Currently

I've been writing a great deal lately, but Rum & Donuts has still suffered greatly over the past few months. My writing has been going to other projects, including some not yet made public. I've written so little here that Amazon canceled my Kindle publishing (not that it was exactly successful anyway, save for seeing that tool in action). Hopefully there are still enough readers following to take note of a new post.

I'll be Twenty-Five in a couple of days. I'm remarkably unimpressed by birthdays for maybe the first time. That might have something to do with seeing that maybe I do have time to do the things I want to do. The maddening rush of my early twenties, driven primarily by college, seems to've slowed to something more realistic. I'm not interested in “settling” by any means (not in, not down, and certainly not for), but I am interested by far in more permanence. If there is any maddening pressure it is now to be doing things which contribute significantly, tangibly, not just to my immediate but to my long-term. My casual interests in sustainability, self-sufficiency and all manner of other skills for a life well earned in any circumstances, are becoming less casual.
Many of these interests are very much at home on the ranch, and I am beginning to really get into them. Next years garden, for which I am already preparing, is going to be significant. My goal is to grant my folks a greater degree of self sufficiency, and thus freedom with their income, via a serious garden. To me, this is an investment in my future; Securing my family and beginning hands on learning that will be foundational for practices I desire to make a larger part of my life away from here. Though when I return, soon, to more urban settings I'll not have the same amount of room for raising food, I will still be able to use lessons learned from what I'll have created here.

Taking my gardening with me to the urban space is not all I have desire for, in moving back to the city. A more urban setting is more truly vital for other things I desire to foster. I really wish I had a space in which to create something different. A collaborative space for people who strike marks in the world with acts of iron and flesh; Who find themselves full in those hard actions between civilization and destruction. I envision a space where things come together. A space full of iron and knives, sinew, nylon, and will. That smells of gun-oil, metal being milled, wood being worked, and flesh sweating. A place of performance and evolution: Of pitiless evaluation, and uncompromised growth. The forge running in the yard, iron being lifted and flesh formed inside, heavy bags and mock-opponents being dealt repeated learning blows, fires being started from raw sticks and sheer will. I have friends interested in my pursuits, in the wilds, with tools and weapons and with shaping the flesh, the corporeal self; I desire to create a space for those things to be shared and explored more fully.
I also desire a space which I can fill with books and interesting things of that nature; Records, a turntable, maps and photographs, comfortable arrangements and good lighting for coffee and reading. A pile of books to be lent out by the door, and music always filling the space. I am much more of a social animal than I ever thought I would be, and my socialization is working and thinking, and joying in such things with fellows. Of all the things I miss from the city, that is what I miss the most.

All this takes its rightful place though, as all things must. Captivating, compelling, even driving, these interests and pursuits must still be put aside for more important things. I tell her all the many things I am thinking about, and she scoffs, “You should free up your mind. So, forget the plants, forget tomorrow. Now sushi, sex, and me should be left. What sense do you make of it?”
And I say that it occurs to me “that if the world were a right and just place, I'd be eating sushi off your naked body. Not sure if that is a form of 'sense' or not... but I like the idea”.

Books of Love

I read aloud. Quietly, and to myself, my lips moving like the illiterate, or the penitent whispering to his god. I am not ashamed of this, and in my mind find scenarios in which I might read aloud to someone else. Not a crowd of them, not an audience, but a someone. In the quiet and darkness of evening, or the warm midday silence of fall. My lips, just louder than a whisper, make a kiss of the words of the page and my someone basks in those words.
Books are things I've always prized, for more than their material being. Before they were tools of revolution, or weapons in wars of ideas, they were secret doors to different places and long before that, they were love. Among my earliest memories as a boy are of my parents reading to me from books. One, or the other, of them would read to me before bed and would kiss me goodnight over my pleas for just one more page.
When I was of the age in school where the institutional “they” expect you to read, I did not. They claimed I had some malady, and I did, but it was of the heart. I did not read, because I did not want my parents to stop reading to me. Eventually, we settled it, and on the assurances that they would not stop, I began to read. We continued on like that for a long time. As I grew older, too old for being put to bed, we would gather at the kitchen table in the evenings. There my parents would take turns reading by the flickering of kerosene lamps. Sometimes they would press the book into my hands, and I would read. By the flutter and shadow-dance of the flame we loved, with our mouths full of words and were a family together. And when darkness had fully fallen, I would rouse from feigned sleep and beneath the covers with a flashlight. As many such love affairs, begun in darkness by sneaking light, that one consumed me.
On my own, I found in books love of ideas and wonder. The love of self as an improvable and improving creature, in the pages of each new world and idea. Essential to me as a young man, in growing and becoming, was that freedom of knowledge. I found, within and without books, love in new and dangerous ways, and from it made of myself much that carried me into adulthood. In books, the love was of growth, adventure, and the revelation of and in the self that being a young man is all about. Though I say was, that still is - I am still young, and reveling in revelations, learning and skills. But my lips have begun to move when I read. Not always, only sometimes, when I do really love the words on the page. My lips move and I whisper, penitent, ill-learned and broken, without someone to whisper to. Because books are love, words and sharing words, are great love. Some words too great to not be loved, some loves too great to go unspoken.

