Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Okay. I’ve been way behind on these, but since today is actually the 17th, I’m going to write this one, then work my way backwards…
First, this site was actually down for a few days — something I didn’t realize until I tried to hit it last night and it resolved to one of those horrible, crappy spam-search pages: “Looking for info about evil war against computers?” or something like that. Hopefully somebody made their $0.10 off of that one.
As I work with my few new clients, now, I really see once again that there’s so much scamming happening online against people who want to use the web but don’t really know how. Especially now that the scammers have figured out the basics of how to put together a website that doesn’t immediately look like scamming shit. One guy wanted a client to pay him $1000 for “keyword targeting” or some-such. Another would only build the website if she could host it on her clearly mediocre, expensive web-hosting service… Sigh.
Shortcuts. People want shortcuts. To money. To whatever. But instead of learning to do something useful (and much more lucrative over time), they scam. Everyone does this to some degree, I guess. But when it involves bilking people out of $1000s of dollars, well…
Anyway.
First day back at school today. Just one class: Douglas Rushkoff’s Post-Linear Narrative seminar. I woke up around 11am, took a quick jog a couple of times around Washington Square Park through the bleary damp cold, and slipped into class a couple minutes after the 12:30pm kick-off time. Douglas introduced himself and laid out what we would be doing, showed the syllabus, etc. The usual stuff. Seems like it’s going to be a very open-ended sort of class — he appeared very interested in letting us persue more-or-less whatever narrative-related projects we would like. We did a round-robin to introduce ourselves and talk briefly about our backgrounds with fiction and narrative, and I mentioned my undergrad in “lit and creative writing” (one of the various phrases I use when explaining “Plan II” would be too time-consuming). I mentioned my novel-writing studies. And Douglas seemed to indicate that even just working on a straight narrative project like that might work for the class. I don’t know if that’s exactly what I want to do, but I have been assembling notes and ideas since the beginning of the summer on another novel project, so that is a possibility. I did try to get into the Creative Writing Program’s graduate fiction workshop — but they flat-out denied me. How awesomely rude. My program has the balls and foresight to let in people from other departments. Not the CWP (or whatever they call it). Their loss. So. But. It might be nice to use Douglas and this class as my fiction workshop instead…
The second half of class was a bit weirder. We started what will I guess be a two-class workshop thing called “Knock-Knock.” We were asked to write down two sentences — questions, statements, commands, whatever. Then Douglas introduced us to this storytelling exercise developed by Jacques Lecoq, a French mime and acting teacher. In groups of four, we were introduced to a certain pattern of a scene: someone knocks on a door, someone says a line to them, someone comes and opens the door and says a line, they walk over to another person sitting in a chair, etc. But each one of the four has to use the two lines they wrote as their lines in the little skit. So in my group, I wound up being the door-opener. And I say, “Get that out of your mouth!” after I open the door.
This probably doesn’t make sense, this description…
Anyway, so we got into our groups after this had been explained and worked on our little surrealist scenes for a while. And we’re supposed to meet sometime this week and really streamline it for performance to the group during next class. Sounds good.
So that was that. Looks like the class will be good. Christin, Gabe, Eliot, Josh Dickens, and a bunch of other good people are in there with me. So I’m looking forward to where this all goes…
Afterwards I took the subway up to 27th St. — the Leonard Bernstein Office. Met Craig Urquhart face-to-face and we went over the various projects over there. Came home. Fell asleep. Woke up just in time to watch American Idol, thank GOD, got some food and read the first half of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and now I’m here. Sitting in bed with my soul-mate, my laptop…
