dead rats press

Move

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 14:57:00 +0000

In an attempt to combine my blog and website, I've moved over to Wordpress, which seems to have more flexibility than blogger. The domain name lylerosdahl.com now points there, though the old web site is still up and Postcard Fiction Collaborative will still be on blogger (as well as SA Taprooms). Along the top of the new blog/site, you'll find static pages to things like my writing, photos and paintings. Hopefully I've got it set up so that you'll be able to see new posts from Facebook and Twitter.

I feel kinda dumb writing this, but I've been trying to promote my work a little more recently and I do like playing around with the technology some (very basically). So for what it's worth...

Just one thing...

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 15:18:00 +0000

San Antonio Current writer holiday gift picks with pics. Mine's down at number five. Notice the charming, elegant hands holding the book up in the picture.

Science and Human Achievement

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 16:41:00 +0000

From "The Truth Wears off" by Jonah Lehrer: "But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look uncertain. It's as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn't yet have an official name, but it's occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. ... In private, [Jonathan] Schooler [tenured professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara] began referring to the problem as 'cosmic habituation,' by analogy to the decrease in response that occurs when individuals habituate to particular stimuli. ... Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe." And, it appears, we still choose what to believe before the experiments are done and carry that through them. While not overtly stated, the desire for positive results from publications is partly to blame, the general aversion to being wrong is also a strong motivator. We also tend to gravitate toward positive results because they corroborate our pre-established beliefs (even when those beliefs are ostensibly innovative -- after all, isn't that inherently part of our belief system?).

From the preface to The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: "we humans, facing limits of knowledge, and things we do not observe, the unseen and the unknown, resolve the tension by squeezing life and the world into crisp commoditized ideas, reductive categories, specific vocabularies, and prepackaged narratives, which, on the occasion, has explosive consequences. Further, we seem unaware of the backward fitting, much like tailors who take great pride in delivering the perfectly fitting suit -- but do so by surgically altering the libs of their customers [Procrustes, in Greek mythology, would put guests in a bed and either cut off the portions of limbs that hung over or stretched the guest who was too short]. for instance, few realize that we are changing the brains of schoolchildren [sic] through medication in order to make them adjust to the curriculum, rather than the reverse." This is the scientific method, after all. Tried and true. I love that there is such a wonderful Greek myth that correlates so perfectly to the scientific method as explored by Lehrer. Proves that we are still mythologically driven at heart as we, culturally, attempt to fit science into our guest bed.

Lehrer, Jonah. "The Truth Wears off." New Yorker. 13 Dec. 2010: 52-57. Web. 8 Dec 2010.
Taleb, Nassim. The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 2010. Print.

Super Soldiers

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 18:45:00 +0000

"'Matt [Wenning, world-class powerlifter] is a great America,' [Maj. Mark] Ivezaj [company commander in the 3rd Battalion of the U.S. Army's 75th Ranger Regiment] says. 'What he did was take standard 185-pound guys and turn them into 205-pound animals who cold clear rooms and drag guys across parking lots. And the soldiers could do these things better and for longer periods than any unit in the world'" (145).

Super soldiers. What a smart, sophisticated way to redevelop weight training for specific types of Army deployments and units. A little frightening, too.

Interesting that he would mention parking lots. Seems oddly specific and rather Stateside-oriented. Lots of parking lots in Afghanistan?

"Protective Forces" by Rob Fitzgerald. Muscle & Fitness. December 2010. 139-145. Print.

Image-Art

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 16:32:00 +0000

For "Husserl it is certain that an image is basically a modification: '[…] through its very sense as such, an "image" presents itself as a modification of something that, in absence of this modification, would simply be present […].'" (qtd in "The Neutrality of Images and Husserlian Aesthetics" by Christian Ferencz-Flatz)

Everything is image. Everything is art.

