HorseloverFat

Forget Scrabulous

BenBurgis@hotmail.com — Tue, 1 Jul 08 13:07:00 UT

The real purpose of Facebook is the 'Mob Wars' application.

Jekyll: A Concise Review

BenBurgis@hotmail.com — Mon, 30 Jun 08 12:02:00 UT

6-episode BBC miniseries.

I liked it.

Nalo!

BenBurgis@hotmail.com — Fri, 27 Jun 08 13:36:00 UT

I just found out that my first-half-of-the-summer-MFA-residency workshop is now going to co-taught by Nalo.

Fuckin' awesome.

#

Also in the 'eerily perfect' category, there's a seminar in the residency on 'writing under the influence of rock music.' This is all way too obviously designed around my particular interests and preferences. I'm starting to think that I'm going to show up and find out that the whole Stonecoast program is a elaborately constructed Philip-K-Dick-esque facade for my benefit, a sting operation with unknown purposes.

If not, though, it might be pretty cool.

#

Meanwhile, I just finished a rough draft of my dissertation proposal and sent it off to my advisor (who's back in Brazil for the summer) for comments. We'll see how that goes, of course, but it would be really nice to have the proposal nailed down and approved by the beginning of the fall semester at UM, so when I really get down to my MFA work, I can be done w/everything but the dissertation itself (minor detail) for the PhD program.

#

Oh, and I'm kind of angry that this band doesn't actually exist.

WaT Day 3

BenBurgis@hotmail.com — Wed, 25 Jun 08 18:34:00 UT

353 words!

WaT Day 2

BenBurgis@hotmail.com — Mon, 23 Jun 08 23:59:00 UT

262 words.

Australia and Southland Tales

BenBurgis@hotmail.com — Mon, 23 Jun 08 13:57:00 UT

The draft schedule finally went up for the Australia conference, and they did indeed manage to fit me into one of the days I'll be there. My talk is one of the last two on the schedule. (It's a big enough conference that pretty much the whole five-and-a-half-day shindig is done on two tracks of programming, and my paper is one of the two scheduled for the very last time slot before the Friday night dinner at the very end.) Since the conference is right after the MFA residency (I fly to Melbourne the day after I get back from Portland), this means I really do need to spend some time during my last two weeks before the residency whittling my very long paper down to a half-hour readable segment, practicing reading it, etc. Yay?

#

Meanwhile, I finally watched "Southland Tales."

I liked it, a lot. Felt like some sort of dreamy acid remix of Philip K. Dick, T.S. Elliot, Bush-era political surreality and Kelly's own previous trippy offering, "Donnie Darko." (Right down to talk about vessels and portals and one of the key people involved having a missing eye.) A lot of it didn't make a damn lick of sense on any kind of literal, linear level, natch, but it in a dream-logic sort of way, it all worked. (For no particular reason except to reference the PKD novel, at one point a policeman just blurts out, "flow my tears!") The fact that the main actors included Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake and the Rock just enhanced the sense that you're literally watching one of Richard Kelly's dreams.

I can understand why a lot of people were non-plussed by it when it came out--it's all about criterea of success--but I'd be amazed if, in 30 years, this isn't still watched as some kind of Zardoz-style underground cult classic.

WaT Day 1 & On-Line Hat-Passing

BenBurgis@hotmail.com — Sun, 22 Jun 08 19:46:00 UT

I'm once again doing the Clarion West write-a-thon this year. For anyone reading this who isn't familiar with that, it's a fundraiser for the Clarion West Writers' Workshop. (Clarion West is a six-week summer sf writers workshop, much like Clarion East or Odyssey apart from the fact that, objectively speaking, it attracts much cooler students.) It works like a walk-a-thon, but with writing instead of walking. Various writers, usually CW alumni, pledge to get a certain amount written and donors pledge to donate proportionally to Clarion West. The general WaT page is here and my particular page is here if you get the urge to sponsor me, or even the urge to look at the picture of me drinking coffee in front of my laptop and lookin' all writerly.

