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There’s a new piece up at CNN.com called “Is the Future of TV on the Web?” in which I’m briefly quoted. I had a lot more to say on the subject, obviously, but due to space constraints it got chopped down to just one sentence. I’m checking with the interviewer to see if I can post the complete transcript here — there’s a couple points I made there that I’d like to share.
Also, if any of you are new readers coming here through a post-article Google search, you can reach me at glong [at] mit [dot] edu. Drop me a line and say hello! I’d love to talk shop.
Well, that didn’t work. Â The last time I did a “30 poems in 30 days” project, it was two years ago and I wound up writing them poems in huge blocks. Â They were much shorter and all followed a similar theme. Â This time around I tried to do longer works on wider themes and, well, it didn’t fly. Â Part of this is because I haven’t been feeling very poetic lately due to my brain being stuck largely in analytic mode due to work — lots of writing being done on the MIT side of things. Â More on that in a minute, but the upshot of 30|08 is that it was a great idea but faltered on the execution. Â Oh, well — I’m still proud of some of the stuff it generated, but next time I’ll be sure to set aside more time just for that type of project.
Better news coming monetarily!
Driving home on Memorial Drive after several hours’ worth of playing Mario Kart Wii, I kept thinking “FIRE THE RED SHELL! Â FIRE THE RED SHELL!” Â Also tempted to rev the engine at red lights, just waiting to press and hold the gas at just… the right… Â moment.
In other words, Mario Kart Wii is awesome. Â
What? Â I work in a game lab. Â You don’t think I spend all my time writing and consulting, do you? Â Â 🙂
Five new poems posted today, and I’m still five behind. Â I’ve halved the gap between me and being caught up, but I need to get another flash of inspiration here if I’m going to finish 30 poems in 30 days. Â It’s my own fault this year – last year I wrote them all on a specific theme (character sketches) and banged out a whole mess of tiny little poems. Â This year they’re longer and often more esoteric. Â I really like where some of the poems this year have been going, and they’re more representative of my current state of mind (a mix of art, mythology and technology, natch) but yep, definitely more time has been going into this year’s batch.
I know I have to get these finished up soon, because it won’t be long before the summer movie season kicks off and my brain will turn to mush. Â There’s only two weekends between now and August 8th when there isn’t a new movie opening that I’m excited to see. Â That’s seventeen films opening up this summer, and if you assume $20 a pop ($10 a ticket for me and Laura, and that’s before popcorn or other munchies), I have to pencil in a $340 movie budget. Â Ouch!
It was her fingers that undid me,
long, spidery things half again too long
and knotted with extra knuckles,
skittering things, scratching things,
grasping, grabbing, groping things,
they took hold of my pleasant delusions
and unraveled them with a harsh nasty tug,
popping loose the seams of my amorous intent
before continuing on to my very heartstrings,
drawing them out from between the meat of my ribs
until nothing remained inside myself
but thread and yarn and red.
The ghost beside me shudders and shakes and swears,
clutching her purse in crabbed old claws,
wracked and wrecked with something old and cold and fatal
I’m grateful I’m not permitted to know.
There’s a tiny something knotted in her hair,
a kink, a snag, a snarled ball trapped in her snakes,
and with a start I realize it’s a tiny baby bird,
killed before it ever opened its eyes,
the blue marbles on its odd featherless head
as still and sightless as the lady’s own,
rolled back in her head, placebos, placeholders,
seeing naught now but memories and the future.
Longing for release and it’s not even Wednesday,
I close my eyes and blink to better coordinates,
folding myself through a tesseract and squeezing through
the tiniest sliver of an escape clause,
I renege on this weather,
I reject the contract that keeps April cold,
I turn my back on the bullshit compliance
that maintains this ridiculous hegemony –
I stand in this subterranean expanse,
leaning heavily against a squat, tattered column
and spluttering in these failing fluorescents,
I shift from foot to foot, I curse, I sweat,
I swallow my frustrations, no good, no good,
my feet scuff the concrete and my teeth grind to razor points,
honing calcium into furious fangs,
with each passing minute I devolve, more feral,
my hair growing long and my nails unsheathing sharp from quicks,
I am this beast that prowls beneath Harvard Square,
a minotaur’s path worn deep into ragged bricks.
I will spin my hair into silver,
my skin into leather,
my eyes into milky marble,
my senses into stillness
and my days into memories of ghosts.
I will grow and weather and buckle and fold,
collapsing in on myself as the trongest of towers
finally yields to the subatomic cracks endemic to its mortar.
Get Kurzweil on the phone, ring up Gray,
tell them I have complaints to lodge,
pleas to make, petitions to file.
I rail against the fading of my genetic sequencing,
the collapse of such simple bonds
and infinitely fall fractures,
the flaw in my design
that fails to render me
immortal.
The boggart stands in the center of the room,
feet apart, jaws agape,
glaring defiance and astonishment at his loss,
spun gold mountained in each corner,
and the stolen babe still in its mother’s traitorous arms.
The fury in his eyes is iridescent,
his last hope for an heir spoiled,
his secret in the open and his enemies well-funded
through his own dearest tricks of the trade.
His arms are empty, his stomach full of ice,
he trembles at the thought of what his wife will say,
or if she will even open the burrow door to him,
or if she will simply silently up and leave,
searching out a better man with a more virile name.
So I’m currently six poems behind in the 2008 edition of 30, my semi-annual ’30 poems in 30 days’ experiment for National Poetry Month. Hopefully I can make up the difference this weekend, or as this week goes along; ironically, it’s not because I haven’t had the time to write that I’m behind so much as I’ve been writing other things. This week I wrote two ~1800-word essays for the Convergence Culture Consortium, one on the blogosphere’s reaction to Flickr Video and the logic behind niche web applications and another, behind C3’s content firewall in the C3 Weekly Update, about HarperCollins’ new publishing imprint that’s attempting to do away with the author advance. Then, this morning, I woke up to an email from a mother on Facebook curious about what her son might expect from four years at Kenyon, which resulted in a ~1200-word essay of a response.
I’m also hard at work on some consulting projects which I’d write more about if they weren’t still in development, but suffice it to say that those projects are helping Laura and I to dig out from under some unexpected vet bills and theoretically helping to pay for us to go to Greece this summer – I’ve had a paper accepted to the 2008 International Toy Researchers Association Conference, as have my friends Barry Kudrowitz and Philip Tan. There was a little while there this week where it looked like the trip might not happen for Laura and I, but now I’m feeling optimistic about it again. Woo! Greece!
So, yes. More details as they develop, and more poems as I get ’em done. 🙂
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