stupidahole

William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Speech

2005-01-13T20:19:00.000-08:00

"I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail." But it was a quieter claim in the same speech that more securely gives voice to the sustained labor of this writer at his desk in Oxford, tirelessly inventing imaginative structures of human pain and defeat and momentary triumph. "I feel that this award was not made to me as a man," Faulkner wrote, "but to my work, a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before."

William Faulkner is without a doubt the best writer I have ever read. Having beaten my head against James Joyce's Ulysses, there is in my mind no doubt who the superior writer is. But, does this extract from his acceptance speech for the 1949 Nobel Prize mean that to be a good storyteller, in the manner that Faulkner was, I must be optimistic about mankind? My stories written with some kind of adoration? I see the average man as contemptible (not that I have contempt for him), yes there is love, yes there is the desire for his best, not with any pessimism either, but there is also the fact that the average man is a depraved hick, a moron whose inbreeding is of the intellectual sort rather than the genetic.

2005-01-13T17:11:00.000-08:00

(CNN) -- Britain's Prince Harry "deserves a break" after his apology for wearing a Nazi uniform to a costume party, his aunt, the Duchess of York, has told CNN.

Harry, third in line for the British throne, was pictured on the front page of Thursday editions of Britain's The Sun newspaper wearing a swastika on his sleeve at the party. The 20-year-old was also holding a drink and smoking a cigarette. The rest here.

The royals lost me on this one. I was all in favor of retaining them (not that I have a say), but this one got me. The inbreeding has obviously dimmed the intellect of the current crop, the need for someone to usurp the throne of England is evident...who's with me???? I need plane fare.

On a serious note, there are actually people who defend this snotty little fucker who is probably too dumb to recognize what his uniform meant. At least I hope that's what it is. Of course, these people can't see anything really bad about Auschwitz, hell some of them don't even know what Auschwitz was.

Words

2005-01-12T01:59:00.000-08:00

I am addicted to words. Words are the constant in my life, a thread of addiction, less than and more than food. My mind plays with them, turns them over, works them out like little math-problems. The words in me are so full of life that they explode out my fingertips. Little juxtapositions of words, words copulating on the page, words making their music down my forearms in little movements on the keyboard. Ideas don't have meaning without words, they are frameless concepts, lies, illusions, but when they become words they become reality. All this might sound vain, I am not a master writer, I have not won myself a Pulitzer, but I AM an addict, nothing boastful in that.

2005-01-10T22:41:00.000-08:00

A Blog Portal for your promoting and networking pleasure.

2005-01-10T02:25:00.000-08:00

ALL THE JOYS OF BLOODY VENGEANCE
By
WR BULL (Part 3)

You come to my house today? My house? Talk to my woman?
Who tell you to come? You come to my house, you mus' be mad. You goin' learn something tonight. You don' have nuttin dere. She don' wan' see you. She don' wan' know you. You are not nuttin'. You undastan'?

He slaps him with the gun and then holds it to his head, needing to see fear in Neill's eyes. Neill gives it to him. Slides off the bed to his knees on the floor and begs for his life. He even tries to piss himself but it won't come. Instead he has an erection. He promises never to come to the house again. The piece de resistance? He offers to blow the man. He is so sorry, so terrified that he is willing to humiliate himself. He watches for confusion in the man's eyes. The moment when he is so distracted by this that his brain loses contact with his trigger finger. When it comes his hand comes up with the scalpel and plunges it into the man's crotch. Then he stands, slicing upward as he does, and reaching out for the gun. No problem, both hands go down to the crotch. Other guy doesn't even know what happened when he sees the gun pointed at him. Big Black is on his knees on the floor, in shock, wondering if what he thought just happened, really did.

Behind the gun, the world is a better place.

He fires once and misses. Instead of running, the other one falls to his knees as well. He walks closer and fires into the younger man's right eye.

