Good advice. Fits nicely with his How to Write With Style, which I posted back in the old days of The Black Laser.

It's true what he's saying, and part of why you haven't seen a word of fiction out of me in months. Where's my head been at? Real talk.

Yeah, that last one got me too, but apparently there's a poem published in The Sangamo Journal in 1838 that is attributed to Lincoln. Wild, right? Even better is that it's dark as hell which you know just sends me into a tizzy. Read it below.

The Suicide's Soliloquy

Here, where the lonely hooting owl
Sends forth his midnight moans,
Fierce wolves shall o’er my carcase growl,
Or buzzards pick my bones.

No fellow-man shall learn my fate,
Or where my ashes lie;
Unless by beasts drawn round their bait,
Or by the ravens’ cry.

Yes! I’ve resolved the deed to do,
And this the place to do it:
This heart I’ll rush a dagger through,
Though I in hell should rue it!

Hell! What is hell to one like me
Who pleasures never know;
By friends consigned to misery,
By hope deserted too?

To ease me of this power to think,
That through my bosom raves,
I’ll headlong leap from hell’s high brink,
And wallow in its waves.

Though devils yell, and burning chains
May waken long regret;
Their frightful screams, and piercing pains,
Will help me to forget.

Yes! I’m prepared, through endless night,
To take that fiery berth!
Think not with tales of hell to fright
Me, who am damn’d on earth!

Sweet steel! come forth from your sheath,
And glist’ning, speak your powers;
Rip up the organs of my breath,
And draw my blood in showers!

I strike! It quivers in that heart
Which drives me to this end;
I draw and kiss the bloody dart,
My last—my only friend!

Neat! So metal.

Recently I finished The Wizard, the second part of Gene Wolfe's Wizard Knight. I enjoyed it, even if reading it on the train made me feel like I was reading The Dungeonmaster's Guide or something similarly dorktastic. Wolfe's writing is strange and dense. Making sense of the story is like a puzzle, with details casually dropped and hinted at throughout. There's a genuine sense of satisfaction when you recall a tidbit that gets paid off 300 pages later.

My current novel is Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth, a novel my mom recommended to me last summer. Apparently Follett makes most of his living as writer on techno-spy thriller kinds of books, a genre with which my mother is definitely enamored. I have never read one of his books before, and, honestly, I probably won't. I'm a hundred pages into this one and I just don't like it, even though I'm whipping through it. His writing is flavorless to me, mechanical. He tells too much and explains too much. As in films or theatre, I want characters to be mysteries we as audience member or reader need to unwrap. I am always fond of the unreliable narrator in books since it provides me with another level of something to work out in the novel. I'm not just trying to decipher the plot, but also the true nature of the protagonist. That is enticing.

But Follett leaves little of his characters's motivations to the imagination. Rather, he spells them out for us like an elementary school teacher explaining long division to a third grader. It's like a popcorn movie where every last beat is obvious, clear from the outset, where vagueness is alien. You don't have to think to understand what's happening; you're being told. It's the clear opposite of Samuel Delany's Dhalgren, a novel I struggled with a bit last year for all its deliberate lack of clarity.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the novel will develop into some tightly plotted, brilliantly executed mesh of interwoven plotlines and characters over the next 880 pages. It certainly has the space for it. But maybe it won't. I'm not exactly ready to give up on it yet, but if it doesn't turn around real fast, it's entering the discard pile.

I feel like The Onion wrote this article just for me. I think this passage will illustrate what I'm mean.

Although the Department of Evil has not yet announced the exact timetable for the death of all, it recommends citizens make their peace with doomed relatives and spouses immediately, as the hour of their ending draws ever nigh and will be upon them as soon as the necessary funding has been authorized by the House Appropriations Committee.

"This budget approval is merely a pitiful, niggling formality, for soon we'll be free to swarm across the land draining the life-pus out of all you quivering mortal worms," Reynolds said. "Doubt us not: Come the wintertide, you all shall die, and die you will. Sorry, I meant 'must.' Die you must!"

Really though, you should just head on over to The Onion and read the damn article. Then come back and tell me what you think. It's easily the funniest thing I've read on The Onion all day.

