C.A. Lang's Blog, page 6

Getting them book learnins

So it’s official and on paper: I’m going back to school at six months shy of thirty. You know those commercials for crappy vocational schools you see on American tv during Maury and such? There’s actually a lot of truth to their sales pitch. I’ve been considering this for years and if I hadn’t been so disorganized about it, could have already been done by now.

Part of why it took this long is this: I can’t stand school. I couldn’t as a kid either, and that’s probably why I’m having to redo a couple of high school courses. I wasn’t pushed as much as I could have. So let my example be living proof: even with a smart kid, a totally hands-off approach has a big downside.

I’m going to do my best to finish the first installment of the serial I’ve been working on. I’ll probably just post it. Selling this stuff just takes way too much time, and if there’s going to be time to devote to writing at the moment, I have to spend it actually writing, not messing around on duotrope and trying to pitch a strange niche fantasy serial. On one hand, I don’t want to loose any credibility by releasing stuff that hasn’t gone through the usual process. On the other, I can’t really afford to treat writing as a serious career at the moment. It’ll be some weird reflexive thing where I essentially become a fanfic writer of my own original work. The only thing I can really care about is the story, which is pretty damn neat . . . Shouldn’t that be what writing is all the time? Ideally sure, but for me at least, having a novel out there for real changes everything.

Part of the complication comes from that I also have to renovate a 70s condo while this school stuff is going on. And work. And stay fit.

Anyway, just for the curious–the working title is Veta’s Death Angels, and this cycle will follow a fighter pilot in the same dieselpunk fantasy world as Blightcross. It’s a lot of fun to get even deeper into a highly industrial slant to heroic fantasy.

Taking an engineering program, like I mentioned earlier, is in the end still related to writing, even if it makes me stop for a while. In addition to having real-world skills that make real money, I can’t wait to have the skills to crank out a real autocad drawing of some of the aircraft and monolithic buildings in my books. See? There’s a method to my seemingly disparate interests.

The Dionysus Thing.

I’m not talking about wine, of course. But artists.

I haven’t had much going on in the way of stuff that might be of interest to my two readers here until just this second. This is due to having actual things going on, and probably too many of them. I need to be getting to sleep because it’s going to be another 5am wakeup so I can get to the gym, but loading WordPress and seeing that ancient post as the last thing I did is frightening. Never mind that my strange brain seems to be hyperactive right now.

One thing that I haven’t been able to gel with is the public’s perception of how a musician and author ought to be. I blame some of this, but not all, on hipsters. Postmodern dandyism has all but destroyed the public’s perception of art in an intellectual manner, instead focusing on the idea of an artist, and that artist making himself and his personality itself part of his art.

People I talk to often have a warm fuzzy spot for writers and so on, and think that I’m a certain way. An example of this is how when I mention that I’ll be making a dayjob-career-change from health and fitness to civil engineering technology, they become frazzled and are sure that I’m just bending to public pressure to have a real job and be productive. Nothing could be further from the truth. Perhaps this is also a symptom of the right/left brain fallacy, which is something most still believe. Anyone who reads the reviews of my novel should notice a theme: the work is meticulous, structured, and quite steady. This is not an accident. Nor does this make it boring, un-artistic, or artificial.

In general, I’m a rigid, militaristic person (not my description; someone else’s) who loves structure. Look at how I go on about Lacan–it’s no accident I find every way possible to give structure to the human experience using that particular tool, instead of pissing it away with the kind of new-age nonsense I liked when I was in my early twenties. I still have an imagination though. I daresay it’s better in some cases than flighty flaky artists who live the Dionysian cliche.

What brought this to a head for me recently is having a quick look at Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus. Anyone remember that? I’d forgotten about it but as soon as I saw those drawings again, it had a certain familiarity. I probably couldn’t appreciate it as much when I’d seen it last. Anyway, the thing is incredible. And the creator is . . . big surprise . . . an architect and industrial designer. Whatever, Dionysus . . .

So here we have a society who has little appreciation for the artistic value of industry and technology and design, and thinks that a writer is a temperamental drunk and gives painters and musicians a special permit to be a moron. That’s why I don’t have a lot of artist friends. Artists can be selfish and really boring. And a really good piece of wisdom I read from one of those shameful paperback writers who makes a lot of money is: you can get away with anything except being boring. Of course the boring artist does fool the audience into being interesting by turning the attention to affect, like his dress and drug addiction and musical preferences, but that hardly counts.