My goal is just to write at least 200 words a day during each day of the six-week Write-a-Thon. (Given that, other than one day that I wrote four sentences, I hadn't written a damned word of fiction in about the last three weeks, this isn't quite so pathetic a goal as it might sound.) Today was the kick-off day and I wrote 480 words.

(Oh yes, and as should be obvious, for the sake of pimping for cash for Clarion West, I'm un-f-locking things at least for the duration of the WaT. We'll see how that goes.)

Where I'll Be When I'm Not Here

BenBurgis@hotmail.com — Fri, 11 Apr 08 01:33:00 UT

[Update: re-reading this, I realize I'm being coy here in a way that tends to drive me nuts when other people do it--'why bring things up at all if you aren't going to talk about them?'--but in context, that mild hypocrisy still strikes me as the lesser evil compared to airing my complaints about anyone in public in a way I'm not comfortable with doing, or exiting this space without any explanation at all.]

As a result of some very weird and over-the-top e-mails I got yesterday, apparently sparked by an in-passing comment on this blog that the wrong person read*, I'm temporarily going to:

(a) restrict my blogging to my livejournal mirror, &
(b) restrict that to friends-locked posts

This is just a personal-comfort-zone thing, which again, is temporary and not a big deal. It's ultimately a cost/benefit decision, whereby I've selfishly decided that the minor weirdness I'm saving myself from a repetition of outweighs the fact that I will be depriving those of you not on my lj friends list of the obviously enormous wit and wisdom regularly exhibited here until I figure out how I want to deal with this.***

Of course, in the fairly unlikely event that anyone actually cares about said deprivation of wit and wisdom, it's easy enough to re-gain access to it by setting up an lj account (even if you don't plan on using it for blogging or anything else...it takes like ten seconds to set one up), and then friending me. If I have no reason to believe that you're going to respond to anything I say with a one-sided series of weird over-the-top e-mails, I'll immediately reciprocate that friending and then you can read every bit of the brilliance that invariably leaks from my fingers as I type.....

Or you can just wait until the restoration of business-as-usual here. Like I said, this is just a temporary thing to give me some time and breathing room to think about all of this.

*Trust me, you don't want to know. Which is the same response that I will give to any requests for clarification via e-mail, IM, phone, in person over drinks** or in any other context. I will register my confusion about why anyone would go through the trouble of seeking out material that they know from repeated previous experience that they will find upsetting, but I'll leave it at that....other than maybe to say if you read that last line and thought, 'aha, I know who it is now,' you're almost certainly wrong.
**Well, unless it's Laphroaig and you're buying. Then anything's possible....
***Which is not a request for advice on how to deal with it, as you can tell from the fact that I've turned off comments on this entry. This might sound weird out of context, but due to the particulars, none of the obvious options (shrug off yesterday's weirdness as not a big deal and continue my usual blogging practices, learn a much more thorough kind of self-censorship, etc.) are particularly attractive to me, so I just need some time to mull it over. Again, really not a big deal.

Zombie Money

BenBurgis@hotmail.com — Thu, 10 Apr 08 22:43:00 UT

Got home last night to find the check from "Tales of the Zombie War" in my mailbox.

God, that feels good.

Even Older

BenBurgis@hotmail.com — Mon, 7 Apr 08 15:22:00 UT

So I'm 28.

In Miami-Dade County, this event was changed to April 5th, on account of how everyone has stuff to do on Mondays, so Saturday was fun and today will be about furious qual-reading.

The pseudo-birthday involved a lot of people I haven't seen in far too long, a nice Mexican place on South Beach, a hookah bar, night-time swimming in the ocean and possibly as much as a drop or two of alcohol.

My wonderful sister sent me "The Steep Approach to Garbadale" by Iain Banks, which is excellent. I've only read the first 70 pages or so, but so far it looks like it might be my favorite Banks novel since "The Crow Road." Also on a Scottish theme, two of my fellow grad students in Miami got me a very lovely bottle of Glenfiddich, which I've been trying very hard not to use up too quickly.