Market Forces

Imagine a world where corporate interests outstrip government. Where executives are celebrities. Where the division between the poor and the rich, the haves and have-nots, is enforced by law, and walls, and an economic standard soaked in blood. A world where executives compete with one another - for promotions, to win contracts, to settle disputes - via murderous road rage in specially designed and armored "battle-wagons". This is the world of Richard K. Morgan's "Market Forces", a character driven science fiction thriller set in the near, and all too believable, future of late 2040's London.
Market Forces protagonist (hero would be the wrong word) Chris Faulkner is an up and coming executive, or "driver" as he is one of the select few who can both afford to drive and are among the ranks of road-rage competing corporate agents. Faulkner, at the book's opening, has just been drafted into the ranks of Shorn Associates, Conflict Investment division. Riding on his work at a previous firm's Emerging Markets division, and the highly controversial yet celebrated kill on the road that won him that position, Faulkner meets immediate challenge. His coworkers and the partners at Shorn are far more bloodthirsty than Faulkner believes necessary, demanding that every roadway dual end in a positive kill. Faulkner is able to deliver extreme violence, as in his celebrated kill in which he ran over his competitor five times, but comes to Shorn with a preference for less bloodthirsty business approaches. This puts him at odds with other Shorn executives; Rivalries which only become worse when he proves successful in the division.
Conflict Investment is no nice thing – It is investment in, and guidance of, small wars for maximum profit. Shorn Associates is as bloodthirsty and greedy here as anywhere, and it pays. Conflict Investment is a money-maker, and success in the field means great gains, recognition and advancement for Faulkner. Being less bloodthirsty still does not give Faulkner clean hands, and as the pressure mounts, he becomes more and more blood-soaked. And he likes it – Every victory, every risk won out, is validation for the way he does business, and the ideals he brings to the game.
At the same time, it is his idealism that runs him aground. Faulkner is no mindless greed driven power player. He's come from the very bottom to get to where he is, and has built the beginnings of a good life. His wife, Carla, is a loving and kind force in his life, always encouraging the best of him. She holds him to be the better man, and not succumb to the sheer greed and immorality of his work.
As Faulkner rises to the top in the most cut-throat area of a cut-throat world, his professional drive and personal conscience conflict more and more. As he struggles with these disparate halves of himself and his life he is forced (or forces himself) into a decision between two paths, one of harmony in his family, and one of unbridled success.

Market Forces channels American Psycho with a Road Warrior ethic and a Dogs of War sensibility. The world created by Richard Morgan for his corporate samurai is one of merciless competition, bloody corporate affairs, unabashed profiteering, riding on a current of warfare and class oppression. In short, Morgan writes a world that, while exaggerated, doesn't seem too impossible or even too far off. In examining this potential future what the reader must ask themselves is if that is a good thing, and what role they want to play. These are the questions that are at the heart of the novel, driving its biting political dialog and fast paced action alike. The choices faced by Faulkner and those surrounding him are more than political, or monetary: Their very lives are at stake on the physical, moral and even human scale.
Market Forces is not an uplifting read. Faulkner is a great anti-hero, and is surrounded by similarly flawed individuals and their mistakes. Very few of these characters are merely two-dimensional, as Morgan is unafraid to delve into the vulgar depths of personality. These are very human people, and will force the reader into uncomfortable territory. At times it is like being in the room while your friend and his wife have a screaming argument. All you can do is watch as people you want to care about debase themselves and one another, screaming themselves into the deafening silence of mutually assured destruction.
Yet while not an uplifting read, it is a fundamentally good read. Morgan's characters resonate with that level of richness throughout, flowing effortlessly with the tautly woven story. Market Force is a book that draws you in, each page pulling you deeper into the quagmire of morality, violence and lust that consumes its characters. It will leave you breathless, and with the sensation that you may be accomplice to something awful, yet wanting more. A unique and masterful work of speculative fiction, Market Forces is a must read.

