Cultured²

It’s hard to even think of how many hours I’ve walked today. More than I’ve ever in my life probably, except for the one time last year I did a walkabout around Tianjin. After only three days, Beijing seems to be growing on me. I can’t help it - I come home, my legs feeling like pine trunks, my neck stiff as a rock, and my feet having found new blisters in places I didn’t know could have blisters. And it’s not like I have a choice in the matter either - without a bike, the blocks in this city must be walked. Unless I took taxis, but then I’d probably come home every day a little/lot less rich, and a little/lot more grumpy, depending on the driver.

They are sea-legs, or rather, Beijing-legs, that I seem to be developing. Although I walked all day today (from about 10am-6pm) I am notably less tired than my initial trips to Beijing when I was only used to riding a bike. Still though, I am exhausted, and was nearly crawling to my door this evening. I am looking forward to buying a bike when I actually get some money.

慢走, 慢走, 别走太快…
小心你的腿,
每天比较强,
每天极好.

July 3rd, 2008 | Category: 天京人 | Leave a comment

Last night I was watching one of those soap-operatic dramas about Japan. You know the kind: where the brave hero stands up to the aggressors, thrusting his chest barely to the point of the bayonet, and with a loud voice cries out something like: We are strong! We will prevail! Or something like that. By the end of the show, I was short of breath, wishing that those damned Japanese soldiers would just leave the motherland and go home with their tails beneath their legs. Especially since the show gave the soldiers those stupid (yet finely washed) floppy hats that look like rabbit heads. That was excruciating to watch. Especially given that in pictures of the past, one is all too aware that the military only has two kinds of dress: primmed, and warred. These guys looked like they just walked out of a kiddie laundry-mat.

So after the show was finished, what did I do? I put in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (not out of any kind of rebellion: only because it was the next film to watch on my list). From the beginning reels (the opening credits reveal the film with a spry Yankee Doodle Dandy) to the almost eye-hurting visits to the Lincoln Memorial and the teary-eyed glances towards the Capitol Dome at night and the rousing speeches about freedom (and even a filibuster on reading the Constitution and various episodes from the Bible) the film was a true product of its time. Now, I’m not terribly patriotic, but neither am I not. It was pure accident that I watched the two films side-by-side, but lent itself to one piece of wisdom that had eluded me prior.

Do all countries do this, and are they equal?

When I watch a Chinese film that depicts the Japanese as Nazis, and the marching communists as the heralds for a new age, I obviously shudder because my inclination through years and years of training throughout the American institution has been to spit with vile on anything that goes against the American machine of democracy (whatever that might have become in this day and age). But being an ex-pat lends me credence to commiserate against my way of thinking as I am currently out of it, and so not dwelling on the decencies and indencies of everyday politics is a wonderful and viable option for me. I don’t have to listen to talk show hosts parade the American dream as I drive my car to work, and I don’t have to listen to ABC’s incessant ramble as they try and infuse some kind of queer entertaining-politic into the news. I can quite happily sit back and ignore everything. It’s actually a relief to be rid of the noise.

Still it begs for the question to have an answer. And I don’t. I suppose they are all equal. But then, I suppose they aren’t. But how unequal and how they aren’t is not something that I seem geared to be able to answer. Nevertheless, it is an interesting conundrum.

April 14th, 2008 | Category: Cultured² | Comments (1)

I’ve always had a fascination for the unreal and the created. From a young age I’ve loved reading books about heroes in forgotten or undiscovered worlds, loved creating scenarios and characters in created earths, and exploring either through movies, games, or whatever I could get my hands on, in the areas of man’s imagination.

About a year ago I discovered wuxia, a Chinese narrative art form that concentrated on heroes wielding magical powers through intense practice and discipleship. The majority of wuxia takes place in a fantastic heroic China. It is similar to America’s Marvel and DC heroes with their array of racially evolved gifts, or ancient civilization pantheons of gods and goddesses who can control the fate of earth through wielding various elements. The Asian form is an old form, dating back to epics such as Journey to the West and Romance of the Three Kingdoms (and even earlier, though those are the largest and best works).

