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  • hardie karges 6:36 am on October 26, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: fame, WRITING   

    If you got a killer line, then use it once or twice. 

    You may never get another chance. When the fickle foot of fate chases you down and kicks your butt, you’ve got one chance to deliver, two if you’re lucky, or fame and fortune pass you by, and your fifteen minutes are up. Fame runs on fleet feet, if and when it runs at all. It’s a societal disease, not a social disease, a disease of the soul, the collective soul. I don’t believe in the collective soul, except in the minimal sense. It’s the floor you walk on, the carpet you clean. It does little to inspire you, even less to fire you up into a truly higher orbit. Only the individual can rise above the crowd.

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  • hardie karges 10:56 am on July 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , WRITING   

    The great American novel 

    is the great American travel book is the great American screenplay is the great American whatever, pretentious in concept, grandiose in scope. There’s no reason to write anything else, really. There’s no reason to do anything in life except contemplate the moment of your death. Everything else is just trivia, facts and figures, characters and plots. I can think of a few plots I’d like to put some of those characters in. They’re all fake, abstractions of abstractions, stories about stories. Not that I didn’t try the same thing myself. I did. I still do. I ran imaginary people through imaginary situations, sending them up trees, throwing rocks at them, then looking for ways to get them down. The only good parts were the digressions, the spontaneous emissions, slips of the tongue, slices of reality in an otherwise bland pound cake. I was just making it all up. There are no good novels anymore, just stories, fabrications coming out of thousands of tiny fantasy factories lining the back streets of New York, London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin, all screaming for your loyalty and your pocketbooks’ attentions. If there has to be some objective measurement of ‘what’s good’, then let it be money. Otherwise we swim in our opinions with no hope of resolution.

     

  • hardie karges 8:16 am on June 30, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: WRITING   

    A CALL TO LITERARY ACTION 

    Where is the great literature of Century 21? What will it be like? As challenging as it might seem to create something that can be equally a sign of the times and a map to the future, especially in an era as highly impressive as ours is technologically, the path may lie imbedded in that very fact. I think it’s time for literature, poetry, science fiction, and ‘action’ fiction storytelling to merge into a new form. Literature is largely uninspired and uninspiring story-telling, less compelling than its poor cousin, pulp fiction. Science fiction has yet to produce a real literary stylist, probably more impressive for its oblique purview and translation of the world of science for non-scientists. . Poetry is totally divorced from the real world of politics and Pontiacs, farther still the cutting edges of subconscious and verbal innovation. Poetry has not had anything heroic since the Beats shook things up. Since then it has gone right back to where it was before, garden parties for the upper class and their mutual admiration society. Only ‘slam’ poetry has added some new force to the field, though it doesn’t hold up as well on paper as on stage with its bro’, rap music. Even popular music in general has stagnated, reduced to formulas and re-hash. The new literature should be a combination of new science, revived poetic cutting-edge language, action story telling, and broad vision.

     

    • maximumfiction 11:25 am on November 18, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      “Science fiction has yet to produce a real literary stylist, probably more impressive for its oblique purview and translation of the world of science for non-scientists.”

      Read the novel _Terrestrials_ by Paul West. Paul is an acclaimed stylist who, in _Terrestrials_, who bravely, if briefly, stepped into the genre. The result is stunning.

  • hardie karges 8:26 am on June 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: WRITING   

    TO EACH HER OWN 

    One American author whose name will go unmentioned, not because of my higher ethics but because I’ve never heard of her, has got the ironic balls to declare that a large number of award-winning authors are masters of what she calls, with no apparent self-consciousness, ‘suckitude’. She’s talking about literature, mind you, something that I doubt her tidy little plots could even pretend to. Okay, she’s been published, so one up on many others, but that’s what defines ‘hackitude’, right? It’s like the old saying “shit happens”; “shit gets published”. She even pretends on her web site (surprise, surprise) to advise other writers on the dangers of literary agents while steadily plugging her own agent and her own contrived stories of international intrigue. It’s a sad day when authors denigrate the best of their lot to exalt the most mundane, as if Shakespeare were really all about the lives and actions of a lot of distinct individuals in specific situations. Shakespeare was all about immortal individuals in universal situations. Modern literature has a chance to do one better by liberating the situations from the characters, in short: stories about nothing, writing about everything, literature without stories.

