I’ve heard some complaints before that the English language lacks the extensive, eloquent vocabulary of other languages and therefore cannot compare to foreign literature. I’ve also heard that English is one of the most evocative and effusive literary languages, and that appropriate wielding of its comprehensive vocabulary can yield incomparable expressive power. Regardless of whether or not English is the best or worst language to write in,though, it is, for better or worse, all I’ve got.

I was walking to the waterfront the other day: to do so requires climbing down from the top of my hill through a series of residential areas varying significantly in property value. The top of the hill is really nice, to be honest, in no small part due to the fantastic views. The best ones are at the top, but as you take each ivy-infested staircase farther down the hill there emerges a curious charm that can’t be had in the most expensive areas. I had descended only one or two of these staircases, and just as you look up to cross the street, you get this incredible view of downtown framed by the homes and apartments on either side, and then layered with a lone airplane in the sky on top and a chunk of greenery followed by cement on the bottom, with telephone wires diagonally cutting through the entire scene like an obnoxious sharpie mark on a beautiful landscape painting. I don’t know what words there are to describe something like that, but it’s that very essence that r/ImaginaryCityScapes tries to capture, simultaneously mundane and awesome.

It’s things like that that make me grateful for living in the city – there’s something so optimistic about seeing the city itself from a distance during the day, that honestly can be much more fulfilling than the city itself. It’s about living areas with a view, I guess – no wonder they pay so well.

The rest of that walk was a good one: the waterfront park was beautiful, and our recent infestation of rabbits proved entertaining for once when a group of 7 or so came out to graze on the grassy steps leading down to one of the big art exhibits. Plus, the beach nearby is great for skipping rocks, except for the syringe I found on the rocks…

Anyways, the really great thing was that view – the intersection of residential and downtown life, just enough of a buffer of other homes and trees to keep from feeling consumed by the city. That was really beautiful.

In the media I’ve come across that depict violence, there can sometimes be a tendency to immerse the reader in a glorification of violence that might, frankly, displace the media from reality, or, worse, romanticize the very violence that it depicts. It is common in adult fantasy novels to engage with rape, for example, in a relatively shallow way – on Reddit one user was critiquing the novels of Game of Thrones for depicting rape of other women, but never really engaging with it among main characters. Spoiler alert, this is not necessarily true for the TV adaptation, but it’s an interesting concept. There is certainly a point in which media crosses a boundary between thoughtful insight into violence and indulgent depictions of it. Physical violence is a far more commonly used in the latter, for example, where action movies engage a very primal satisfaction with violence that everyone feels to some degree, and turns it up to ridiculous levels – and in all honesty, the extent to which that is damaging is debatable, because it is certainly not the fault of mass media or major depictions of violence of any kind that any significant amount of people hurt each other. People tend to seriously harm other people for an accumulated variety of reasons: social, fiscal, emotional, cultural, etc. Point here is that it’s an example of the way media can glorify violence of a certain kind.

Now, what really brought this subject up was the manga Goblin Slayer. Most people familiar with manga or anime have seen the intro scene of the first episode, or the first chapter, in which goblins violently rape and murder a band of adventurers. I have seen plenty of rationalizations of the scene, and from a stand-alone perspective that ignores the rest of the show, it holds up – such a shocking scene has the potential to set the stage for a complex, “realistic” fantasy world that echoes the violence of inter-human pillaging. However, the manga at least quickly devolves into a very self-serving harem fantasy that repeatedly shows rape of well-endowed, perfectly figured women again and again (and near-rape of main characters that, of course, are saved at the last second and express little to no concern for themselves after the fact) for the sake of titillating its audience, which is a shame because there is a lot of potential in that beginning scene. There are, in fact, hardly any women portrayed that aren’t catering to some sort of audience (one of the girls is even specifically advertised as being 15, one of many insights into the rather disturbing sexualization of children and teens in the medium).

That’s the main issue here – is when people writing escapism get lost in the portrayal of violence in their fantasies (because that’s how they get people to keep reading, or because the author has a rape-fetish) and lose sight of looking through reality from an insightful lens. Sex does sell after all, so it’s no wonder people make media like this, and probably very few people want to read artistic or literary things all of the time. At the end of the day though, much of this media is forgettable, and, as Saidiya Hartman was once criticized for, threatens to potentially promote violence by portraying it in detail. As I said before however, I am not entirely convinced media is a major contributor to violence, because the threat of censorship leveraging this argument is far more dangerous. However, if violence is portrayed casually, and the effects it has on its victims and executors disregarded, it certainly loses its value within any work.