The other is bleeding profusely and sweating. He looks up at Neill but doesn't see him, his face shiny and gray. Doesn't see anything except for the fact that his penis has become detached from the rest of his body. Neill puts the gun against Terry's new boyfriend's forehead and blows his brains out.

He steps out into the night. The air is cool and there are no sirens. It is clean, the rain having just fallen and he has a gun now. The smell of gunfire and blood in his nostrils he takes a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lights one. Menthols. Ah, the joy of bloody vengeance.

Cigarette smoked, he sets out to go kill his ex-girlfriend.

THE END.

REAL RACISM

2005-01-08T23:19:00.000-08:00

In a major historical study, Elkins, an assistant professor of history at Harvard, relates the gruesome, little-known story of the mass internment and murder of thousands of Kenyans at the hands of the British in the last years of imperial rule. Beginning with a trenchant account of British colonial enterprise in Kenya, Elkins charts white supremacy's impact on Kenya's largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu, and the radicalization of a Kikuyu faction sworn by tribal oath to extremism known as Mau Mau. Elkins recounts how in the late 1940s horrific Mau Mau murders of white settlers on their isolated farms led the British government to declare a state of emergency that lasted until 1960, legitimating a decade-long assault on the Kikuyu. First, the British blatantly rigged the trial of and imprisoned the moderate leader Jomo Kenyatta (later Kenya's first postindependence prime minister). Beginning in 1953, they deported or detained 1.4 million Kikuyu, who were systematically "screened," and in many cases tortured, to determine the extent of their Mau Mau sympathies. Much more here.

2005-01-08T13:04:00.000-08:00

ALL THE JOYS OF BLOODY VENGEANCE
By
WR BULL (Part 2)

Before too long it was December and his uncle let him go. The days were moist and hot, the continuing existence of the people around him, their satisfaction with the shit life of wanting more shit made him disgusted to a point of madness and only the weed could bring him down. But when there was no money to buy weed he thought about murder and the release of it. They felt like cockroaches though. Like going into your kitchen at 3:00 in the morning and seeing a bunch of them huddled there on the floor over a crumb of bread, even though you are barefooted you want to kill, and kill and kill.

He did not carry a knife, instead, he carried a scalpel.

He finds himself one evening with a need to talk to her. So he goes to the house, which is not far away. He stands at the gate and calls, hello? Hello? An old woman, presumably the boyfriend's mother comes out and asks him who he wants, she is friendly,or at least not unfriendly. He says he wants to talk to Terry for a minute, she says, oh. Then who should I say is calling? He says tell her Neill. She goes in quickly without saying anything more. Terry comes out and comes to the gate, looking like she was preparing to tell him to fuck off. He says, Hi. She asks how are you? He lies, Fine. She says, Look, I need you to go. I'm sorry. He sees that there is no more love, he sees that she never loved because love doesn't go away like that, even after four years. He sees that he needs her so bad he will have to kill her dead.

He walks away. She calls to him, says something that he cannot hear, but its tone is apologetic. He says fuck you.

They kick down his door in the night like the badasses they imagined themselves to be. Big Black Boyfriend and his posse of one, Smaller Black Boy. Neill woke up without jumping, without his heart beating fast. Too many late night searches, too violent many attempts to get him to suck cock by imagined badasses. At the back of his mind as he turns the light on is the fact that he does not care. When he sees who it is and that they have brought a gun a part of him smiles.

(END OF PART 2)

2005-01-08T02:52:00.000-08:00

Stuff for the content-challenged Blogger, add-ons and such.

2005-01-07T04:40:00.000-08:00

ALL THE JOYS OF BLOODY VENGEANCE
By
WR BULL (Part 1)

He was scarred in all kinds of new ways, new souvenirs, deeper and uglier than the ones he went in with, missing a tooth, smoking more than he had before, but he came out, came back home unraped, unbeaten, and less afraid than ever. He got a job with his uncle, working as a clerk in the mornings answering the phone and working the cash register. He got a room in Delford, a rough-drawn haphazard little town, no straight roads anywhere. He bought weed and sat by his window in the evenings and smoked and planned.