Serafini’s work is a mind-boggling artistic exercise of his technical skills. If the average person is alienated from, say, Frank Lloyd Wright as “art,” maybe Serafini is an easier demonstration of how reason can produce amazing artistic works where intuition would completely fail. Maybe it seems hypocritical for me to make the Codex Seraphinianus as some champion of reason, given that it’s filled with asemic writing, but to me that aspect still dwells within the realm of technique and reason, despite that it evokes strange, mystical sensations in the reader. The man played with structure in a way that exposes the hoax of the symbol. That’s likely a loaded way of putting it, but I think it’s parallel to his own comments on the work. In Lacanian terms, I think this asemic work exposes the structure of the subconscious and underlines the fundamental unapproachable nature of the other. Humans are captivated by the symbol, but the symbol ultimately murders the thing, and we’re still completely alien to the rest of the world due to that flaw in symbol-making.

Joyce did this too, and while people tend to think his experimental works are garbage or psychotic, they’re missing what he’s actually doing with words and how it’s related to concepts like Freud’s theories about dreams and so on. I lack the expertise to delve into that fully, which is a shame, but I can’t see myself spending eight years in university to be able to do that. Anyway, I do notice similarities between the Codex and Joyce’s work. Both have deliberately played with symbolic structures and done things to them kind of like what the subconscious does in dreams through sublimation and compression and so on. Joyce’s endless puns and jokes, to me, are similar to the way Serafini turns ordinary things into grotesque but strangely humourous and even sometimes practical jokes in his diagrams. Joyce’s puns don’t work without reason behind them–the fact that he’s completely rewritten the structure for himself doesn’t take away from that fact. In the same way, Serafini’s grotesque creations still show technical skill in the design and they do make sense much of the time, in a strange way.

Neither of these works seem at all to be the work of a Dionysian. I think works like these show that reason, technical skill, and imagination make art just as much as those who operate simply on “inspiration” and other cliches of the trade.

This is why I have trouble getting into talking about my genre, or about music. Scenes are tricky for me because I don’t necessarily care about the specifics. Dieselpunk is where I’m at with my fiction, but instead of making costumes, the intellectual climate of the diesel era is what I take from it. All that fan stuff is fun and I’m glad other people enjoy it without taking it seriously like I make myself, but for me it’s such an internal and intellectual thing that talking about it and dressing up and being into the scene are things I can’t really get into easily. So here’s where the people who doubt that learning an industrial technical trade is really “me” come in. I’m at a point where my writing isn’t going to have vertical growth without delving into something with more intellectual stimulation. To me, even if I have to quit writing for a while to get through the program, having the kind of technical knowledge that allows you to understand how important things are designed and built is probably one of the most important things I can do to improve as an artist.

Will I have to cut out writing in order to focus on school? Who knows. I hope not. But the writing I do when I come back to it will be so much better than it can be right now.

Anyway.

 

 

 

 

 

International Dieselpunk Day (Or: F.U.-kuyama)

I’ll be honest: I don’t have a clue where these special days come from. Who has the power to proclaim such things? Anyway, it’s International Dieselpunk Day, and this means that I’m obliged to write something and break that uncomfortable silence that sometimes happens after I write a ridiculous blog post that makes little sense, yet just enough that I’m not totally embarrassed enough to delete it.

It would have been cool if I had my serial ready to release today, but unfortunately all both of you are going to get is this general “yay for dieselpunk” post.

Dieselpunk is a niche. And my take on it is even nichier. I personally think that’s a good thing, and I’ll explain why in a minute. But first, why the weird title? I’m really not trying to be hostile towards Fukuyama. It’s just that anyone who is into dieselpunk pretty much will be at odds with anything he says.

If you’re lost, here’s all that really matters: Francis Fukuyama was the dude who deemed our time as “the end of history.” Meaning, in a trite first-year university student way, that we’re done with meta-narratives. Typical boring postmodern excuses. What that really amounts to is the end of boundaries, common sense, and, most importantly, big ideas. It’s the big ideas that we’re mainly concerned with here.

Now, he was pretty much just the messenger. The late-capitalist era was already here, and philosophers don’t create anything but hot air, so it’s just a matter of this dude being the figurehead for a frustrating point in history. Enough about that–this is about dieselpunk.

One of the biggest features of the genre is its monolithic nature. It’s that aspect that I’m mostly concerned with. You’ll notice that I don’t do the costume thing or pine for the 30s. I don’t care about looking back so much as I care about getting back on track after a major derailment. This is what originally attracted me to the science fiction I read as a kid; it was all just so big and some of the authors could even talk you into believing that humans would do the things they dreamed of in their stories. Does that just amount to plain outdated futurism?