Meanwhile, the full list of accepted papers for the Australia conference is on-line.

Australia, MFA and Prize-Winning Zombies

BenBurgis@hotmail.com — Wed, 2 Apr 08 18:32:00 UT

This morning I found out that my abstract was accepted for presentation at the Fourth World Congress of Paraconsistency this summer at the University of Melbourne. I've never actually flown to Australia before, and I'm guessing that it's not cheap, so whether or not I actually go is going to depend heavily on how much financial support I can get on this end from the Department, my research account, etc. (The conference also starts the day before my summer MFA residency ends, which doesn't mean I can't figure something out and do both, but it will be a tight squeeze.) The paper is called "Paraconsistent Tense Logic, the Metaphysics of Change," and in the event that anyone who reads this blog is actually interested in this strange thing that I do for a living, here's the abstract:

"Graham Priest has argued that there are some true contradictions, but that the statistical frequency of true contradictions is very low, and that as such the epistemic probability of any particular contradiction being true is very low. This claim is essential to his justification for the âclassical re-capture.â At the same time Priest has identified some concrete extra-semantic candidates for the status of true contradictions in analysis of the metaphysics of change. Expressed in terms of a paraconsistent logic (his own LP) outfitted with tense operators like P, which can be read as âit was the case that,â Priest argues for 'Zenoâs Law,' the principle that (Î± & PÂ¬Î±) entails the disjunction of (Î± & Â¬Î±) or P(Î± & Â¬Î±). Despite his repeated claims to the contrary, it will become clear that Priest is so deeply committed to the tensed theory of time that his analysis falls apart once the tenseless theory is substituted. More importantly, Priestâs argument for 'Zenoâs Law' exhibits a methodology which undermines his claim that the statistical frequency of true contradictions is very low. A closer examination of this point should demonstrate that there is no good reason why arguments at least as good in more mundane contexts couldnât turn up enough true contradictions to overturn the claim that the statistical frequency of true contradictions is very low. As such, if dialetheism is correct, we are not justified in generally assigning low epistemic probabilities to contradictory outcomes in our arguments, and the âclassical re-captureâ fails."

#

Meanwhile, I just saw the tentative workshop schedule for the summer residency at Stonecoast. It looks like I'm workshopping with Elizabeth Searle for the first week and with Kelly Link for the second. This is very cool.

One of my new classmates, Jason McCarty, posted up probably the single comment that made me most excited about going to Stonecoast. It was a response to that entry I did a while back on The Book I Want To Write Someday (a Mamatasian mash-up of Buffy & Questionable Content), and his comment was:

"Yep, you'll fit in well at Stonecoast (Mamatasian? Sheesh...). My first semester I workshopped a story about two roommates--one a goth/industrial DJ, the other a college English instructor with a PhD in Folklore--who accidentally summon a demon in the middle of a club and proceed to fight and defeat it, all through the creative use of Yeats' 'The Second Coming.' So yes, we are your people, welcome home..."

Excellent.

#

Last but very far from least, yesterday I found out that my story Three Perspectives on the Role of the Anarchists in the Zombie Apocalypse won the second-place prize at the most recent contest at Tales of the Zombie War. The prize is $25, which is about the cost of three drinks at South Miami dive bars (more like two drinks on South Beach), but (a) three drinks isn't nothing, and (b) it's wicked good for the ego to get paid twice for the same story.

Since it was written pre-Clarion, I've changed a lot stylistically since I wrote it, etc., it's kind of funny to me that it's my most successful offering so far, but if these good things were going to happen to any of my older stories, this would be it. There's a *lot* of me in that story--honestly, you want to see what the-world-from-the-point-of-view-of-Ben looks like, read it--and there are still a lot of things I like about it. So...in summation....I'm proud of my little zombie offspring, and I'd like it to find new ways to keep buying me drinks.