War, Cormac McCarthy and Speculative Fiction

Broke, running out of coffee and whiskey (not to mention food), and not feeling like going in to work leaves me in a random mood today. I feel rushed and pressed to do a lot of things, all on my mind at once. Yet I sit at my desk, in my broken backed chair and pursue utter randomness, looking for Black Swans.
Really, I was trying to find a Cormac McCarthy quote to use in a discussion, and it somehow led into an expanding gyre of the random. So, I'm running with it.

"It makes no difference what men think of war [...] War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner." Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian is, without a doubt, my least favorite McCarthy novel. At least of those I have read (I have yet to read The Crossing, The Sunset Limited, Outer Dark, Cities of the Plain or The Orchard Keeper). I am not turned off by the violence, or the despairing philosophies, or any of the rest that so many others find repugnant about the book. I simply think McCarthy has done better. Blood Meridian is revisionist, a nice way of saying its historical accuracy is precisely dick, and compared to McCarthy's masterpieces such as Suttree and The Road, poorly written. It lacks the subtlety in extremes of those two novels. While they deal with extreme, and violent, situations and the wreck and ruin of human lives, Suttree and The Road do so with understatement, and the literary equivalent of negative space. The unsaid. offers little subtlety in its extremes, reveling in the violence, and base vulgarities of nearly every character. I understand the idea, the portrayal of human natures desired, but I simply find Blood Meridian to be inelegant all around. Even in Child of God, which lacks some of the subtlety of later McCarthy, there was an elegance to the handling of such extremes. I am continually mystified at people who cant get over Blood Meridian - Its just not that good. And don't even get me started on people who want to think it is an accurate historical portrayal.
With all that said, however, it has some gems in a handful of lines. And bad McCarthy is still better than a lot of other writers best. The line about war, as said by the character of the Judge, is one I have always liked.

While looking for that quote, I came across another interesting perspective on McCarthy, in particular his Pulitzer winning The Road.
I am an unabashed fan of The Road, and have recommended it to most everyone I know. Some who've taken me up on it liked it, others did not as is the way with anything. I think it is one of the best works of literary fiction I've ever read, truly a master work. But beyond that, I've thought since it first came out, that it was a bold move in literary fiction, as it is essentially speculative fiction. Science fiction, speculative fiction, SciFi, Sciffy, call it what you will, is a dirty term in literary circles. Like fantasy (thud and blunder), it is an area regarded by the literati as populated by hacks, and poor use of language, and all the other cardinal sins against literature. And, to some extent, they are right - There is a lot of really terrible speculative fiction. But there is a lot of really good speculative fiction, and plenty of writers who are far more literary and skilled at their crafting of language than a lot of the icons of literature. I personally think there are more fundamentally important works of science fiction, than there are of (at least modern) literary fiction. Perhaps only made more so by the fact that, the engineers, the scientists, the builders of our world read science fiction/speculative fiction. Their bliss, their flights of fancy, and the reflections of their hopes, dreams, failures, and losses, are all in speculative fiction. These are the people who build our world. Yet to many literati, their voices and concerns are low and vulgar, they are the unwashed rabble.
And someone, at least, has the balls to point all this out: Dipping Their Toes in the Genre Pool

I need to read A Canticle of Leibowitz again. It is a fantastic book. I was thrilled last fall when I saw it was among the required reading for a popular course at New Mexico Tech. Seeing numerous students carrying it around, dog earing pages, and talking about it was fantastic.

Rogues and Raconteurs

"I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage."
-John Steinbeck

I've always liked Steinbeck. He was a great writer in both the sense of his ability to craft language, and his way with truth. More people should probably read him, though I wonder how many can still truly identify.

And I think I've chanced upon the name for the bookstore/coffee & tea shop/tobacconist's I want to operate someday in the naming of this entry. Rogues & Raconteurs: Fine Books, Rich Coffee, Exotic Tea, Rare Tobacco & Other Vices