Compare Star Trek with Firefly. Yes, we all love cynical SF that doesn’t have that nerdy optimistic outlook, but honestly, which one sparks the imagination more?

I get a similar vibe from reading about stuff during the age of exploration. Or playing that old game, Uncharted Waters. Yet it seems a lot of science fiction and fantasy centres around stagnant periods. Most fantasy looks this way to me. It’s like taking too far the idea of establishing a status quo in a story that you deliberately break in order to create the driving tension of it. Transitional times are far more interesting to me, and that is the ultimate appeal to steampunk and dieselpunk. It can go anywhere.

Cyberpunk feels like quicksand to me. It’s so very cynical and I can’t see the people in those worlds moving forward–it just seems they’ll just be continuing as they are until the world ends. This is not good or bad, and I’m not trashing an entire genre, of course. But as a writer and thinker, dieselpunk offers a better starting point.

So when someone cries END OF HISTORY! I can’t help but raise my hackles and try not to buy into it. The USA has retired the last space shuttle and doesn’t seem to be interested in space travel anymore. Every nation has abandoned any idea of a national project. Sure, the private sector is figuring out ways to get into space that are many times less expensive than the way we did it before, but there’s a fatal flaw in relying exclusively upon the market to move us forward: moving forward isn’t always profitable, and if it doesn’t make business sense, it’s not going to happen. So yes, it’s a lot more likely that it’s more profitable for humans to withdraw into some autistic technological hell than to colonize other planets, but where’s the fun in that?

Yes, transhumanists–this suit-loving jazz guitarist cranky writer is calling you out as a bunch of buzzkilling shitheads. Turning people into computers isn’t a feat or triumph. It’s a shameful extinction of a species.

There is, however, a huge risk in looking back. Obviously something didn’t work so well. It’s sometimes hard to avoid nostalgia and maintain a critical eye towards the diesel era. Nostalgia is the worst kind of kitsch and has no place in the intellectual world. That’s why, even though it’s not all that popular among this niche, I think secondary-world dieselpunk fiction is important. Sidestepping our own world gives a more objective view of the diesel era. Besides, it’s also a lot more fun to write.

So that’s my off-the-cuff unedited International Dieselpunk Day rant. It may not be as interesting as a post comparing death metal to euro-pop groups, but damn it I bet at least one of my two shill accounts readers is going to like it.

We Morbid Northerners

*warning: may contain overt generalizations about large groups of people.*

I was at my mom’s having dinner, catching up. She showed me this group from Finland that totally moved her, and nearly to tears. Specifically this acapella tune:

Naturally I was interested, since I love Scandinavian death metal. One of my favourite bands in the world is Sentenced . . . I think they’re the only band to be able to be extremely morbid without coming off as stupid teenaged drama–something a lot of American bands just can’t pull off. It’s still pretty crude and probably disturbing to some people, but that Finnish metal band expresses very well what I personally stereotype (correctly, in my opinion) a certain Northern temperament.

That’s the reason, in my opinion, Americans can’t do that kind of morbidity very well. It’s just not endemic to the culture, so when it happens, it seems cartoonish and stupid. It gets a bit grey when you get into the Florida technical death metal scene of the 90s, but that was a more intellectual style and not that morbid, despite the “death metal” label.

Back to my point–check out this song. Besides that these singers are incredible, it’s also a very morbid song that doesn’t seem out of place to someone who listens to a lot of Finnish metal. Musically it’s entirely different (though it really wouldn’t be all that hard to picture Jani Liimatainen playing with them) but the vibe is exactly the same to me.

Ethnically, I’m mostly Russian, Ukrainian, and a bit Icelandic. Being raised in a tiny town, I think those cultural undercurrents survived easier than they would have had I been raised in Vancouver, where I would have been coerced into becoming a beer-loving extraverted Canucks fan, practically at gunpoint. We know that statistically certian Northern countries (like Russia) have abnormally higher suicide rates, and when I speak to jolly positive extravert Canadian friends who have travelled to Scandinavia, they notice that people just aren’t as outgoing as would be convenient for them. I’m not trying to glorify depression and demonize America’s canonization of the extravert, but I do find the difference fascinating.