Ferencz-Flatz, Christian. "The Neutrality of Images and Husserlian Aesthetics." Studia Phaenomenologica 9.(2009): 477-493. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 4 Dec. 2010.

Some Observations about Shoplifting

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 17:58:00 +0000

Shoplifting from American Apparel by Tao Lin is a story typical of a mainstreaming apathetic generation of artists. This isn't a story in which nothing happens. Lots happen. There are consequences, just no emotional response to them. What do consequences mean when you don't feel anything? I'm not sure the novella answers the question, but it certainly brings it up. Events occur, people make decisions, but the reader is never told why. And that left me feeling disembodied, which is an unusual sensation after reading for me: "Paula and Matt were sitting opposite Sam and Kaitlyn. Sam called Paula's cell phone with his cell phone. Paula answered and Sam hung up. Kaitlyn asked if Sam wanted a drink" (49). These exchanges between characters who are identified only by first name and never in any context are meaningless and silly and string together to create a choppy, empty rhythm of events. Lin tells the reader what the characters are feeling instead of showing her, adding to the disconnect between what is happening and what anyone might be feeling or really thinking. "Sam thought 'voracious' and felt confused." The characters display "neutral facial expression[s]" (61) all of which creates a shallow, edgy, disconcerting novella. It is as if the characters are separate from their minds, their actions -- they are observers of themselves: "'Oscar Wilde said that a genius is a spectator to their own life, to the point that the real genius is uninteresting,' said Luis. 'No, Marissa has never threatened to kill me.' 'Oscar Wilde was stupid though,'" writes Sam in this rather lengthy Gmail chat exchange with Luis. Lin has managed to write exactly what Luis claims Oscar Wilde said*. And it is an interesting and mentally stimulating effort.

***

I wondered too if this wasn't really a book about Autism in a way. The fact that emotional response and human interaction is as important as say a shoplifted shirt.

***

Finally, the novella is intensely funny; the juxtapositions create humor in their disconnected deadpan. The screaming drunk in the jail cell or Brandon at a party who, after walking away from Sam, "came back and said the name of the string theory he believed was correct. The name was a combination of letters and numbers" (60).

***

I read this book very quickly because all of these aspects created a fascinating, perplexing story.
---
*I can't find anything (from a cursory google search) that exactly fits Luis' paraphrase, but here are a couple of Oscar Wilde quotes, the second of which could be interpreted to mean what Luis says.

"To become a spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life."
"It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors."

Shoplifting from American Apparel by Tao Lin. Melville House: The Contemporary Art of the Novella collection. 2009.

Gimme Noir

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 19:58:00 +0000

"I keep forgetting you're a man of principles," Nora Cameron says near the end of the novel (120). Though I'm only somewhat familiar with noir movies and novels, this strikes me as one of them for that exact reason. It is about a man of principles. When all else goes south, Sam Cameron still has his values. They're Hemingwayesque ideals, as is the language of the book: hard and good, which limns the action nicely in black and white. The dichotomy makes everything edgy and dramatic, but not overly so as I was afraid it might (at least not often enough to make it unenjoyable). And the use of specific sailing terminology (of which I know nothing) ratcheted up the allure for me. I love the way the sentences flowed, both sharp and undulating: "The darkness made a solid wall ahead of them. Sam let the sloop ghost forward under jib alone, straining to make out the dark bulk of Maquid Point. There was a smell of rain in the air, and the sea had an uneasy chop that slapped hard against the Holiday's bow" (86). While this sentence isn't as jargon-filled (and I use that term in the most appreciative way) as a few others, it does give a good sense of the novel. The perfect book that I picked up as a freebie at the San Antonio Public Library Book Cellar.

Million Dollar Murder by Edward S. Aarons. Fawcett Gold Metal Book. 1950.

The Mythology of Life

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 20:33:00 +0000

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. What an astonishing book. I can't believe I haven't read it until now, but somehow, I also wonder if I would have been ready for it somehow.