Here I am on the tail end of some major life changes and I feel like something is missing. I'm settled in my new apartment, my finances have leveled out after the move, I've been working regularly, and playing a lot. The transition into this new phase is basically over and I'm starting to feel a little antsy about it. Not antsy about the transition, but antsy about what's next. That familiar tightness in the chest is back, that feeling that I'm not doing enough, that I'm not creating enough, that I'm wasting such valuable time as I'll never have again. Hedonism has become dull, a chore, a worn out play-thing destined for the bottom of the toy chest. All the playing is a nice distraction from life when I'm stressed and stupid and trying to avoid my feelings (as I've been doing since the beginning of February), but when I'm not really avoiding anything all the hedonism does is inspire feelings of guilt and shame. Loss? I don't know. Maybe that's too strong a word. It makes me feel bad and dumb.

After cranking out the piece for Hunter earlier this year and my subsequent rejection, there has been this tiny little whisper in my brain chanting its disheartening mantra of "Fuck it," which is a terrible attitude to seeping through your subconscious. Astute Black Laserites will notice that I've posted nary a single photo all year. It's May. You'll also notice that I've not posted any other writing besides the Hunter piece. And that I've made ZERO progress on the three music videos I've assigned myself for this year. Pathetic. This year's theme is flailing around, begging for attention, and I can't seem to muster it. What is my deal? I'm trading my work time for play time as a way to rebound, but it's not having the affect it should. Quite the opposite, I think.

With this warm weather anxiety firmly gripping my chest, I've been thinking of a few simple ways to change things up, to put my brain into a different place. Let's explore, shall we?

• Buy a bicycle - I really want one. I think it would be nice to have one to ride around on in the summer time. On the other hand, it's been 15 years since I've ridden a bicycle regularly and riding one around NY scares me more than a little. It's something I need to overcome.
• Lose a little weight - Nothing drastic. Just a little. I could stand a little definition. It will help me feel better, no doubt. I don't really know how to do this, but maybe the bike will help.
• Read more - This is another weird thing. I think I've read maybe 2 or 3 books this year? Again, it's May. That is a surprisingly low number for me. I like reading a lot. It makes my brain function better and helps me write.
• Work less - I've been working nonstop since October and I'm ready not to work for a little. I can afford it. Thankfully, most of June and parts of July and August I'll not be working. Super.
• Pick up the guitar again - It's been a million years since I owned and played a guitar regularly. I'd like to get one again and flex that part of my brain so long dormant.

All in all, not an insurmountable list. With any measure of diligence I should be able to accomplish these things and they will open the flood gates of my brain so that I might be able to get some damned work done when I'm not working. What is this crazy work compulsion I feel about? Weird. Anyway, I'd like to work more.

And lest this come off as some whiny bitch and moan session (it's not intended to be), here's something I find inspirational.

Speaking of books, I recently stumbled upon (without the help of StumbleUpon) the work of a British artist named Philip Smith who works exclusively in the bindings of books. As you know, a book is really just a stack of loosely connected papers until someone or some machine comes along and binds them all together. Usually a books binding is utilitarian at best, and shoddy at worst. Hard bound books are nice, if expensive, and then you have your mass market paperbacks which fall apart after 5 years because of cheap paper and cheaper glue.

Then you have artists like Mr. Smith here who not only return the craft of bookbinding to the highly-skilled artisanal place it held for centuries but add a surprising new dimension to it.

Here are a few favorites of mine from his site. See if you can guess which book each of these is. I promise there's nothing esoteric here; these books can be found anywhere. Except maybe on Mars. For now.

Cool, right? I would LOVE to have one of these in my house on display. Talk about amazing art that would fit right in with my weirdo collection of things I like.

Head on over to the site to see if your guesses were correct. They're all in the galleries.

If you're anything like me, and chances are you aren't, then you have a huge stack of books on your shelves waiting for you to stay home more often and actually read them. I feel a little like a bad parent, but what are you going to do? However, having a back log of books doesn't prevent me from wanting to acquire more books that I might eventually at some point in the future get around to reading. I mean, books are beautiful objects in their own right, and what's the harm? It's better to spend the 12.95 or whatever on a book than to spend it on cocaine. It wouldn't be very MUCH cocaine, but the point still holds.