I find it interesting because intellectually I know these things are depressing and bring people down in my society, but emotionally it doesn’t do that to me. It’s definitely a very real facet of life, and us Northern people seem better able to turn this facet into aesthetic value. I can listen to a song about suicide and appreciate it and not feel bad, where others think it’s screwed up and wrong, or that it is actually capable of making people kill themselves for real.

North Americans seem particularly sensitive to these rocks pelting the glass house–I’ve heard people even think Mumford and Sons were “weird” and morbid. In a bad way, I mean.

Yet at the same time, I’m sure that the pretty package this morbid song is wrapped in will make it easily accessible to people who are normally vulnerable to kitschy moments. Musically, this is definitely an emotionally manipulative piece. If it were experimental jazz, people would think it was fucked up and hate it immediately. Is it kitsch? It definitely straddles the border. I can’t really tell though.

Milan Kundera defines kitsch as this: “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”

. . . but he also says that kitsch is “the absolute denial of shit.”

I generally stick to this definition, but in the case of morbid potential-kitsch, it gets tricky. Is this song denying shit? It’s sad but not jarringly so. On one hand, I think it could be sanitizing sadness. It may be that it denies the shit of death and loss and leaves you with the surplus-feeling–that second tear. On the other, just because it’s musically pleasant doesn’t necessarily mean it’s sanitizing death.

As comparison though, look at this video from Sentenced:

Also look at the top comment for this video. Someone wrote: “Modern pop music shows “love stories” where the couple is young, they drink, dance and make you think their lives are a real-life fairytale where they never grow old. Life is not like that at all. This music, this video, show a more realistic perspective of love. This is good music. This, dear friends, this… is true love.”

That leads me to the cultural issue. I wonder if Northern cultures tend to try to kitschify death out of inability to cope, or if they’re just more able to face the reality through art and so on.

So after all that, now I wonder if my death metal heroes are just yet more purveyors of their own brand of kitsch. It’s so hard for me to tell because I’m so close to it. But in the end, kitsch or not, it’s still a cultural trait, and one that’s hard for people in this part of the world to appreciate. The thing I forget in all my hours upon hours of criticism that nobody really cares about is that kitsch, like the shit it tries to deny, is itself undeniable. A certain amount is always going to be part of life for even the most hardened critic.

This was supposed to be about music, not criticism. Just check out these singers. I do hope this group gains some momentum, and it would be interesting to see how forever-happy extraverted North American city-people react to this song in particular.

Not exactly Hemingway

 

And by that I mean that I’m back from Cuba. Although I did sit in the El Floridita and drink a daiquiri, I didn’t come back with another novel under my belt. About the only writing I managed was a sketchy journal-ish type deal, which needs heavy editing and I will post it in the next few days, along with photos.

So, as a generally anxious person who thought all sorts of stupid things like “aaaaah will they throw us in jail because Fifty Shades of Grey could be considered pornography?” and “everyone outside Canada wants to kill me,” I realized quickly that leaving the country isn’t a big deal. That’s why diseases spread so quickly now–everyone and their dog can get around and it’s easy and all anyone wants is your tourist money and couldn’t care less about anything else.

That’s a weird thing to realize, because at the same time the world is still pretty damned hostile, but I guess you have to go looking for the hostility nowadays. There’s too much income at stake for the easy trips to involve hostile territory.

Now that I got all that nonsense out of the way–yes, it was a ton of fun. And real fun–not just turning into a walking digestive tract with a barely-functioning nervous system pickled in alcohol. Thankfully we didn’t drink much at all, which, to be honest, was a concern, since all I’ve heard about regarding resorts is how everyone is constantly shitcanned. There’s way too much to take in when you’re away (at least for me, since I’ve never done it before) to put your brain in that kind of prison.

Oh yeah, the hurricane. It did pass over, but didn’t do much besides make us play cards instead of go to the beach. It was neat in a way . . . I like storms and was hoping to glimpse a tropical storm while there, and I did.

Anyway, laugh at my backwards hick attitudes if you will. At least I’ve gotten over them! How do you know until you do it?

There’s not much to bring back from Cuba. Coffee, cigars, rum. All of which I did bring back. But the catch is that I’m finding that I don’t want any of it. And luckily for me, some of the people close to me have quit smoking and drinking too, so I’m left with the strange issue of how to get rid of this dirt-cheap booze and delicious Cuban tobacco. I figured I’d just have a couple days of writerly solo debauchery and dispose of this stuff, but I find that I don’t want any of it now. I’m forcing myself to keep some Cohiba minis, despite that I want to pawn them off to the first person I see on the street!