Near the end: "The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. With a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village. He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must lie and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun" (216). Such sadness limned so beautifully by the mythology of Winesburg -- a place both real and imagined. And just a few pages later: "One shudders at the thought of the meaninglessness of life while at the same instant, and if the people of the town are his people, one loves life so intensely that tears come into the eyes" (222-3). Such a striking imbalance. In the language itself, too. The ironic certainty of a moment in the first quote (this perfect epiphany) gives way to a sort of confused nostalgia for life in the second one, a muddle of humanity -- such as it is. What a strange shift between "one," "his" and then "the eyes." It is a movement to mythology while at the same time away from it -- the "adventures" that happen throughout the book are not those of Odysseus or Gilgamesh, but of rural Americans living sad, lonely, uncertain lives so enchantingly in the fields planted with berries and corn and "set ablaze" by the afternoon sun. Such an apt description of the midwest, the human spirit and the mythology of life.

Wings Press

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 18:21:00 +0000

An in depth look at San Antonio publisher Wings Press by the Huffington Post. This kind of foresight and passion makes San Antonio an important, interesting city.

To Catch a Drunk

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 19:30:00 +0000

The man was drunk, but more importantly, banned from the library... So everyone acted nonchalant until the librarian in charge could make it up and kick him, very gently, out. It was an odd ploy, trying to keep him around so that we could expel him and it required just the right mixture of personnel (including security), deception and rigor.

I actually kind of felt bad for the guy. Just out of jail. Drunk at 9:27 in the morning. Not that long ago that I'd had a couple of beers by that time. So it's not like I can't relate. Still, don't forget that you must interact kindly with one another. Thou shalt not be drunk in the library (especially if thou hitith up others for moneyith). Thou shalt not abuse privilege, whatever that may be (especially if it is your right to).

Alas, perhaps we are too stony and not drunk enough as a culture. More Dionysus, less Apollo. Crash and burn instead of onward and upward. But let us also engorge ourselves on words -- congestion of inky sentences. Grovel in the musty tomes of wood pulp and leave the drunks, who we must join shortly, to their travails.

But I digress, drunk as I am on language.

The Bus

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 18:47:00 +0000

While we were waiting, a cat fell out of the window above the bus stop. It did not land on it's feet.

A week later had done it no favors. Asphalt rocks showed through the holes in its skin and fur. The greasy outline showed where the cat had actually seeped into the parking lot. We still waited in the same spot for the bus, but now the "we" included the carcass. Everyday I would stare at the cat until the bus came (the number 8) and I felt like I began to disintegrate with the animal. At least my memory. I knew that the carcass was decaying, but I couldn't ever remember what it looked like the day before or that first day. It had no reference point except for my daily waits for the bus, which would pick me up and whisk me away to my dead end job at the zoo. And all those days melded together -- primordial ooze in my mind.

It's not like I hadn't seen dead animals before, of course, but they were always disposed of right away. Incinerated. (Sure the bigger animals were problematic -- sometimes taking all day to cut up and ship off to the incinerator, but that's the difference between an institution and the bitter, uncaring world in which the institution exists: people care what the institution does, but not about a dead cat on the street.) Soon (oddly, I seem to have a clear line of sight to the future, if not the past) the cat will be leathery fur and then just patches of fur and then I'll be all alone waiting for my bus, compounding myself into asphalt pastpresent future.

A Writer Is

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 18:08:00 +0000

"A writer, some say, is a person who knows the names of things: the name of the tree and the name of the window through which the tree is seen; the name of the car parked by the tree and the name of the child who falls from the tree; the name of the bone and the name of the break. Then there's another view that holds that if names are powerful, then, like a boyfriend or the car keys when you really need to get to work, they'll be more powerful in their absence."
--from a review ("Engaged Detachment" by Dylan Hicks) of Firework by Eugene Marten

The Business of Teaching

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 17:49:00 +0000

In teaching neither success nor failure is easy to qualify, despite Malcolm Gladwell's brilliant work to the contrary. Or at least it is for the teachers themselves. Or at least it is for me. You can take student surveys, but they don't really tell you much (the A students thought I was great, while the students who can't put two words together, rarely turn their work in anyway, and don't show up to class think that I was brutally difficult). You can fill out scantrons. You can get other teachers to come in and evaluate your abilities. But these are all flawed.

