K.M. Alexander's Blog, page 43

Speakin’ Gibberish

I’m a sucker for language experiments. So when I read this little article in the New York Times called “How to Speak Gibberish,” I had to seek out the video mentioned. You can watch it below.

In it, Sara Forsberg experiments with the phonetics of languages. By doing so, she manages to replicate the sound fairly accurately, at least to my ear. It’s a fascinating experiment, and I can see why it drew so much attention and why Forsberg was tapped to create a conlang for The Force Awakens.

Since posting this four years ago, Forsberg has gone on to a musical career under the name Saara. She still posts regularly on YouTube, and you can follow her over on Instagram. There’s also a follow-up video with some quick Q&A.

P.S. I’m not sorry for that weird egg in the featured image.

Bourdain

Since the news broke about the suicide of Anthony Bourdain, there has been a bloom of posts, tweets, and articles across the internet. Reflections, reminiscences, and stories told from those who knew him and those who admired him. This will be another—albeit one more personal. I suppose these are what happens when someone’s life touched so many people in so many unexpected ways.

I don’t usually get worked up about celebrity news—I never met Bourdain in person, but I felt like I did. He was something different; open, honest, and unwilling to hide. Bourdain was a masterful storyteller with a raw and unapologetic voice. Reading Kitchen Confidential felt like I was swapping stories with him at a seedy bar in Manhattan. It made me appreciate food and cooking in a way I hadn’t considered.  A Cook’s Tour and No Reservations opened up the world and made me want to travel. Parts Unknown and Medium Raw were continuations of those early lessons.

“As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life — and travel — leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks — on your body or on your heart — are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.”

—Anthony Bourdain

There was something about Bourdain’s punk-rock unpretentious attitude drew me in as a young man. To many, he came across as abrasive, but below his sarcastic steak was a profoundly earnest and empathetic man who cared about people. He also allowed himself to be ugly. Bourdain made mistakes, he owned up to them, and he didn’t dismiss his past. He showed many of us that it was okay to screw-up, and it was okay to love screw-ups.

I’m going to miss his writing, his authenticity, and his observations on life. I wish his last mistake hadn’t been so permanent. Often, when an author dies we mourn the loss of a voice—and that is true with Bourdain. But his writing remains, his show remains—his voice might be gone, but his life was too loud to go silent.

I’ve seen depression’s impact on more than just celebrities like Anthony Bourdain. I’ve seen it hurt friends, family, and fellow authors. Depression is a wicked beast of a thing. It tricks your mind. It lies to you. If you’re ever thinking of hurting yourself, please remember you’re loved. Seek help. You matter. We need you here. Talk or text a friend or loved one. If you can’t do that and live in the US, call 1-800-273-8255. (You can find international numbers here.)

Many Defeats

“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.”

—Maya Angelou

I’m in The Woolf

My friend, fellow author, and travel buddy, Jim Rushing, recently put together a great (and extensive) interview on writing cross-genre fiction for the online literary mag, The Woolf. You can read it via the link below:

“What if your book is the child of two genres?”

In it, a group of us discuss a lot of great topics from how cross-genre work is born to how it’s approached in publishing, to our influences. As most of my readers know, genre-blending is something near and dear to my heart, and it was an honor to be interviewed along with a cadre of excellent writers: Virginia King, Anthony Lodge, K.T. Lee, Suzy Howlett, Rae Stoltenkamp, Rohan Quine, and Rob Johnson. You should check out their work as well and see if there is anything that strikes your fancy. The Woolf is primarily focused on writers based out of Zurich, but it regularly features a lot of excellent content. It’s worth exploring.

The Poisoned Garden Pt. 2

Way back in February, I wrote a post about the debut of Kari-Lise’s latest series, The Poisoned Garden. Well, I am excited to share that the next installment will premiere Saturday in Melbourne, Australia as a part of Beinart Gallery’s upcoming group exhibition: Dreamer, Lover, Maker, Fighter.

I love this series, and I’ve enjoyed watching her create each piece. There is a narrative richness in The Poisoned Garden that I find quite appealing. Each piece carries a shadowed sense of wonder tinged with beautiful melancholy. They’re haunting. I’ve included a few of my favorites in this post, but I’d encourage you to click here and check out the full show. It’s amazing.

[image error]Kari-Lise Alexander — “Picking The Perfect Poison #2” in the studio
[image error]

Far Alamo – A Short Film

It will come as no surprise that I was delighted by Fabrice Mathieu’s mashup of John Wayne’s The Alamo and Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. It’s the combo I never thought I needed and I found it delightful and incredibly well done. I shared it on Twitter earlier today, but it needed to be shared here as well. Someone give Mathieu the funding to make this a feature-length film, please.