Enough With 'Teh'

BenBurgis@hotmail.com — Sun, 30 Mar 08 16:08:00 UT

1. It's an annoying word. I don't want to be mean, and I hate to be the one to tell you, but when use 'teh,' it's not cute, and it's not funny. It's just....sort of....sad. Like you're trying way too hard to be cutesy and it's not quite coming off.

2. There's something very strange about 'teh' as slangy, cutesy web-speak in so far as I have almost never seen anyone under the age of 30 use it.* At this point, I suspect that if teh kids ever used it, they've long since stopped.

3. Lolcats are still allowed to use it because, despite the presence of whatever strange magic that allows them to speak English, they are, after all, cats, and as such their tiny brains cannot be expected to formulate more cleverly cutesy language patterns.** Humans, however, should be expected to come up with something a bit more creative.

4. That is all.

*"Wait," you may be thinking. "What about Penny Arcade? I'm sure I've seen the word 'teh' used there." Sure, but you know what? I checked, and Jerry Holkins is 32 years old. Our boy was born on February 6th, 1976, i.e. during Teh Ford Administration.
**I love the Miami kitten. I loved all the cats my parents had back in Michigan when I was growing up, too, but I have never had the impression that any of them were geniuses.

MFA (The Big Public Announcement)

BenBurgis@hotmail.com — Mon, 24 Mar 08 14:02:00 UT

This winter, I applied to the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Maine (Stonecoast). I picked USM on the recommendation of my Clarion West classmate Meghan...I was telling her how for the last couple of years, I'd been seriously thinking about applying to a low-residency MFA program, but I wasn't sure where specifically, and she mentioned that Stonecoast offers a 'Popular Fiction' specialization, and they have Kelly Link and James Patrick Kelly on their faculty, so they should be friendly to the kind of stuff I write. I did the actual application just before Winter Break, Maureen McHugh and Nalo Hopkinson (and, locally, the wonderful, repeatedly-Nebula-nominated Adam-Troy Castro, who's in my local crit group) very kindly agreed to write letters of recommendation and, true to character, I had all of my supporting materials (essays, writing sample) in the mail by about three days before the Feb. 1st deadline. Then came the waiting. Honestly, I was pretty sure I wouldn't get in, since given their faculty, they can afford to be selective, and my application essays were pretty rushed and showed it.

On March 7th, I got the phone call letting me know that I got in. (The woman on the other end said that Pop Fic students always sounded much happier on the phone than their Lit-Fic counterparts, which I thought was funny.) Then last Monday, I got another phone call, this one from Nancy Holder, who's on the faculty there, saying she'd recommended me for admission when she was on the committee and she really hoped I'd come....she liked my writing sample, she's on the board of Clarion out in San Diego, and she knows Adam & Nalo, so she's eager to get the Adam- and Nalo-recommended Clarion grad to come. In between, I got the actual letter, telling me that I had until March 24th to decide whether I was going to come. So, naturally....

Anyway, I'm going! The program looks fantastic, the next two years are the perfect time to do it (see FAQ, below), and after the number of Stephen King novels I've read over the years, I love the idea of going off to do writerly stuff in Maine. I may even go so far as to wear a tweed jacket when I fly off to my first residency this summer.

I'd even say that this is a situation where "woo"'s and "hoo"'s are called for in celebration.

#

Meanwhile, a brief FAQ:

Q: What do you expect to get out of this?

A: Me want learn write better. Me want write good stories. Also, I enjoy teaching, and it would be nice to have the option to mix it up a bit and teach creative writing classes as well as Philo classes someday, if only as an occasional adjunct thing at a community college or whatnot.

Q: So, uh, you're dropping out of your PhD program?

A: No. It's a low-res MFA program...10 days a semester face to face, and the rest of it long-distance. The whole point is to be compatible with whatever your full-time day job is--in my case, being a Philo grad student and instructor.

Q: How are you paying for this? Aren't you broke all the time?