Not only have I never felt comfortable in the "authority" role (this is how you have to do this), but I never really knew if anyone was learning anything. I don't like the system of grading (though I use it fairly strictly with my students -- a C is average) and most of the students don't want to be in Freshman Composition to begin with (how do you motivate people like that -- which includes myself when I had to take it?). Both of these issues make writing less meaningful. They encourage dishonesty. And not only is it almost impossible to catch, but it reflects well on the teacher, albeit falsely. Students bring in drafts of papers that are grammatical train wrecks and then submit their final essay (two days later, no less) with hardly a word out of place. Turnitin shows me quite definitively (though I don't really know how definitively) that it hasn't been plagiarized. But how do I know that in actual fact it was written by someone else? I've chosen ignorantly blissful cliché (wow, she got it -- must have really buckled down and cleaned up her act) as a response or, more accurately, plain relief (I just can't stand to read one more of these stupid essays -- oh, look, this one has clear, logically progressive sentences: how great is this? [It's like slipping into a hot tub on a cold afternoon.]). It's this lack of quantifiable knowledge and the human desire for success (both cheating students who want that A paper and self-deluded professors [like me] who want those brilliant leaps of progress, which is all founded on their excellent teaching abilities) that makes me uneasy.

If all of this is true, then what am I really doing? Am I not justifying a flawed system? So I'm taking a semester off, mostly because I want to take some time to write (maybe not much of anything, but I'm putting my own words on the page), but also because I'm really starting to feel disheartened about the whole enterprise. I mean America's most lucrative business model is the criminal justice and health systems (humans as commodity -- quantity instead of quality). Is the higher education business really any different? Does anyone care?

Project Smiley

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 03:39:00 +0000

Two Kinds of Writers

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 16:49:00 +0000

"Let's lie and say there are only two kinds of writers I like, the caffeinated and the sleepy. Balzac exemplifies the caffeinated. He drank coffee to the point of a trembling hand -- something like thirty cups a day -- and then he'd masturbate to the very edge of orgasm, but not over, and that state -- agitated, excited to the point of near madness -- was Balzac's sweet spot, in terms of composing. Then there's the sleepy: De Quincey with his opium, Milton waking up his red-slippered daughters to take down verses that had come to him in a dream. We might also think of the method by which Benjamin Franklin purportedly came up with inventions: he'd deprive himself of sleep, then, exhausted, sit in an uncomfortable chair while holding a heavy metal ball in each hand so that when he'd nod off a hand would go limp and its ball would fall, making a sound that would wake him from his dreams. That was how he came up with his best ideas for inventions, basically asleep -- just not so asleep that he couldn't take down a few notes." Rivka Galchen in her review of The Microscripts entitled "From the Pencil Zone: Robert Walser's Masterworklets."

How many kinds of writers are there?

Babbler

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 16:47:00 +0000

"But one can live quite well without excitements, can't one, only one ought to be endowed with a bit less poesie and the like, should one not, should one not? What a babbler I am, am I not, am I not?" Letter from Walser to his sister. "From the Pencil Zone: Robert Walser's Masterworklets" a review of The Microscripts by Rivka Galchen.

Bizarro Brilliance

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 16:41:00 +0000

An article in Details magazine with book covers and some very basic information about Bizarro. Some absolute brilliant covers and descriptions. This is what I always thought of when I thought of Pulp... Can't wait to get my hands on some of these (I actually already owned one).