Anyway, hopefully I can turn my holiday ramblings into something interesting, and I’ll have it up soon. Another new experience was writing that piece–this is a form of writing I’ve never been interested in before, so haven’t read much of it at all and sure as hell have not written any. There are so many details and I struggle to filter what is interesting to a reader and what is just my own nonsense!

Later.

While I hope I’m not like them, I’m not so sure.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=buVCY7Y4r5Y

Back in a week!

Kateri Tekakwitha and Experimental Writing

 

 

I don’t know how many people saw that the Vatican is canonizing Kateri Tekakwitha, or how many really care. But as soon as I saw it I got a bit excited.

Why? I’m not a Catholic, or religious at all. No, the reason I got a bit excited was because of the (to me) obvious connection to Leonard Cohen. And to me he’s a pretty big deal.

The thing that gets me is that even Leonard Cohen fans these days probably have no idea what I’m talking about. Because it’s not related to a song. It pains me to have to actually tell people that Kateri Tekakwitha was a central figure in Leonard Cohen’s novel. Yes, NOVEL. Leonard Cohen wrote novels before he wrote pop songs. Nothing wrong with his music, but these novels, specifically Beautiful Losers, are amazing.

Beautiful Losers is an experimental novel about three (I think) weird people, one of whom is obsessed with Kateri Tekakwitha. It’s such a scattered piece of writing that even if I had recently read it, I’d probably have trouble explaining it. I don’t have it with me, which is another strike against me even pretending that I know anything about it. But the impact it had on me left quite a mark.

This is such a huge, beautiful piece of writing and I can’t figure out why I’ve yet to meet a pretentious, over-educated Bachelor of Arts person who dealt with this novel during their studies. As far as I know it doesn’t even make it into Canadian literature course material.

After reading this novel, in typical pre-million-words-of-crap unpublished writer fashion, I imitated it. Of course I didn’t tell myself that. For a long time I was pretty proud of this disjointed piece of garbage I had turned out after being dazzled by Cohen’s experimental writing. This isn’t to say there weren’t one or two little bits that I still feel great about. But at the time I had the dumb idea that just because I had thrown out the rules, I was necessarily doing something new and shaking my fist at postmodernism. And yet it was such a postmodern novel! And that’s not even the worst part. I actually submitted it a few times before giving up and realizing that it was something, like any food product that comes out of an aerosol can, nobody should consume for any reason whatsoever at any time.

It was important to write all that crap because even though it was an artistic failure, it still got me to where I am now. And for that I’m greatful. But why does nobody in literature really consider Cohen’s novels?

This is part of the reason I don’t like late-capitalism all that much. I’m using that term to imply a kind of ultimate postmodernism, not in an economic or political way. Maybe post postmodernism. Beautiful Losers is a postmodern novel, but back then it seems to have actually meant something. There is no such thing as experimental writing anymore. Nobody wants to play outside anymore. Is it because of cynicism, like people doubt any lofty goal whatsoever?

Beautiful Losers was slammed by critics at first. So was Ulysses. The latter is STILL bashed by the unlikely tag-team of the overeducated cynic and the myopic cretin concerned with nothing but entertaining soporifics. I almost want to say this is a backfiring of individualism being taught in the wrong way. Any jarring stimulus seems cause knee-jerk reactions and nothing further. But without that jarring stimulus, that discomfort and discord between your sketchy mental map and that offered by a psychotic piece of writing, people will just become decadent and complacent.

By that I mean we’re told to be so baselessly self-assured in all circumstances that the good kind of questioning and doubt cannot occur. Why analyze a discomforting novel when you can just write it off as crap without being asked to qualify it? I still haven’t read more than one or two legitimately interesting or intellectually sound criticisms of Joyce. The rest is just “me uncomfortable, stimulus bad” response.

I’m not sure if any of that makes sense. I’m still sick and it’s late and the benadryl is kicking in.

Okay seriously, on that note, I’m starting to find it weird just how many people immediately tell you to drink (insert hard liquor here) when you have a cold. Dude. It’s not going to help anything. Get over it. Menthol does the same thing to your throat, only better, and doesn’t contribute to the dizziness, nausea, and headache a person with a cold already has. I mean it’s actually really weird that so many people throw that at you when they see you’re sick.

Maybe if they’d read a crappy, disjointed novel they’d have the critical thinking skills to actually question stuff before saying or believing it.

Just sayin’.

At any rate, check out Leonard Cohen. Leonard Cohen the novelist.

Got sick, read a book. Clockwork Angels review. Sort of.