Oh, how he hated the world. He wanted to kill and kill and never stop killing. He wanted to walk into restaurants and dump a bucket of gasoline on somebody and set them on fire. He wanted to get a gun and fire tight groupings into walking bodies. He wanted to strangle, to decapitate. Thing was, now he could do it. Prison had given him the key to the hole where the animals were kept. Now all he wanted was for somebody to set him off.

There she was sitting on the veranda swing, the Great White Goddess in all her glory. She would see him standing behind the tree and imagine he still cared, still the little loser who loved her and couldn't find anybody else who wanted him. He was the one she had wanted when she still thought he was stronger and blacker than he turned out to be. Yeah man, she got herself a real nigger now, big and black, and this one has money. After prison in Tennessee Neill found that the voices in his head are almost always African American. She was there on the swing looking happy like he had never been in her life and he wanted so much to kill her. Not slowly though, fast and bloody and hard. What did that say?
(END OF PART 1)

RUM PUNCH By Elmore Leonard

2005-01-06T01:56:00.000-08:00

Mystery By Peter Straub

2005-01-05T19:56:00.000-08:00

Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island has something of a dramatic plot twist about two thirds of the way through, if you don't already know. I would be lying if I claimed to not have enjoyed this book. I liked the thrill of that moment when the gimmickery didn't feel like gimmickery, when I was genuinely surprised. That's rare for me, not that I'm smart or anything, just cynical about literary devices and tricky writer shit.

The story itself is about a pair of federal marshals arriving at an institution for the criminally insane to investigate the disappearance of an inmate, Rachel Solando, who is there for having drowned her children. This prison/mental hospital is on an island. It follows a line of interesting, if not particularly alarming, twists till about 3/4 of the way in we hit up against the stonewall of the big surprise. I won't spoil it for you. There are links to Amazon here. Don't be a hater.

I have two points to make about this book:

1. It strikes me that pretty much anybody (especially if they have a quirky personality) could be committed by their family should the family so desire. Think of any of the people you know over age 25 and let us say that you heard that they had been sent to a mental hosptital. Would it be that hard for you to come up with a reason? Something that you could think back to and say, ah, yes, I should have seen it coming? Look at those ugly pictures he has on his blog! What normal person would enjoy such things! I knew he was fucking nuts!

2. The surprise is not the kind where the writer has been thinking of this all along.If you've ever written a short story or a novel and tried to be cute with your endings, you know that surprise endings are fucking hard to pull off. The way it happens most easily, is for the ending to surprise you. You're writing along happily and then it hits you: what if I did this? Or this? I suspect that that is what happened here. You can see the narrative building the suspense in one direction, and then you can see where the lightbulb goes on.

2005-01-03T05:49:00.000-08:00

There is no way to like violent pulp and not like Stephen Hunter's books. These are guys' books if there ever was such a genre. Unlike Tom Clancy, the king of the guys' book, Hunter does not shy away from extremes. His heroes are a little deeper than Clancy's chise-jawed stalwart. The Swaggers et al are very matter-of fact about killing and Hunter is in no way ashamed. Much like Dennis Lehane (whose SHUTTER ISLAND I will look at shortly) he writes his protagonists as tortured with guilt and old sufferings. It is an easy way to get the reader on the side of the man who is going to kill more than a few bad guys before the novel ends.

Hot Springs is neither Hunter's best or worst book, it is simply typical. His hero is Earl Swagger, the father of the hero of a couple of his other books, Bobby Lee Swagger. He is war-hero still haunted by his abusive childhood and his younger brother's suicide. He is requested to join the war against Owney Maddox (based on a real-life gangster who did, in fact, run Hot Springs, Arkansas after WWII, it's a name similar to "Owney Madden"). Needless, to say, the pages of the book start to smell like gunsmoke and sound like the tinkling of spent shell before you're halfway through. Swagger manages to have a fistfight with Bugsy Siegel, drink countless bottles of bourbon, and kill countless hillbillies as well as father Bobby Lee.