Random Cats

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 20:55:00 +0000

"What's surprising is how well the human imagination takes to the extravagance of random order." -"The Web's Random Logic" by Jeff Porter, The Wilson Quarterly AUTUMN2010

The word "order" at the end of this quote is particularly telling. We always look for patterns. Some of us more stringently than others. Some of us are driven to find patterns already established by popular culture or academia. Some of us like the gray, empty areas, while others prefer the thick black connective lines between ideas.

I remember an article I read years: the author (who's name I can not remember -- those connections are weak for me) lamented the advent of searchable databases. He claimed that we wouldn't have the unexpected, delightful connections and surprises we used to when we would read a magazine for a particular article but stumble upon something seemingly unrelated on the next page -- we wouldn't be able to make those magical leaps between subjects and voices. But how different, really, are magazine articles in the same magazine anyway? The Journal of the American Medical Association is not going to have an article about flower arranging next to the one you just read about Asperger's Syndrome anyway. Granted that's rather extreme, but still... How much different would the succeeding article be in a magazine compared to what will (quite often randomly) turn up on a search engine or a database? And, after all, how much of it is us, our curiosity, driving the search engine, rather than the search engine driving us: "not that order comes from chaos, but the other way around." I think Porter does a nice job of showing that the cat didn't kill curiosity and neither did curiosity kill the cat (Shrödinger was right).

Do something else.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 01:29:00 +0000

"Large-scale, decentralized democratic societies are not very adept at generating neat, rational solutions to messy situations. The story line on education, at this ill-tempered moment in American life, expresses what might be called the Noah’s Ark view of life: a vast territory looks so impossibly corrupted that it must be washed away, so that we can begin its activities anew, on finer, higher, firmer principles. One should treat any perception that something so large is so completely awry with suspicion, and consider that it might not be true—especially before acting on it."
-- Nicholas Lemann "Schoolwork"

This is undoubtedly true. I think it's an issue of giving students more options and making sure they know that college is not socially or culturally mandatory (which is how we tend to perceive it).

B Is for Beer by Tom Robbins

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 19:39:00 +0000

"The older you get ... the harder it is to interface with the Mystery. Yet adults still thirst for that connection, that alternative to the unsatisfying reality men have constructed for themselves, and which they feel locked into like a dungeon.

"So, they resort to all sorts of things -- a few enlightened, many destructive, most ineffective, some just plain silly -- that might allow them even a breath or two outside the prison walls. To a certain extent, that explains the appeal of beer." (95)

This lovely "children's book for grown-ups" and "grown-up book for children" follows a precocious and imaginative little girl from Seattle through her adventures with beer. The story itself is amusing (it's Tom Robbins, after all) as well as being very informative, especially in describing the process of brewing beer. It certainly does fit it's epithet.

The masses rose up and they only had one thing in mind.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 01:43:00 +0000

Alterity

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 14:53:00 +0000

defies a simple definition because it contains concepts like difference and otherness within itself

Claw

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 18:07:00 +0000

Haiku by the Bayou by O'San

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 18:20:00 +0000

An interesting collection of haiku. Though I feel like many of the miss the real quintessential nature of haiku:

Louisiana State
Wildlife Refuge
harbors many birds
in sanctuary

Where are the colors, the specifics? It's more like a title than a haiku.

On the other hand, there are some really interesting, surprising images:

cows wading
udders dipping
in the bayou

I never associated cattle with the bayou and this is a fantastic image -- without ever saying it, I can see the ripples made by the udders.

Story-a-day cancellation

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:51:00 +0000

Wrapped up my story-a-day project with #42. A random place to stop and a delayed finishing considering it was for 7/26/10. Things got away from me and so it's time to stop.

You can read the stories or the shorter collection within the story-a-day called The Clara Wars.

It was a fun project and one that began to get into my general unconsciousness. The juxtaposition and POV and verb tenses were challenging and produced some really unexpected pieces.

Something to look forward to doing next year over the summer.