dhalgren, and it's been extraordinarily useful to me, on the heels of rereading 'the screwball asses', in re: the whole queertopia thing.  our experience of society, and of social spaces, and natural spaces, and shared spaces...  all very much on my mind.  plus i have this whole Very Gay beach right next door to me, and the lights tend to be off in the park a lot.  the city has a lot to say about the human condition beyond being horny, of course.  but it's nice to recognize the positive, in life as much as in art & one's experience of it, and i have not spent nearly as much of my fifty years on this planet as i would have liked, being happy about being a gay man, and liking men.  men have not done much to make this world pleasant, these past fifty years.  i find i empathize perhaps too well with the amoral Kid at the center of dhalgren.  i get where delany was at when he wrote it.  he was very conflicted about the world that produced him.  i do not feel dissimilar.  but i do find joy in this life: an extraordinary amount: and i believe i have found the means & the medium by which to express it.  which is also where i think delany was, when he wrote dhalgren (and the book(s) that dhalgren contains-- beause, as a container, it refers to notes towards a modular calculus, which is a structural conceit within delany's corpus which contains all of neveryon + trouble on triton).  

boxes within boxes within boxes

(it just ends there)

shutdown(s) & selling wolf tickets

There will be times this blog is deactivated.  If it's not here, it will be back.  It will always be back.

Currently on deck:

• HERO OF THE FEVER--  a queertopian sci-fi soap opera Infinite Scroll style webcomic --is in process.  Debuting soooooooooooonish.  Don't crowd me.
  
• THE BRIDGE OF MANIPULATIONS will be published next year.  It's a comic.  It's a tarot card set.  It's my life's work.  It's true!  This is the place to peek at it.
• DENIZEN, a bio-comic chronicling William S. Burroughs' involvement in the Carr-Kammerer murder case, is working.  It will be serialized as a webcomic, aimed at print.  With any luck I don't get sued.
• THE AZURE PANTRY, a dating horror graphic novel, is also on the slate.  Maybe it'll run alongside DENIZEN.  Maybe they have things in common.  Maybe?
• THE KILL HOUSE: an extremely meta vapor-comic which queers some Image Comics / Wildstorm / DC comics characters everyone's forgotten.  A military adventure thing with conspiracy frosting!  And sprinkles!
  
• and, as ever, there's PAINLESS, which was meant to be my attempt at a Disney money cash-in, but now it's dead bottom of the deck.  Who doesn't love a bootleg Wolverine yarn?  Besides copyright holders.