I don’t get sick, so if I do, it’s a big deal. Now, I have a normally high pain threshold, but it seems when you throw in a bunch of random, irritating symptoms at once, like in a bad cold, I turn into a dramatic little girl. I guess when it comes to getting ill, I prefer the interval training method over the month-long low-grade symptoms a lot of people get. I literally feel like I’m dying for 2 days and feel fine thereafter. Usually.

I mean, normally I’d welcome an excuse to mainline Nyquil, but it gets a bit ridiculous when a good dose of ativan doesn’t even help you sleep.

The reason this is extra dumb is that in 4 days I’m going to be in Cuba. I know I’ve never left the continent and might not have any say in the matter, but I don’t know how great it is to enter a third-world country already diseased.

Anyway, the nice thing about having extra time but no motivation due to feeling like a bag of asses is that I finally finished reading Clockwork Angels. I find it hard to review books now that I’m on the other end of them.

All I can really do is write about it from the perspective of a Rush fan. I’m not sure if someone who had never heard of the band would be as into it as I was. The writing is great and the pacing perfect for what it is. Hardcore nerds seem to trash Kevin J. Anderson in the way people trash anyone who has a lot of commercial output, but obviously the man is a great writer and can crank out a smoothly-reading story easily. On the other hand, I’m not totally sure where the conflict really came from, or if there were sufficient amounts. I realize that in a “boy decides to leave home and have adventure for the sake of adventure” type story, there isn’t as much of an expectation of devious plot twists and cliffhangers and so on. For me, as a writer, whims are sketchy to use as motivation for the initial incident that gets a story moving. Now, that was part of the point of the book, so that’s not really a criticism. I actually liked the character of the Watchmaker and it would have been neat to focus more on that source of conflict than in painting  Owen’s kind-of-pointless journey in broad strokes.

Actually, The Watchmaker reminds me a lot of the antagonist in Blightcross. Just sayin’.

I think any of these issues I had with it are nullified by the statement at the beginning that the character’s stories “aren’t for everyone,” which we’re reminded of a few more times. So maybe the character or the writer or somebody is aware that adventure stories with no central conflict aren’t exactly everyone’s thing. And when I get a feeling that aspects I don’t like about something are at least intentional, they don’t bother me anymore.

At first I thought it was awesome how the text was peppered with bits of Rush lyrics. At some point it started to feel forced. But then again, I am a Rush freak. I literally listen to it every single day at some point. I doubt anyone else would notice. It was neat to constantly be hunting for obscure bits of lyrics in the story. Not just lyrics from the album, but ones from all their work.

Also this book came with illustrations, which were very cool.

So besides being an easy, good read, Clockwork Angels totally suceeds in blending a novel with a prog rock album. That was something I’ve wanted to do since as far back as I can remember, and it’s really cool to see someone, never mind the best band in the world and one of the most prolific SF/F authors out there, pull off.

I still feel like a bag of asses though. Bleh.

Unsolicited

The other day I was doing deadlifts at 6am at the YMCA. It started out fine, but then one of the worst possible things that can happen did indeed happen.

So you know how when you’re in a groove at the gym and you suddenly get this eerie feeling, but you keep going because your set is going pretty well, but you just can’t shake that awful sense that somebody is perving on you? Then you see the person standing there staring, stare back for a few awkward seconds, then remove the headphones and wait for them to state their business?

That’s what happened. This time it was one of those YMCA fitness centre employees. The woman criticized my slight spinal flexion during the deadlift. Fine, since that would be exactly what any entry-level course textbook would say.

I find people in gyms love to get involved with your deadlifts. It’s weird. Maybe they’re just as enthusiastic about deadlifts as I am. The same thing happened before, only that time it was some guy who figured that owning a gym at one point in his life meant that his unsolicited opinion was worth something.

I think it’s because there’s this overblown myth/perception about how fragile the lumbar spine is. Even experienced exercisers have this exaggerated fear of spinal shear. Sure,  you hear about people herniating discs while doing simple things. But how often are those stories involving people with strong backs?

In vitro experiments apparently demonstrate that any spinal flexion is going to put too much load on ligaments. This debate has been written about to death on the internet and here I am repeating it . . .

Powerlifters use a bit of flexion to increase their lift. I tend to curve when fatigued. It’s never caused me any problems, and in some ways it felt like I was targeting the muscles I wanted more–of course the lumbar area. That’s why I allowed myself that slight flex despite knowing the textbook position on this issue.

