POETIC JUSTICE

Summer has sprung, so they say in the business. Up until this year, my summers have been relatively carefree. Sure, I went to classes and sure, I've had a job to tend to every summer since I was fourteen, but up until this moment in time no summer has been quite as taxing as this very one. For you see, dear reader, this is the summer in which I must relentlessly search for a real job. Not these jobby jobs I've been pulling, but a real, honest-to-God, my-life-is-pretty-much-over job. I need to get on the road to my career. Whatever that may be.

It's also the summer in which I will have a freakishly large amount of free time on the count of me having no life. And so, this summer will be codenamed: POETIC JUSTICE, because no matter how hard I try and how much I try to accomplish, something completely ironic in stature will happen to me. I'm not sure what it is, but when it happens it will happen! There will be nothing I can do to stop it.

I've already started working on two books. One of them is actually codenamed POETIC JUSTICE, but that might not be the final title because of the 1993 Janet Jackson flick of the same name. I've also begun a short story collection. I'd like to post more about them, but I don't want people stealing my precious ideas that will probably never come to proper fruition.

Anyway, this is what I've been reading:



On the Beach by Nevil Shute is a post-apocalyptic novel that takes place in Australia. The entire northern hemisphere has been killed off by nuclear war, and the radiation is slowly traveling down to the southern hemisphere until the world is inevitably enveloped in its deadly blanket.

This novel is wonderfully written and tells the story of a few people who are facing their final months of life. They live in the last city to be wiped out and occasionally live in a disillusioned state of mind where they may wind up surviving and this is all a terrible dream.

I'm not going to ruin much, although I must say that I was only able to find this book on eBay (for a dollar!) so if you are so motivated to read it then I applaud you. It is probably one of the best, frightening and enlightening post-apocalyptic novels you could ever possibly read. But I must say, it is the only book I've ever read that made me cry. I cried like a little bitch for pages. I've never cried during any medium - no movie, no tv series, no song has ever moved me to tears. This book did. So if you want to be sad, try this out.



I'm currently crotch-deep in Rudy Rucker's Software, the first in a quadrilogy of -ware titled novels. I also have Wetware on my shelf, but I might not read past that unless I'm really motivated. I'm reading Software now because apparently it is one of the first cyberpunk novels.

I gotta say, it's a solid book. It's very fun to read, the characters are interesting, and I guess I'm probably not even qualified to say it's anything less than stellar because Rudy Rucker is the fucking man. But I don't think this is really cyberpunk. Maybe I define cyberpunk differently than everyone else, but it's mostly about the grimey city aesthetic, the anti-hero protagonist, his addiction to drugs and sex despite his sexless life... and I mean, there are elements of all that in Software, but they feel more like the absolute prototypes for what would become of the unrelatable crazies in books like Neuromancer and When Gravity Fails.

But it's definitely a cool read and I'm looking forward to Wetware, which I will knock off after I finish the Foundation series which I just recently ordered. I've never read those and I bought editions of them with cool covers.



Last, but certainly not least is The Essential Ellison, 35 years of Harlan Ellison's short stories. I was originally skeptical about this, as eBayers listed its price as $30+. I thought that it may just be a difficult book to get. I managed to score it for a mere $15 and, after receiving it, I understood the original high prices. This book is massive. It is well over a thousand pages. It's a god damn massivology.

I was so inclined to get it because it contains one of my favorite short stories: "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream." I hadn't read much Ellison beyond that and so I figured this would be a good place to start. This is a great place to start, although not all of Ellison's work is science fiction which makes the order of stories a little disorienting.

And so, my attempt to turn a potential summer of solitude into that of glorious nerdening begins with a bang. More on this story as it develops.

HERE COMES A CHOPPER TO CHHHHHHHHH

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine brought to my attention an off-broadway production of every high schooler's collective favorite dystopian future novel, 1984. I, not being one to miss such a heroic attempt at live-action, low-budgeted adaptation, sought to buy tickets to see a Saturday matinee performance of it. At a paltry $25 per ticket (plus applicable convenience charges), this 80-minute uninterupted spectacle of postmodernism is well worth the price of admission.

Without spoiling too much, this envisioning of the 1949 George Orwell novel does a more-than-adequate job at capturing the disconnected, lonely feeling of Winston's troubles throughout the course of the story. Naturally, minor details are cut in favor of cramming the main plot points into something that's just barely under an hour and a half, but the important bits are there. It's done by a group of artists known as the Godlight Theater Company, who have worked on similar adaptations of other novels such as Blindness, Slaughterhouse Five, Farenheit 451, and so on and so forth. I could go over their merits as a company, but to be honest this is the first time I've ever heard of them, so if you're so inclined to learn more about them you can just click on the link. That's the magic of Al Gore Presents : The Internet, Hard at Work!, hard at work.

The acting was delightful, especially the pasty, soft-spoken yet intimidating man who played O'Brien, although Julia looked somewhat similar to a girl I once dated who dumped my loser ass swiftly, so that totally took me out of it. I also very much liked how the actor who played Parsons reacted in an explosion of nervous fury when he was sentenced to Room 101, as his sentiments very closely parallel mine whenever I'm told I have to go to school, or work, or outside, or basically anywhere that involves leaving my basement.

Perhaps the most interesting of design choices involved the lighting - there was often a square of light in the center of the stage, which was treated differently in each scene (for example, in one scene it's treated as an imaginary table). The telescreens were depicted by four women standing at the outer edges of the stage, quietly chattering away as the action unfolded in the center and wonderfully illustrating the claustrophobic feel Big Brother hammered down on the doomed city.

It's currently being shown at 59E59 on 59th Street between Madison and Park, and it's a grand old time and highly recommended by this sci-fi fart in the wind, so take that as you will.