You can see more of Mathieu’s work on Vimeo and make sure to follow him over on Twitter.

An Evening With the Maker of Patterns

Freeman Dyson is an academic titan, and it’s hard to fully grasp his impact in the sciences. His work in theoretical physics and mathematics have impacted both fields through much of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. He’s influenced science and science fiction alike. (We’ve all read accounts of his theorized Dyson Sphere—it’s common in science fiction and has even shown up recently in the news.) He’s a man whose contemporaries included names like Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, and Robert Oppenheimer. So when my friend Steve Leroux and I heard Town Hall Seattle was bringing him here to promote his new autobiography Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters and have a conversation with Neal Stephenson, we jumped at the chance to see him. Yesterday, I shared that we were attending, and some of my readers requested a recap. This is that recap.

[image error]Freeman Dyson and Neal Stephenson at Town Hall Seattle

Dyson is now ninety-four, and while still very sharp, the conversation felt a bit disjointed. Stephenson came very well prepared and managed to guide the discussion to some interesting bits. But it took a while for Dyson to engage and much of the dialogue was dry. That said, I particularly enjoyed Dyson’s stories about his experiences with British Bomber Command during World War II and how it shaped some of his thoughts in regards to theoretical models and practices.

[image error] Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters by Freeman Dyson

My biggest takeaway was Dyson explaining how incredible ideas don’t just come while you’re lying on a beach. They’re a product of hard work. You do the work first, and that will eventually spark the idea. I’ve found myself thinking along these lines as well. Spending more time in silence with my own thoughts and less time drowning my brain with music, podcasts, or audiobooks.

Occasionally Stephenson would read from Dyson’s autobiography—a paragraph from a letter, a bit from a note—that sort of thing. I found Dyson’s writing striking, and I’ll probably get around to picking up his autobiography in the future. While I’m no disciple of his, I do appreciate how his mind works. He’s a fascinating character who has lived an incredible life, and he’s worth getting to know. I was glad to spend an hour listening to him.

You can see a video of the conversation on YouTube.

Ghosts of April

It’s strange to me that in a few days April 2018 will have come and gone and we’ll be moving towards summer here in Seattle. Time—as ever—ticks forward. I realize that for the last few months, April in particular, things have been rather quiet around here. Damn near ghostly, in fact; so I wanted to take a moment to update everyone on what’s been happening.

I’m still hard at work on rewrites and edits for Coal Belly. That seems to be my usual state of being lately. Edits tend to be difficult for me, namely because my eyes see what my brain wanted and not what should be there. Thank goodness for copy editors. That said, it’s coming along at quite a clip, and I’ll be reaching out to my beta readers this summer. Then, once I get their feedback, I go back through it all over again.

The fourth Bell Forging Cycle novel has been in the works for some time now. While there hasn’t been any prose written, I do have a rough outline, and think I know where I want it to go. Now, whether Wal behaves is another matter. So often we writers create characters and then the characters do something wildly different than what we planned. It’ll be interesting going back to it after having written two very different books in the interim.

So that’s been my spring. It’s odd writing posts like these, because while a lot has been happening, it doesn’t always come across that way when you lay everything out. Once that progress slider is full it seems like everything should be done, but in truth, the first draft is only the beginning.

Okay, back to work.

The Wreckage of Men

“It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”

—Virginia Woolf

Sorry for the lack of updates. I’ve been quite busy deep in the manuscript mines these past weeks. That said, I have seen progress (yay!), and the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel is shining brighter. I’ll have more to share soon.

My Virtual Nightstand

The other day, I was chatting with a few friends, and we were talking about our to-read stack. We all have them, the books you’ve purchased queued up to read in no particular order. For some, it sits on our nightstand. For others, it’s on a shelf. These days it might be a collection of files on your Kindle. Voracious readers all have them—myself included.

As we talked, I realized I didn’t have a good way for me to track my own to-read stack. Afterall, while I do read primarily on my Kindle, I have a lot of physical books as well. My to-read stack was all over the place! Knowing what I have and what I could start next was a tad cumbersome.

But, I think I’ve come up with a solution. I’ve decided to start using Goodreads’ “To-Read” feature to list my collection of owned but unread books. This way, when I finish a book, I have one spot where I can peruse everything I have on hand. Since the list is public, I figured a quick post was necessary to explain how I’m using it. (I track books I intend to purchase with a different method.) These aren’t just books I’m interested in, these are books I’ve committed to reading eventually.

There’s no particular order, but feel free to check it out my list below. Maybe you’ll find something in my to-read stack that’ll pique your interest. Happy Reading!

K. M. Alexander’s To-Read List →