The reasonable, real-world resolution seems to be this: someone with experience and kinetic awareness can get away with a certain amount of spinal flexion. The key here is the part about it being a certain amount. Also, of course you’d never want a beginner to deadlift this way.

Back to the awkward moment though–I see people do all sorts of ridiculous, dangerous exercises but nobody says a word. The question still remains of why people gotta be like that. I’m clearly not a beginner or out of shape, and wasn’t in pain or even flexing that much to begin with. Unsolicited advice, in any stuation, not just the gym, is a crass, lowborn behaviour unless you’re positive that person is going to destroy themselves without you messing with their groove.

I may be the most obstinate creature in existence, but today I did in fact keep a neutral spine just for shits and giggles. It did feel better in that it was getting at my hips more. Not a bad thing at all.

The issue seems to be this, with deadlifts specifically. When people, like me in this case, are doing too many reps, they inevitably start to curve and lose form. It’s not bad to crank out a couple crappy reps when you’re tired if you know what you’re doing.

So even though this person’s advice was totally unwanted and basically ruined my day because I’m oversensitive, it eventually brought me to this conclusion, which is common practice for guys who do this all the time, as opposed to casual deadlifters who do it to support a broader program. 5 reps and under is best for deadlifts. I was doing 8-12 and getting tired and doing a lot of crappier ones as a result. Today I found that 5 reps while keeping a neutral spine increased the amount I could lift. It sounds obvious but when you’re the only one in charge of your workouts, you can get into ruts. And I’m the master of getting into ruts.

I still see how allowing for some flexion would help increase the lift more, but I’m not exactly a powerlifter and since this is working, I see no reason to go there yet.

Wasn’t that confusing? I’m bitching about unsolicited advice, but actually found that following it had helped?

Yeah I don’t know.

The other point is that in the health and fitness arena, people love dogmatic thinking and to throw out reality. Gluten is bad for everyone. Spinal flexion is bad for everyone all the time. Always alkalize. Whatever that really means. But that’s just my own unsolicited opinion.

Ah well.

The FOMO thing.

 

 

I just heard of this acronym. It’s related to YOLOs. We all know how fun it is to ridicule those, right? Which is totally cool with them, because they’re just happy to be having a good time. Anyway, apparently this means “Fear Of Missing Out.”

Do we need any more evidence for the legitimacy and relevance of Lacan? In one of my rants here I’m sure I posted a video of Slavoj Zizek talking about this. FOMO is actually a lot more honest than YOLO. YOLO has little credibility, since it’s basically just a lame excuse to be an idiot. For example, you don’t really see top athletes, or philanthropists, police, doctors, nurses, self-indulgent hero architects or artists, or anyone else who actually makes a difference, use this term for themselves. FOMO correctly shows us the pathological nature of what so far has gotten a free ride as some positive life-affirming philosophy.

FOMO is more accurate because, as Zizek says in that video I’m talking about but am too lazy to dig up, the task of psychoanalysis in this era is not to open up a space to enjoy, like it was in, say the diesel era. Now it is to remove the blockage that has made us totally captivated by the superego and afraid to not enjoy. FOMO blatantly admits this. Finally.

So, to illustrate:

1930: “Doctor, I am having sexual dysfunction due to X issue stemming from my childhood.” And the analyst helps them restructure their subconscious so that they are able to enjoy themselves without feeling weird.

2012: “OMGOMGOMGOMG I NEED TO VISIT EVERY SINGLE ROLLERCOASTER IN THE WORLD AND IF I DON’T I’LL HAVE REGRETS AND MY ENTIRE LIFE WILL HAVE SUCKED LOOKING BACK AND OMGOMGOMGOMG I’D HAVE TO BECOME A HOOKER IN ORDER TO AFFORD ACHIEVING EVERYTHING ON MY “BUCKET LIST” BUT OH WELL, IF I DON’T I’LL SURE REGRET IT!” . . . and of course the other big difference here is that in 2012 nobody is even thinking about seeing an analyst to help them learn how to chill the fuck out and accept that even precious little snowflakes will not get to fulfill every little whim that their precious little whirlwind of an attention span kicks up.

Don’t mistake this for extreme cynicism. The reality is that it’s just as silly and ultimately destructive as any neurosis stemming from 1930s parental oppression. It may be more profitable (which is why it’s encouraged so much), but just because this neurosis has more sex appeal doesn’t mean it should go uncriticized.

The desire to trangress the pleasure principle in such a way isn’t an expression of personal freedom, but one of extreme slavery to the superego.

