List #3

3a: 2007

1. Remember
2. Smoke
3. Revelation
4. Work
5. Grace
6. Waiting
7. Insomnia
8. Voyeur
9. Butterfly
10. Reunion

3b: 2008 - 2009

1. Untitled
2. Aubade
3. Gravity
4. Prayer
5. Homecoming
6. Night
7. Drowning
8. Home
9. Sonnet
10. Sleep

~ The Virginia Quarterly Review

List #2

The Sown Men
see myth of Cadmus

Echion / Ekhion: "[son] of the viper (echis)"
Udaeus / Oudaios: "the black one" or "the infernal one" (?)
Chthonius / Khthonios: "of the earth (underground)"
Hyperenor: "over, above" + "a man"
Pelorus / Peloros: "giant" or "big man"

List #1

Fiction

a. Features

• Character
• Incident
• Linguistic invention

b. Tension

• Social strivings
• Existential strivings
• Sexual strivings
• Political strivings

c. Payoff

• Humor
• Pathos
• Mystery
• Surprise

Photo by Helquin.

Where to Begin

"...[I]t was only when I sweated my way into it that I realized one of the most fundamental rules of comics storytelling: start the story as late as possible."
~ Mark Waid at Kung Fu Monkey

Music #6

"Soulshake," Peggy Scott & Jo Jo Benson

"I Wanna Be A Flintstone," The Screaming Blue Messiahs

"Friends," Whodini

On The Edge

"Thematically, film noir examines the role of the individual within a diseased modern society. The issues of noir films are alienation, entrapment within a powerful industrial system, paranoia, fatalism and inevitable doom of mankind. In a sense, one can argue that film noir is a psychological examination of modern man’s existence. And along the way it thrills the audience. Film noir forces the viewer to think and grapple with its themes. Viewing a film noir is not a passive experience, rather, it is active and sometimes quite disturbing. The characters of noir live on the edge and take the audience along with them."
~ Tony Kashani, "Film Noir Form and Content," from Chapter 12 of Deconstructing the Mystique

Nothing to Be Done

From Giorgio Agamben's Profanations:

Each of us has known such creatures, whom Walter Benjamin defines as "crepuscular" and incomplete, similar to the gandharvas of the Indian sages, who are half celestial genie, half demon. "None has a firm place in the world, or firm, inalienable outlines. There is not one that is not either rising or falling, none that is not trading its qualities with its enemies or neighbor; none that has not completed its period of time and yet is unripe, none that is not deeply exhausted and yet is only at the beginning of a long existence." More intelligent and gifted than our other friends, always intent on notions and projects for which they seem to have all the necessary virtues, they still do not succeed in finishing anything and are generally idle [senz' opera]. They embody the type of eternal student or swindler who ages badly and who must be left behind in the end, even if it is against our wishes. And yet something about them, an inconclusive gesture, an unforeseen grace, a certain mathematical boldness in judgment and taste, a certain air of nimbleness in their limbs or words -- all these features indicate that they belong to a complementary world and allude to a lost citizenship or inviolable elsewhere. In this sense, they give us help, even though we can't quite tell what sort of help it is. It could consist precisely in the fact that they cannot be helped, or in their stubborn insistence that "there is nothing to be done for us." For that very reason, we know, in the end, that we have somehow betrayed them.

[as quoted at Ads Without Products]