Something I’ve found interesting lately is those times of the day where you don’t really feel particularly strongly about anything in particular. It’s not apathy, exactly, where you don’t feel like doing anything, instead you’re doing chores and don’t have anything to be especially excited about so you just are there doing chores – in the moment, so to speak, but not necessarily tranquil, just not exuberant or despairing, just… there. I’m pretty used to distracting myself from life with books or shows or games or sugar so this is a little disorienting. Part of it comes with the realization that there’s really nothing else I’d rather be doing – just being aware that something needs to be done and I’m getting it done and that maybe it’s a bit of a relief to have something do to instead of the nothing I’d otherwise be occupying myself with.

In all honesty it’s a bit of a blessing in disguise, just something that takes some adjusting too, because that’s probably what a lot of normal life is supposed to be like – just being what it is, although that sort of tedium probably can cause a lot of stress or desire for escape in and of itself. It’s this kind of response that leads back to old habits – the monotonous toil of everyday life. It’s really not especially exciting, to be honest.

I’ve already written about why escapism is often, but not necessarily, a bad thing from a literary or analytical standpoint, but there are a few more comments I want to make that are less critical of the genre. Escapism, in my opinion, is magical not only in the literal sense of the fantasy or science fiction that it is often encased within, but also in a profoundly emotionally inspirational way. It is a medium for channeling the passion that everyone wants to experience daily, the vessel through which many people’s visions of grandeur are poured into, and a catalyst for art and discussion and love.

Writing or creating in any way something of or within escapism is an attempt to capture the very magic that once captivated the creator – and this is true of any performance art. Music, magic of the Penn and Teller variety, art, teaching (in a perfect world), woodworking, etc. are all inspired. The delirious thrill of watching a master of their craft at work, and the ensuing, gut wrenching jealousy that fuels that kindling of passion. This, to me, is magic, where one might get swept away by the feeling, obsessively creating and practicing and perfecting until something great is made.

It’s a beautiful thing, but at the same time there are often the lowest lows for those that experience the greatest highs, pitch-black subterranean caverns and milky white clouds in the bluest of skies. Perhaps others can consume their escapism in moderation, but in my experience I binge-watch or read and then feel lost at the end – and there’s always an end.

Escapism, or, well, good escapism, is chasing that high, with all the negative connotations that entails. The best highs, though, are ones that make you think, and this comes back to my previous post that discussed the ways escapism can be produced in a significant or interesting way. The ideal is to create a fantastic story that holds up after the escapist glow fades away – that’s what makes great media, a high that never really fades away into obscurity.

Sunlight drizzles on leaves

Swaying, shaken by playful

Creatures just out of sight that

Animate nature

Sirens ring endlessly

Just out of sight

Disturbing but surreal because

Only one sense is touched

Noise, broken down

Is a test of character

That asks if its listener assumes

The best or the worst

Dogs barking could be

Playing or warning

Exciting or terrifying

Obvious or enigmatic

Silence too can be comforting

Or debilitating

Mysterious or apparent

Transparent and, too, opaque

Writing can be both

Imaginative and realistic

Idealistic and pragmatic

Playful and serious

And, like a thief

Just out of sight,

Leaves fingerprints

Today I woke up and was relaxed enough to eat breakfast. Too relaxed – I had eaten way too much the night before, and too much for breakfast, and then too much for lunch. It was nice though because I had not been willing to eat anything for basically the past three weeks since I was so worried about my future. I was convinced I was totally doomed, but even though I just got a response that one job I was hoping for didn’t work out, I was able to stay calm because I knew I had other options.

Getting up was entirely different as well: I wasn’t in a rush to jump up at 4:30 in the morning, so instead I laid in bed and stared at my phone until the last minute before I could reasonably shower and drive down to an appointment I had made. It was during this process I realized that my standard method for waking up in the morning is not as efficient as it should be. It’s terrible to have to wake up too early, but needing to get to work certainly gets you going, and once you’re their, even if you’re tired, you’re as productive as an be – especially with a little coffee. If i’m trying to maintain my productivity, the best thing for me might be to just get out of bed in the morning, instead of laying around on my phone. A while back I had issues sleeping because I was so restless: the solution was exercise, of course, but also not using electronics in bed so that you would associate it purely with sleep. I didn’t necessarily reduce electronic use, as one might hope, but it did get rid of the restlessness, so that’s something. Electronics also definitely keep you awake, so the less they’re used in bed the better.