This book is not what I would call "quality fiction", it's sort a cross between Dirty Harry and Forrest Gump, now that I think of it. It is raw, violent, male-bravado pulp with no other merit than to keep you turning the pages, but it does its job very well.

2005-01-02T00:44:00.000-08:00

Jebnit
IFYOUMESSWITHMEIWILLKILLYOU
broken
DeadBolt-Bulletin
vulgarmonkey
Avast30

2005-01-01T21:40:00.000-08:00

You read a novel and it changes you. Readers are different from the rest of the world, readers of fiction in particular. The love of stories is the sign of an internal life, an ability to relate to concepts and to empathize, it shows a personal layer beyond the apparent. The enjoyment of words on paper separates you from the rest of the world for whom reading is a tiresome necessity, a chore to be done in order to pass tests or to find out what is in this can.

The vast majority of human beings concern themselves only with what is practical, what is likely, what exists, they do this and are content. They are unable to see beyond necessity and desire. In this respect they are not unlike dogs. Their aesthetic is basic, this matches that, they like paintings that are like photographs, they like the smell of English Leather. This girl is pretty because she has big eyes and long hair. They like TV because you can understand the stories that are on TV, the soap operas are like gossip, the actors spit emotion at you and you don’t have think to get anything. For TV you don’t need imagination. Imagination distracts you. You sit and suck at Hollywood’s teat and numb your mind.

The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry

Tsunami Relief

2004-12-30T01:25:00.000-08:00

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2004-12-29T18:05:00.000-08:00

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2004-12-29T17:35:00.000-08:00

Last of the Breed By Louis L'amour

2004-12-29T15:27:00.000-08:00

2004-12-19T20:52:00.000-08:00

What most wives don't understand is how much happier they would be if they submitted to their husbands. There is security there. It is the natural leaning of the female species. The only marriages that are truly happy are the ones with wives who (voluntarily) submit themselves to the leaderships of their men and with men who are ready and willing to take up command. It is necessary for most couples to understand that there is a place for spanking and other forms of physical discipline. That submissiveness does not equal inequality and does not have to be infantilizing. There are simply different roles for the genders in a heterosexual relationship.

2004-12-19T09:25:00.000-08:00

(Paying) Flash Fiction Market listings available at: Marketpimp

2004-12-19T04:50:00.000-08:00

Yet another site for the working writer. Maybe one day we'll all be millionaires! Yay! Seriously, though, 90% of the market sites out there are either out-of-date or not free. Besides that, there are almost no real markets for flash fiction. They're not listed on the page above but Flashquake, with it's rude, obnoxious editorial staff, is pretty much the best we've got.

In Black and White or whatever...

2004-12-17T23:15:00.000-08:00

Interracial relationships...

Pompositizers

2004-12-17T17:29:00.000-08:00

I think that most people grow up in their own little set of circumstances and they never ever get a good reason to come out. They stay in the little safe place and never see the rest of the world from any other POV, so they are not able to relate, to empathize. That, kiddies, is the reason for rednecks of all colors, arrogance, and all the lame little men and women who think they know everything and that you are wrong and they are right.

Speedypin does better landline to landline. (Click only if you're in the market for prepaid International calling cards).

WordDragon

2004-12-17T01:06:00.000-08:00

So there we are, worddragon is up and running. Hope you guys find it useful. I have decided that while there may (or may not) lurk some talent for webdesign somewhere in my little brain, it's easier and cheaper to just use free templates, the indignity of having someone else's name at the bottom is better than that of having a crappy, hastily designed pience of cyberjunk floating out there. You all might also want to check out wiredword while you're at it.