Once you've finished reading my pile of free, wildly captivating fiction, you might find yourself in need of something else to read while patiently waiting for me to update this site. Where might you find suggestions?

How about a surprisingly poorly written list of famous author's favorite books?

Did you know that JCO's favorite book is Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky? Or that David Foster Wallace picked C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters? Or that Michael Chabon, who I adore, picked Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges? Lots of surprises! Lots of new, fun books to read. The list even features Peter Cary of not-letting-me-into-Hunter fame. What was his favorite book? Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.

My only disappointment in this list—besides its ham-fisted writing style—is that my favorite author of all time, Cormac McCarthy, was not represented. I wonder what his favorite book is? Mr. McCarthy, if you read this, leave us a comment. Thanks!

Here it is. For you to enjoy.

Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature,
An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature;
Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses
Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses.

I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations,
A singular development of cat communications
That obviates your basic hedonistic predilection
For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection.

A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents;
You would not be so agile if you lacked its counterbalance.
And when not being utilized to aid in locomotion,
It often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion.

O Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display
Connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array.
And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend,
I nonetheless consider you a true and valued friend.

Bonus points if you can name the source without Google. Mikey, I'm looking at you.

This is the second of two poetry jokes I am posting right now.

Urban Dictionary has 58 definitions for the term "dipset". The one I am inclined to take into consideration for this posting is as follows:

dipset

The diplomats, also known as dipset, are a Harlem new york based group who previously signed to Rockefeller records but now are signed to their own label diplomat records. The group was founded by rappers Cameron and Jim Jones. The diplomats first became popular following Cameron's reemergence in 2002.

Usage: "Dipset...yup...yeh, yeh, yeh"

With that placed firmly in the forefront of our brains, today I happened across Dipset Haiku, a humorous collection of haikus in what I can only assume to be Cam'ron and the remainder of the Dipset's style.

Here are a few gems.

3G'd Up

The Great Recession

Rehab

Yellow Bellies

But get yourself o'er to the site and read the rest. Perfect for a boring day at the office. I'm also a real big fan of their color palette.

This is the first of two poetry jokes I am about to post.

Princeton professor and Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Muldoon critiques my favorite pop starlet of the moment, Kesha. In my opinion, he accurately describes the majesty of Kesha's work, the wonderful way she uses word meaning in novel ways to express fresh ideas, and her obvious homage to Yeats.

I feel inspired by her work to create and to continue to create in the face of people not being able to understand the true depths of your work.

I stole this from McSweeney's. I'm not this clever.

1. "Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead."

2. "We are Satan's generation."

3. "As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted."

4. "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."

5. "The child of burning time has gone. He hasn't come back."

6. "Flames of profligacy, naked bodies flowing in the stream of wild dreams."

7. "The original Archangel or possessor of the command of the heavenly host, is called the Devil."

8. "The sulphur-kingdom, purgatory, hell`s damnation, no man will be perditioned for all time."

9. "Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires."

10. "Every man is therefore guilty of all the good he did."

The key is here. How many did you get right?

Dear Hunter,

Boo.

I am disappointed. This is not a very fun way to start my Monday. I thought I wrote a pretty fucking good piece for you guys. Much better than last year's certainly. Was it the F for the English class on my NYU transcript? Was it all the cursing in my piece? Was it that I'm just so super stylish and great that you thought I would overwhelm the rest of the students? Probably not. Whatever arcane magic went into your decision making process, I am not mad. Disappointed? Yes. Saddened? A little. Curious? Totally. I also understand that you only take six students a year and that the selection process is a difficult one. I guess I lost this little wager.

Luckily, I have a career I like and things to look forward to. And, shit, I can and will keep writing.

All in all, Hunter College, I understand. Personally, I think you made the wrong choice, but what are you going to do? We'll see how I feel about applying a third time in the coming autumn.

Sincerely,

Joe Dillingham
The Black Laser

And here it is.