Anyways, it’s time for me to figure out the best way for me to maximize productivity. I’ve noticed now that I’m mostly out of my college apartment I have a much easier time focusing, not to mention the stress of trying to find a job and solidify a career. I also know that I’ll need to exercise in order to keep away that nasty mental fog that was all too close a friend in middle and high school. All of this is important, but perhaps something really interesting is the way that I utilize creative bursts and inspirations. Sometimes I tire myself out doing things that aren’t very productive – video games mainly, but frankly piano a little bit too. I don’t think I can give up the latter, but it could be that games are too good at distracting me from doing real work that I would do without them. Also, caffeine.

It feels good though, to be productive. I’ll have to schedule my time in the future I think, but it feels really good. So: enough sleep, exercise, the teeniest bit of anxiety, getting right out of bed when you wake up, and of course, coffee. Cheers!

I’ve been reading through some of my old blog posts, and I have to say I am not the biggest fan of my own writing. I can tell that I have a very repetitive pattern of writing, and often use words like “critical” , “underscore”, and “vital” over and over again. Big yikes, as people say.

This is a good thing because the first step to solving a problem is acknowledging there is one, but at the same time it’s a bit of a blow to realize my writing vocabulary is so limited. Frankly, I should be reading more just to keep up to date on a variety of writing styles and vocabulary, but at the same time there is value in writing not just concisely but simply. There is beauty in choice, complicated word choice, but especially for blog writing it’s important not to get too wrapped up in yourself and allow your writing to be legible.

This being said, one of the things that always struck me about Nabokov is that early English professors would criticize him for always throwing bits of French into his writing, claiming that it came off as overly pretentious. Certainly this would have been the case, but in the end this habit of his contributed to his fantastic writing later in life.

One of the nice things about poetry, of which I know nothing about, for the record, is at least that it’s a quick way of engaging in thought about word choice and phrasing. For other types of writing there’s a bit of getting around to it, and frankly it is often easier to identify poor word choice than to celebrate good.

Anyways, for now, I will try to make an effort to avoid these habitual patterns of writing. This might be a tad overkill, as I’m especially sensitive to these things, having gone through lots of my own writing, but at the same time I want to write for myself as well. It means a great deal to me to produce work that I am happy with, and one the other side great shame to read work of mine that I sincerely dislike.

My preoccupation with escapist fantasy, and where it stands in the puzzle of media consumption, primarily derives from my own justification for considering writing in the genre. To be taken seriously in a literary setting, it probably won’t get any aspiring writer very far to indulge in their dirtiest, most incestuous erotic fantasies – usually it requires not just quality writing, but also a conscious or conveniently unconscious development of critical cultural or literary ideas that are identified and explored in an interesting way. For example, Octavia Butler doesn’t just write about aliens and parasitic worms, but uses them, intentionally or not, as analogies for slavery and as tools for underscoring major themes about humanity. Good literary analysis of Butler involves lots of cultural theory – such as Foucault and Hartman – as well as thematic analysis across her other works because of this.

So what is it exactly about escapist fantasy that necessarily avoids this? Certainly it should be possible to write compelling, entertaining escapism that investigates fundamental truths about the human condition – and indeed this has been demonstrated over and over across media. The final arc of the anime Hunter x Hunter, for example, critically engages Foucalt’s theory of biopower in arguably a more explicit and investigative way than even Butler does in any one of her works. To be fair, however, much of this arc expands beyond the escapist aspects that were decidedly more defined earlier in the show – specifically dealing with sacrifice of power and bringing in parallel character developments to enhance the major themes that some individuals may find overwhelming or uninteresting.

The true danger of escapism in any critical setting is, frankly, the degree to which reality is often disregarded – even though this is the entire point of escapism. This does not mean that a fantasy show or book or comic can not engage with reality in an analytical way. In fact, often fantasy or science fiction can serve as hyperbole to emphasize certain truths about the world, and this can be considered ‘literary’. The actual concern is the degree to which escapism is emphasized over other aspects of a story – in other words, the rationalization or details of your self-insert’s 100 woman harem could, believe it or not, get in the way of any literary substance to your short story. In my experience, many of the best works of art engage with some truth that is ill-defined and ambiguous, and serves as some sort of investigation into the murky contradictions and paradoxes that create an interesting topic representative of life (i.e. Nabokov and pedophilia, or the aforementioned Butler’s exploration of pleasure in domination in settings parallel to slavery). So when reality is disregarded intentionally to serve as an escape from its dreariness, many of these interesting topics are left along with it, at the cost of potentially interesting stories.