I’ve recently (well, not that recently) begun writing a novel. The initial idea (as most of my novels are and only are) was to combine the Western literary tradition with a video-game styled narrative and wuxia characterizations, though I’ve found that to not only be cumbersome but depressing. The fact is, most western “literary traditions” consist of an over-dwelling of romanticism, which I’ve always disdained. I’ve started the novel over and over again without much success, always hitting a rock: that I just don’t care anymore. Something that really got me rolling today was the idea of scrapping all that literary pretentiousness and just going for balls-out-action. I’ve already got the characters in place, just the right number for a wuxia.

It excites me because I’ve always enjoyed writing action scenes, and one of the major draws to martial art novels is the action. Also, I’ve recently been reading Wolf Totem, which covers some excellent action. I’m getting more excited by the minute.

April 11th, 2008 | Category: Cultured² | Comments (2)

I can vaguely recall sitting in class today, aware of two different things going on in my head: the first being the teacher speaking and the information settling into me, almost like seeds lifting up a thin veil of my skin and pulling themselves inside. The second being that of the outside world imploding, crashing in. There seem to be those times in ones life when you suddenly realize the world has direction: not that you can change it, but that you merely recognize it does have direction, and you move your mind to intercept it. That happened today in class. I feel a little bad for my teacher, because it meant she received half of my attentions, but some things are much clearer than they were before.

On my way home, biking back from 南大, I had the vaguest sense of belonging. I’m going to tack that feeling down as the spring air infecting me with the nostalgia of having previously lived on the campus and wondering if I should yet again. It’s been a strange week, and the weather has been deviating from freezing to sweating, and my own body has refused to take a middle ground in the issue.

I’m gladly giving myself away to the notion that the week for me is half over. That is, a happy thought.

April 9th, 2008 | Category: Cultured² | Leave a comment

I believe this is a record. I am shutting down Google Reader, in celebration (or fear). At least for tonight.

March 31st, 2008 | Category: Cultured² | Leave a comment

The process to rebuilding this journal has been long. A couple of months ago, my original site, cultured.fishspeaker.com, was blocked. Since then, I’ve realized I needed a new place on the internet, and so I found easternity.com. The process was long because of trying to meander among proxies and FTP clients and the whole process of turning off the motors that I was previously using, to try and re-organize my thoughts for something new.

In the processing of the old site and the new site, my projects have increased exponentially. I’m not even sure how much time I will have to really dedicate to keeping this up-to-date, though I will try. When I was last blogging, I had two projects: my study of Chinese, and my novel. Now, I have increased a hundredfold, starting a message board, a new web journal (besides this), a game script, and to add to all of those, a Master’s degree (pending).

I am hoping to focus this site more on personal essays, to divide the strain from my other projects. Expect that if I have a clever little idea, I might interject some ideas here. For the moment, this is purely a personal blog, a way for me to be accountable to myself. I would like to eventually get back into photoblogging, as well as poemblogging. In the near future, I hope to place a lot of that kind of material here.

March 31st, 2008 | Category: Cultured² | Leave a comment

And so it begins.

March 30th, 2008 | Category: Cultured² | Leave a comment

I’m back from Hong Kong (as of yesterday). I am happy to say that during my trip I accomplished no word progress, but did something far more important: I got my architecture together, and I am nearly done tracing all 122 character relationships. As my story has that many characters and they are all related somehow to each other, this has been a very tricky process of figuring out how to go about writing a complete story while taking care to pay each character their own due during the course of the novel. This was accomplished by several steps, which are still in progress:

1) After the creation of the character pantheon (which I’ll call it from now on, to save myself from sounding too presumptuous), I set out a 122-stage timeline, and then filled in the blanks with various worldwide impacting events, which besides giving me a general outline of how the world is generally changed during the course of the story, is going to eventually give me the opportunity to flesh out each character without using the characters as a crutch to move the main plotline of the story forward, which is for most fantasy fiction, a huge and deadly pitfall most fantasy literature falls into.