A salesman is sitting in the reception area of a big corporation, waiting to give a presentation to some of the people there. He is kept waiting almost 40 minutes beyond the time of his appointment, and then he's finally ushered into a conference room. He goes in, and sitting around a big table are two Jews, an African-American woman, and a gay guy of Chinese descent. The salesman goes into his pitch, for software or a phone system or something, and it's pretty evident a couple minutes into it that these four people couldn't care less, especially the younger Jew, who keeps checking his BlackBerry. But he plows through the presentation anyway, and when he finishes, everybody shakes his hand and thanks him. He goes out to his car and starts to drive home. On the road, his cell phone rings and he answers it. It's his wife, and she asks him to pick up a couple of groceries on his way home. He says OK. She says, are you OK? And he says, yeah, I'm fine. She says OK. He hangs up, and this commercial for anti-itch powder comes on the radio, and it's got all these country-sounding old people giving testimonials about how this powder completely improved the quality of their lives. And the salesman starts crying. Big choked sobs. He shades his eyes with his left hand so that the other drivers can't see that he's crying and says, "And I don't even fucking care about this shit!"

Seriously, this really gets me for some reason. It comes from "Jokes" by Andy Richter on McSweeney's. Check out the rest of them. His other 4 jokes in the article are similarly awkward and deliberately not jokey, but this salesman one is just miserable and makes me sad, not because it's badly written, but because I feel for the pathetic salesman. Just horrible.

Funny how such a small bit of text can be so affective.

Thanks, Andy Richter. Real cool.

Now that February is clipping along rapidly, my application to Hunter is finished and submitted, and I have had a moment to think about the results of last year's theme, the time has arrived to discuss 2009 - The Year of 5000 Photos and 50 Short Stories. I know that you were all super excited for yet another text-heavy Black Laser posting in which I muse about things that matter to me but probably don't matter to you. Isn't the internet wonderful?

In case you missed it, here is my original statement of intent for 2009.

Photography.

2009 was wildly successful for my photo work. Not only did I hit 5017 out of 5000 photos, but I really do think that my photos got noticeably better over the course of the year. I've throw together a gallery of some of my favorites from the last year. There's no rhyme or reason for the selections; I just went through 2009 and picked a bunch I liked. They are arranged in chronological order, oldest first.

I took a lot of good photos and a handful of great ones. I feel much more confident with my tools than I did before. I learned and experimented and limited myself. Tremendous success. We'll see how many photos I take this year. I've hardly touched my camera since the year began because I was working so hard on my graduate school application, but that will soon change. Making photos is fun and rewarding, even if I don't make a damned dollar doing it.

Here are all the galleries I've posted on this site. Anything tagged "Year of 5000 Photos and 50 Short Stories" is, obviously, part of this theme.

Writing.

The results of my writing last year are much less clear. In one quantitative manner, it was only a partial success with only 38 of 50 short stories being written. Even once I lowered my goals in terms of word count, I was unable to get as much done as I had strived for. There is no excuse really. I missed the mark and that's it. It's disappointing too, because once I really got down to it, I was able to crank out piece after piece. Between the middle of November and the end of the year I wrote 36 of my 38 short stories. If you do the math, that works out to an average of 6 stories a week for 6 weeks. Not bad at all.

And that's the rub. More importantly than whether or not I met the quota I set for myself in December of 2008, in terms of my skills as a writer, I think that 2009 was a complete success. Writing as often and as much as I did undoubtedly helped my writing. "Duh," you say, but it's true. I believe that whipping through those short stories made me a stronger writer. It's one thing to know that practice makes you better at things, but it's entirely different to have experienced it. I am sure that the writing I did last year contributed directly to the quality of my creative submission to Hunter this year, which is quite clearly superior to the work I submitted last year. And that is awesome.

I'm still not that great with writing about myself, though.

Check out all posts with the tag "Year of 5000 Photos and 50 Short Stories" to see the work I did.

Going forward.

This year I've already written 1 of my assigned 12 Finished Short Stories. I've not yet done any real work on the music videos, but it is only February and there is time. I hope to continue the roll I started in November when I decided that all the worrying I was doing about the quality of my work was preventing me from doing any at all (stupid). I've got more writing to do and photos to make. It feels great to make something out of nothing, and I hope all you lovely readers of my tiny speck on the face of the Interwebs will continue to read and look. And if you don't, at the very least, I enjoy it all and that's really what matters.