This being said, there is certainly room for critique of humanity’s tendency towards escapism, and there is fantastic media out there that deals with this (the music video MEMEME! comes to mind, where pornographic consumption and obsession is explored through the very pornographic content it criticizes). This is where interesting writing or media production can flourish – the intersection of creating escapism and dealing with the underlying desires and needs that necessitated it. Similarly, perhaps the best way to create a foundation of this in any given plot is by being escapist, and then subverting those expectations or somehow examining reality through this established lens of escapism.

So, in the future it could be interesting to write something like this – a betrayal of the things I consider escapism paired with some meta-acknowledgement that, somehow, might forgive it. So keep your eyes peeled folks.

And now for the most original sentence ever: people express grief in different ways. I guess I never really understood how differently until recently in my life. Some sob, loudly, scream out the agony of loss, and others apologize for crying at the funeral of their father. People react very differently to the loss of others too – some go to the survived and offer words or touches of comfort, and others gossip knowingly on the sidelines, relishing in the taboo of death.

A man I met died this weekend, shot by a cop. The news story claims he pulled out a gun – a rifle – and pointed it at the cop after being pulled over, and the officer retaliated in self-defense. This is a lesson in narratives. I met him as the kind, friendly jokester that threw around rolls of tape and laughed with his coworkers and subordinates. He shook my hand when we met and nodded at me whenever we passed by. He brought me the labels I needed to sign before they could be stuck on boxes of fish. He had tattoos.

People are complicated – they can be earnest and cunning, genuine and deceiving. Maybe he had a gun, maybe he didn’t. He’s dead now so I guess it’s too late for him regardless, but I think that it must be very painful to be shot.

Someone reaches their point in life in a variety of ways. The psychology that leads to criminality is complicated and progressive, small crimes often leading to bigger. The motivation behind them, the thought process, are all very human. So even if this is what happened I still feel empathy – and this is something that is easy to forget. This does not mean condoning crime, or pardoning it, but understanding that criminals are all too human. All that being said – narratives.

I’ve been looking through a fair amount of journal articles describing the process through which people successful in their fields become such. The biggest point was simply that they did their one thing over and over again – success never came at first, and it was through failure and repetition and failure again that finally something half decent got created. I think their advice really is about mindset more than practice, and even with that mindset the majority do not succeed. That being said, one would never get anywhere at all if they did not put in the effort.

I’ve never been very good about creating projects, or working every day towards something. There are certain things I come back to occasionally, but nothing in which I’ve learned something or critically practiced something every single day – and look how far that has taken me.

It can be surprisingly difficult to create things. For music, or writing, it’s not just about the inspiration to create something, abstractly, but instead a critical idea that pops into your head for some reason and acts as the foundation for whatever it is you’ll have two days to a month from now. For me, sometimes its the very process of creation, or more accurately the etching of random jargon that flows into your mind into the metaphorical stone that can then be polished and decorated, and, breaking free of the metaphor here, edited down or up into something concrete (no pun intended).

To be completely honest I’m not entirely sure this is how everyone creates. Some people have an idea and plan it out ahead of time so they know what to work towards, and others are probably much more spontaneous, creating more genuine character interactions as a consequence. A friend once told me there was a difference between spontaneous and outlined literature, as such, but I’m afraid that for me the ideas very rarely come out even partially fleshed. The short story I published on this blog was inspired once at random, and then researched and built upon over a good while before written out. And even then, I found myself struggling with the details. How many characters should there be? What is the best way to demonstrate conflict or foreshadow betrayal? How should it end? Is this too explicit or too subtle? The irony really lies in the fact that simply asking all these questions did not mean the creation of really any particularly interesting piece of writing. But it’s a start, and at least I have that, instead of nothing. Surely the steps necessary to create more engaging, longer, better works requires the understanding of the challenge that awaits, and the pushing forward in spite of it. Writing, either creative or analytical or technical, will always come out rough around the edges at first. That’s what editing is for of course, but also practice. To edit, and acknowledge your mistakes, and continue to write anyways, just better the next time.

I think that a lot of my writing on this blog will be bad. So instead of trying to stroke my ego, I should probably acknowledge that and instead use this as a portfolio of, hopefully, improvement. We’ll see where it stands a few years from now.