     

  • hardie karges 8:05 am on June 27, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , WRITING   

    Stories have convenient beginnings, middles, and endings; 

    life itself has nothing of the sort. Half thoughts and misfired synapses jockey for position in a bubble of consciousness defined only by memory and bordering on infinity. Stop re-normalizing equations; maybe mass is infinite at the speed of light. I sell my soul to sell my self, writing little stories to try to amuse the masses and still can’t get past the dead-letter file, so f%$# it. I’ll write what I want, maybe my unborn progeny will appreciate it some day, the ravings of a 21st century lunatic, legend in his own mind, lover of women and brother of men. I try to create meaning in a world that doesn’t necessarily have any. I try to do for paper what Picasso did for canvas, make love to it, then spurt my juices on its surface as my supreme gift. The only question is: do nouns and verbs accurately describe human existence? Is a picture really worth a thousand words? What are words worth on the open market anyway?

     

  • hardie karges 7:15 am on June 26, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , WRITING   

    The nice thing about ‘automatic writing’ 

    is that there’s never any writer’s block because there’s no structure anyway. It should be word-jazz like be-bop, open the gates and let out all the chickens and scaredy-cats that’ve been cooped up since consciousness sprouted from seed in the fertile soil at the crossroads where attraction meets imagination and the algebra of need meets the geometry of desire. I don’t even have my glasses on so won’t know most of my typographic errors until later. Forget centrality, theme, whatever, everything but meaning. The only worthwhile goal of writing, of anything for that matter, is to find meaning in a world that doesn’t necessarily have any.

     

  • hardie karges 6:35 am on June 24, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: WRITING   

    Nothing inspires like a deadline. 

    Just got to write it down while I still remember it; just got to write it down before the game ends. “Write what you know.” The only thing anyone really knows is his own life, the jumble of perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and memories that constitute the phenomena of a human existence, the internal half of one of the higher apes homo sapiens sapiens, walking this planet in the path of his ancestors, lost in self-reflection.

     

  • hardie karges 6:38 am on June 23, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: WRITING   

    Automatic writing, 

    mind on auto-pilot, contact improvisation; everything is related to the things that came before, and nothing is related to the center, because there is none. Character development is fun if it’s a real character. I hate making shit up. Why expend time creating and developing new characters when so little is done with the characters that already exist? The ‘abstraction’ gene gets its way, I guess. The need to universalize and ultimately, teach, is part of the human makeup. It’s better than mascara. If words could connect to each other above and below as well as before and after, then that would be interesting, certainly better than much of the artsy-fartsy manipulations extant in the current publications, the next best thing to another dimension.

     

  • hardie karges 9:33 am on June 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: WRITING   

    DANGLING PARTICIPLES 

    I don’t do flower arrangements, a word here and a comma there, a male noun dangling here and a female verb down under just waiting to swoop up to the rescue in an elaborate choreography of stoic feminism and poetic justice. If these are the nuts and the bolts of the trade, the arts and farts of culture, then maybe I’ll just have to content myself with the rhythms of natives, the beats of the past, and the music of the dispossessed, in order to maintain some integrity of purpose. Maybe art is a plaything of the rich and I’ll admit that I never wanted to be a starving artist. But language is at a disadvantage, because people use it for mundane purposes also. The average bloke doesn’t paint landscapes. Everybody writes. To rise above, pretense demands elaborate editorial gymnastics to maintain the inherited class system. Life itself is an art form, of course, and the essence of art is combination, bringing diverse elements into unique juxtaposition. Nothing is truly original. Balance is the hard part, as always, carefully crafting the finished product so that it is ‘just so’. ‘Stuff’ cannot be defined; you’ve either got it or you don’t. In other words, “Don’t call us; we’ll call you.”

     

  • hardie karges 7:57 am on June 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , WRITING   

    WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW 

    Here’s writing fit for public consumption. There’s no politics nor science, no physics nor evolution, no cuss words nor sex, no spicy pickled metaphors, no right nor wrong, no meaning, no nothing, just letters holding hands forming words forming phrases going to market, staying home, having roast beef, having none, and making the funny sounds of verbal contentment all the way home. I’m ready to celebrate the mundane, revel in the morning blush on the evening primrose, and revel in the morning blush on my wife’s face. I’m ready to publicly mourn the birth of my dog and the death of my dad, exult in the toothless smile of a bum and the toothless smile of a lad. Nobody wants cosmic poems pretending to fathom the heights of quantum physics or wallow in the death of suicidal despair. It fails to inspire and it’s just not civilized. Still photography is my role model, cool remote and serene. I want to paint with words, watercolors and oils according to the mood. I wish I could write other people’s poems. I wish I could arrange flowers elaborately, poems in the shape of chalices and goblets, valises and vases, all containing internal logic, hard-wired beauty. I want to get out of my rut and get into a groove. Alas I’m stuck in my own body, trapped in my own mind, doing the best I can one day at the time. I can’t write other people’s shit; I can only write my own.

     

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