Am I really trashing the bucket list idea? Am I that lame?

Yes and no. I guess to most normal people, the bucket list is just a sparkly version of goal-setting. I admire it since at least it makes people plan ahead and think, instead of the standard YOLO practice of just doing, you know, whatever, man.

Now, coming from a fitness background, I know that goalsetting itself isn’t necessarily it. If the goals aren’t realistic, there’s a risk of the entire process derailing once the person tires of falling short of these goals. But, since most people who bandy about the “bucket list” are still normal and reasonable, they’re probably going to have mostly attainable things on the list, with one or two silly things that sound exciting but aren’t a big deal tossed in there for sex appeal.

Back to the FOMO acronym: as far as fears go, it’s interesting to look at it critically. The fear of “missing out” hardly seems like anything at all. There is no threat to your existence. I don’t believe you can trace it back to early childhood development–I don’t think this is a manque issue, such as a legitimate fear of lack traced to parental failure to fulfill the infant’s demands. “Missing out” can’t be traced to any unpleasant stimulus whatsoever, as far as I can see. So, given that, I think the only explanation for it is that it has nothing to do with life-affirming attitudes, but subconscious drives and structure.

And that pretty much amounts to an overbearing fatherly command to excess. Many are going to discredit the ideas in this post due to the fact that they rely on psychoanalysis, but I’m sure even North American psychology today acknowledges some of the contributions people like Freud and Klein contributed to it, mainly in those early stages of life.

This could have similar coordinates to fear of failure. I’ve got that one big time. What the actual difference would be, I’m not sure yet. It could just be a matter of degrees, although fear of failure is probably more linked to productivity, while fear of missing out is linked to nothing in particular. Productivity could be traced to scarcity, which would be a legitimate threat to existence. Fear of missing out often pushes the person towards threats to existence, most of which offer no advantage to overcoming, actually. So maybe the difference here is between life instinct and death drive.

So that’s the gratuitous intellectual rant portion. What would all of that mean? Well let’s take that nasty pressure to “do” things, which, let’s say, are on this bucket list thing. I’ve done some things that people put on those, many cases of which likely due to FOMO. Things like getting a novel published (without paying someone to do it) and completing endurance races. Personally, I never once had the thought, “I have to do this because if I don’t I might be sad later on in life! I only live once!” That kind of thought would have totally ruined my novels and my training. I did it just because I wanted to at the time, and it was a challenge to myself.

But if I hadn’t have done them? I’d be fine. Because I’d just be doing something else fulfilling. The sheer amount of things a person can do shouldn’t result in a fear of missing out if one doesn’t gorge on experiences and burn out, or an obsession with a single unattainable goal like stardom; it should be a comforting fact that there’s always something interesting to do even in the most boring circumstances.

Not to sound glib about fulfilling a dream like having my novel published. It’s amazing. I’m saying the kind of stubbornness and determination that it required certainly could never have come from a YOLO attitude. There’s far too much hard work and unpleasantness involved.

Way back on a writing forum, a couple of the old guys who had dozens of mass market paperbacks under their belts sometimes raised this point, though not in the same way. They reminded frustrated writers that they didn’t have to keep writing if it really was that much of a struggle; that sometimes it makes more sense to move on. Of course nobody listened to that, including me. But I think that advice subtly fits with this point–sometimes doing things like that can feel like you’re working with a gun to your head. I think the difference in that case is who is holding it.

If it’s mostly the superego/Other–maybe it’s not a good motivation.

One guy who shouldn’t have any fear of failure is Patrick Weekes. This guy’s novel, The Palace Job, was just released by Tyche Books and the attention it’s getting makes me drool, and he’s even got a spot on an Amazon hot list. In case you didn’t know, makin’ vidya games sells a lot more books than badgering eveyone about doing more pullups. It’s so cool that they’re making waves like these despite being in it for less than a year. Usually they (the old guys with the dozens of mass-market paperbacks) tell you that it’s insane to hand your book over to someone to be their first novel to publish–”If it’s good enough for them, it should be good enough for someone else too.” But screw that. I made a good choice, regardless of whether or not this dieselpunk thing can gain any traction.

Did I just break some rule set out by an internet guide about how to write fun, easy-to-read, short blog posts that will ensure success and wide readership? meh.

In other randomness, I have to readjust a lesson I’ve learned. “Life is too short and often hard and tragic enough without bringing drugs and alcohol into it.” Add to that the following thing life is too short and tragic for:

 

STRATA COUNCILS.

Just sayin’.