Things to do within the next year, or maybe starting next summer, depending on what they are:
-get more familiar with UNIX and associated programs (vim for starters)
-set up my own Gopherspace
-get my books and music arranged alongside Tracey's; now that we're married, there's not much excuse not to merge our collections
-skate more
-translate at least three of Lin Yutang's (or someone's) essays from Chinese
-visit my brother in California
-finish volumes 2 (in progress) and 3 of In Search of Lost Time
-finish 2666, not kill self
-hit 150 pages on the current novel, or another one, as long as I'm writing something
-maybe get into some kinda grad program for Chinese, if not, no worries
-convince myself certain types of comma usage are acceptable
-lots of other things I can't think of right now
How can you help? I don't know. Remind me I wrote this in, say, January 2012, and maybe that'll start a frenzy of activity. Or I'll do nothing and blame it on what should be my final semester at UH in the Chinese Studies program.
I'll be back before I head to China. Later, folks.
now playing: Destroyer 666, Unchain the Wolves
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Friday, June 24, 2011
A thousand thoughts, a thousand edits
Lately I've written several things that I either didn't post here, or took down shortly after posting them. My reasons are numerous: something wasn't finished, or it sucked, or it was inconsequential, even by the standards of this blog. Take, for example, my brief paean to Brooke Brodack, which itself relied on my habit of collecting search terms that returned no results on Google. My wife caught it before I removed it, which is fine; I wasn't ashamed of the sentiments expressed therein- after all, don't you find it odd that after all these years nobody's typed the same thing into Google?-but the muddled nature of the post irked me when I re-read it. Hence its voyage into the void.
A bizarre, and quite possibly awful, nanofiction piece I've worked on lately, "Bad Dudes," also got axed, because I posted it when it wasn't complete. It'll return for your reading displeasure very soon. I also stayed up way, way too late one night composing an essay on dressing well (Oh, the irony!), but it remains unfinished and unspecific, and may never see the light of day.
I mention these things because, very soon, I'm going to China for several weeks. The Great Firewall of China will block my access to Blogger, so I'll be incommunicado via this channel. I should be able to post to my website from the Middle Kingdom, so look there if you want to follow my activities in real(ish)-time. Whether I'll write much is an entirely different matter, and I'll probably reprint my travelogue here when I return to Houston; ergo, I can't guarantee that you'll find much worth reading- assuming there's anything in the first place.
And now some assorted facts, statements, etc. in no particular order:
-I have a gorgeous gingham tie I'm dying to wear. There are also a number of gorgeous ties I want to purchase, and wear. The disconnect between my usual mode of dress and the things I just expressed is not lost on me.
-I'm two or three days into an experiment wherein I've swapped using a webmail client (standard Gmail) for Thunderbird. So far I'm quite pleased with the separation of web and mail.
-Grails' Deep Politics album was stunning upon first listen, and only gets better with time. That D-side engraving is icing on the cake for those of us who purchase vinyl.
-I'm reading far too many books at once*. Off the top of my head, I'm in the midst of vol. 2 of In Search of Lost Time; a re-read of Pynchon's Mason & Dixon; the seemingly never-edited but defiantly enjoyable Denied to the Enemy by Dennis Detwiller (Axis Mundi Sum never had an editor, sure, but it wasn't riddled with spelling/homonym errors and awful comma splices); a volume of collected Solomon Kane tales by Robert E. Howard; The Unborn, a series of the Zen teacher Bankei's lectures and dialogues; The Confusions of Pleasure by Timothy Brook, a history of commerce and culture in Ming dynasty China that I can't recommend enough; and probably a couple more. I keep track of every book I read during the year, and having so many in rotation not only makes the list look pitifully short, it seems I never finish anything.
-Tracey and I's wedding celebration in Wimberley was awesome. I extend my thanks to everyone who came, because without y'all it wouldn't have been what it was.
-The Time of No Time Evermore by The Devil's Blood is a really, really good record.
-Julie Delpy, of (in my book) Killing Zoe fame, stars as the infamous Erszebet Bathory in a movie called The Countess. I haven't watched it yet, but man, how can you go wrong with that combination?
-Commas appear to be encroaching into my writing with a frequency that would be alarming if I wasn't confident that I use them properly. Using them well is a different story, of course.
That's all for now, dear readers. Thanks for your time, and I hope to post more before I head east by going west.
Your friend,
D.A. Smith
*Nothing new, yet always worthy of complaint.
A bizarre, and quite possibly awful, nanofiction piece I've worked on lately, "Bad Dudes," also got axed, because I posted it when it wasn't complete. It'll return for your reading displeasure very soon. I also stayed up way, way too late one night composing an essay on dressing well (Oh, the irony!), but it remains unfinished and unspecific, and may never see the light of day.
I mention these things because, very soon, I'm going to China for several weeks. The Great Firewall of China will block my access to Blogger, so I'll be incommunicado via this channel. I should be able to post to my website from the Middle Kingdom, so look there if you want to follow my activities in real(ish)-time. Whether I'll write much is an entirely different matter, and I'll probably reprint my travelogue here when I return to Houston; ergo, I can't guarantee that you'll find much worth reading- assuming there's anything in the first place.
And now some assorted facts, statements, etc. in no particular order:
-I have a gorgeous gingham tie I'm dying to wear. There are also a number of gorgeous ties I want to purchase, and wear. The disconnect between my usual mode of dress and the things I just expressed is not lost on me.
-I'm two or three days into an experiment wherein I've swapped using a webmail client (standard Gmail) for Thunderbird. So far I'm quite pleased with the separation of web and mail.
-Grails' Deep Politics album was stunning upon first listen, and only gets better with time. That D-side engraving is icing on the cake for those of us who purchase vinyl.
-I'm reading far too many books at once*. Off the top of my head, I'm in the midst of vol. 2 of In Search of Lost Time; a re-read of Pynchon's Mason & Dixon; the seemingly never-edited but defiantly enjoyable Denied to the Enemy by Dennis Detwiller (Axis Mundi Sum never had an editor, sure, but it wasn't riddled with spelling/homonym errors and awful comma splices); a volume of collected Solomon Kane tales by Robert E. Howard; The Unborn, a series of the Zen teacher Bankei's lectures and dialogues; The Confusions of Pleasure by Timothy Brook, a history of commerce and culture in Ming dynasty China that I can't recommend enough; and probably a couple more. I keep track of every book I read during the year, and having so many in rotation not only makes the list look pitifully short, it seems I never finish anything.
-Tracey and I's wedding celebration in Wimberley was awesome. I extend my thanks to everyone who came, because without y'all it wouldn't have been what it was.
-The Time of No Time Evermore by The Devil's Blood is a really, really good record.
-Julie Delpy, of (in my book) Killing Zoe fame, stars as the infamous Erszebet Bathory in a movie called The Countess. I haven't watched it yet, but man, how can you go wrong with that combination?
-Commas appear to be encroaching into my writing with a frequency that would be alarming if I wasn't confident that I use them properly. Using them well is a different story, of course.
That's all for now, dear readers. Thanks for your time, and I hope to post more before I head east by going west.
Your friend,
D.A. Smith
*Nothing new, yet always worthy of complaint.
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