2) Creation of the relationship map: by writing on a large sheet of paper (really large), I was able to finally draw out a lineage of relationships between characters visually. It’s incredibly hectic and busy, but finally finished. This has been important not only because I am able to see which characters have the most relationships, but also I have the “big picture” of how people are related to one another.

3) Finally, progress on the character path is being done right now. This is the most challenging, as it requires filling out 122 character leaves, which contain numerical accounts of which characters they are related to. After finished (I’m only halfway through now) the process becomes much like “Mexican Train,” in which the leaves are lined up one against another with matching numbers. The end product is a seamless line of characters, from one corner of the board to another. After that is done, setting up each character on the timeline is a cinch, and then brainstorming and production of their stories becomes the next and final step in the process.

I hope.

This project has been terribly influenced by the wuxia genre, as well as my own crazy desire to do something way different. It’s similar to Catherynne Valente’s Orphan’s Tales, except using a wider range of characters. I suppose the strongest link would be to the Arabian Nights, but again, as there is no central character (the story is about how all the characters end up influencing the force of the plot), it will be slightly different. My goal is to create a series of stories that reflect the inner turmoil of each character using an introspective point-of-view, while not falling prey to the fantasy genre’s pitfalls: typecast characters, the dungeon crawl plot, and the worst of all: managing plot through the character, while not allowing character to grow and explore the context of surroundings.

For those of you who have found this website through Google or some search engine after reading my article in Studio Classroom: welcome. This website though, is basically a repository of various writings over the years. It is not in the best of shape, is terribly haphazard, and the only continuity it has is that I have continued to write at least something over the many years it has been around (since I’ve graduated from college). Being an idealist, I always have the hope that I will hit on one of those “blogging goldmines” which do not actually exist (to be honest). I’m just not happy with talking about one thing enough to make a marketable blog, so this is the product. Nevertheless, I am proud of what has been put out, even if my readership wanes and changes over the years. I hope you enjoy what I’ve got on here.

February 3rd, 2008 | Category: workblog | Comments (48)

Progress on the project has been slower these last couple of days. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because my mind is prepping for Hong Kong, or perhaps I’m running into the slump that the story is becoming too long, without any breaks. The idea is that the whole story is one long meditative piece, that flows and tries to explain what death is like for a dying man, going through various phases, but right now the piece feels very exaggerated and without a lot of focus. It’s going to need a lot of rewrites, which actually I’m looking forward to for the first time.

I’m going to take my computer and the project down to Hong Kong still with the same goal of meeting at least 1,000 words a day. Though I missed my count yesterday (which I feel like a gaping hole) I’m going to keep the minimum. I would love to be matching Jay Lake’s 10k per day, but at this point in my writing, that’s just impossible. My choice of words is too shallow, my ability to see the plot flow from my head to paper is not complete enough, and the lack of having finish a couple of projects and so not really understanding how I work best is yet to be seen. As my first hopefully finished product, cheers and prayers. I’m nearing the stopping point of my last project, except I’m now working with the understanding of what needs to be done.

WIP:
Death was approaching. Perhaps Ethic was singing his last song now, the final ballad of his life, and watched his livelihood descend into a mute realm. He had no lovers awaiting him outside, no family to his name. Only those people outside who cared nothing for him. And yet, somewhere inside he felt a distant hope, though he could not put it to words. Somewhere, he felt a soft glow cross over to him, but he did not know it, nor had no name for it. Perhaps he should give a name to it. Imbroglio embraced him. He was like a mass of wires tangled together, and as he crouched further down, crowding flesh to flesh, trying to discern something extraordinary within the nothingness that surrounded him, he felt only the beating of his own heart.

January 13th, 2008 | Category: workblog | Comments (14)