A: Well, the good news is that they have stuff like "financial aid" and "scholarships," and I'm applying for everything I can get my hands on. Also, I should be making a decent chunk of money this summer teaching at MDC, which is something that in the post-coursework, post-quals phase of things, I hope to be able to do more of. In fact, worst case scenario, my hope is that the amount of annual income I get from the MDC adjunct-ing will be about the annual cost of Stonecoast, so I can live on my UM assistantship, I should be OK. If I'm being overly optimistic financially, I can always drop out and finish the program when things are better, and that won't be the end of the world either. We'll see, of course, and there are open questions here, but I'm at least cautiously optimistic, hence my accepting a spot in the program.

Q: Wait wait wait. Are you *crazy?* You're going to try to finish your doctorate and get an MFA *at the same time?* You'll die.

A: Actually, not so much. First of all, keep in mind that the primary things you do in an MFA program are *write* and *crit,* and those are things I'd be doing anyway. As is, if I go more than a week without getting writing done, I get swamped with horrible irrational paranoia that It's All Done, the Tap Has Run Dry and the last couple years have been a flash in the pan. I know that's silly, but I can't help it. The vantage point from within my head is, I'll admit, a little weird, but I'll say that getting so wrapped up in paraconsistent logic that I stop putting words together for the purposes of fiction is not only depressing but literally terrifying to me, so the extra incentive to keep up with my writing is actually a deeply good thing from my perspective.

Q: But why not wait until you're done with your PhD first?

A: What, besides my desire to be done with school by the time I'm 30?

Q: Yeah, besides that.

A: OK, here's the thing. From a time management point of view, it makes exponentially more sense to do this while I'm in grad school than to try to do it while I'm a full-time prof. Professors are, in fact, much busier people than grad students, between the much bigger teaching load and the committee work and the research and publication expectations. There's a long tradition of advice given by crusty old academics to bright-eyed young things to get stuff done in grad school you'll have less time to do later. So if I'm going to get an MFA--and, y'know, I'd like to--this is the time to do it, short of dropping out of the day-job career all together, which is certainly not a decision I'm prepared to make at this stage of my life.

Q: Hmm...... Isn't there still a danger that you're increasing the chance that you won't wrap up your dissertation on time within the next two years?

A: Well, first of all, I'm touched by your confidence that I'll pass my qualifying exams, have my proposal approved, and all that, so that this question will even come up.

Q: No problem, kid. I believe in you.

A: Cool! But to answer your original question, yeah, I guess there is. I don't think it's inevitable, though--my friend Albert got his PhD written in six months of concerted effort, so I think two years of part-time effort should do it for me--but even if it is....well....lots of people end up spending a little extra time on their PhDs without getting low-res MFAs, and it's not the end of the world. The way I see it, if I'm going to be one of them, I should at least be getting something productive out of the time I'm not spending on the dissertation.

Q: OK, OK, you've convinced me. But why Maine? Haven't you ever read any Stephen King novels? Writerly types traveling through Maine always run into supernatural horrors.

A: Yeah, but it's cool, since I'm in the Popular Fiction track, so any apocalypse cults or vampires or anything I run into will actually be useful story material.

Q: Hmmm........

By Popular Demand

BenBurgis@hotmail.com — Sun, 16 Mar 08 02:45:00 UT

Here's our third housemate:

The Book I Want To Write Someday

BenBurgis@hotmail.com — Wed, 12 Mar 08 13:56:00 UT

...is a contemporary fantasy novel that would basically be a Mamatasian mash-up of Nick Hornby's "High Fidelity" and Robin McKinley's "Sunshine," or (to blatantly mix mediums) of BtVS and Questionable Content. Basically, the characters would sit around drinking coffee and arguing with each other about the respective merits of various obscure Indie bands, except when they'd be occasionally interrupted by hordes of vampires or demons that needed killin'.

Just to be even more self-indulgent, I'd be tempted to make one of them a philosophy grad student so they could also sit around talking about the cosmological argument and the tenseless theory of time, but I'm afraid that might get silly.