christopher cocca

 The “25 Random Things About Me” meme is everywhere right now.   Below are the all-time top 25 posts on this blog by popularity (most popular to least).  This turns out to be a pretty decent cross-section of what’s here.  

Best Metaphors and Similes + Leonard Cohen on Depression and Depression +  Just Like Brian Wilson +  I think it’s kind of funny, I think it’s kind of sad + Dirty Realism Rules +  A Winter Ascetic + Realism, Voice, and Form in Micro Fiction + Barack Obama and the Hero’s Journey + Song Titles as Short Stories + Public Domain Stories, Wikipedia, and the Creative Process +  Drabble On +  Writing In The Creative Commons + 50 Words in Boston Literary Magazine + Dying Metaphors + The Modern Library’s Top 100 + An actual line from “The Shack” + To Artists as An Artist + A Series of Posts to Progressive Christians + Consider Avoiding These +  Most Beautifully Sung Songs of the 20th Century + Flash Fiction Prompt #17 +  The Thing About Consumerism + Four Word Story + Micro Fiction and Micro Nonfiction + Dirty Realism

I am going to lose a lot of sleep on ObamaPosterMaker.com

You might know that Shephard Fairey, the artist  behind the underground “Andre Has A Posse” and “OBEY” posters, is also the designer of the definitive icon of the Obama campaign.  I’m probably not alone in noting just a little bit of irony here.  I’m probably also not the only one who’s googled “Obama poster maker” a few times in recent months.  Finally there’s an option that doesn’t require PhotoShop skills:  www.obamapostermaker.com.

Earlier today I found a posterized picture of John Locke from LOST emblazoned with the phrase “Yes I Can.”  This was paired with a posterized picture of Jack saying “No You Can’t.”  If you watch LOST, you know the deal.  So this sparked a little battle on facebook between my sister and I: I’m squarely in Locke’s camp and she’s on Team Jack.  She challenged my wife to choose sides, and my wife made her own poster:

and then I made this one:

As I’m finishing this post, Shephard Fairey was just featured on a TV commercial.  Looks like he won an award from the USA Network.  Is zeitgeisty a word?

Two blog friends have recent posts (here, here, and here) about the usefulness of Twitter.  Tara Lazar’s posts focus on Twitter as tool for writers, and Dan Scott is talking about professional/personal networking and idea sharing (and of course, these things all overlap).  A few months ago I explained how I’m using the application:WordPress updates Twitter whenever I post a new blog, and the subsequent tweet automatically updates my facebook status.  I also use the account for occasional microfiction and micrononfiction (TwitLit).  

Dan has a cool video by Common Craft that explains the basics for the uninitiated.  While this focuses on Twitter as a sort of social glue or digital third place between blogs and emails, creative approaches (like the ones being used by wirters) abound.  Even though Twitter’s been around for a few years, it seems like it’s everywhere right now.  It think it’ll get even bigger this year.

I carry extra weight and acne like battle scars and badges.  I read this thing online the other night, something that Updike said after Kurt Cobain killed himself and everyone heard about it from Kurt Loder a few minutes before I left for an 8th grade dance where they’d still playTeen Spirit and everyone would cheer.

Everyone has their thing, Updike said, the thing they do to cope, the thing they do to deal with the quiet desperation that plagues most men and he said he got that from Thoreau.  Some people drink or shoot or fuck (and here I’m paraphrasing) and “some people shoot themselves in the head.” For me it has been eating and refusing to sleep.

Rock stars come from suburban basements, Updike said, and I think he must be right.  The instant fame’s what kills them more than drugs or sex.  The fame, yes, the fame and all that pressure – the burden of heroics is a heavy cross to bear.  Even Dylan lost it, Cash and even Elvis.  Tim Buckley once said that it was sad, all these other people living through musicians, hanging to their words and deeds instead of really living.  We look to them as “easy gods,” he said, easy things to follow, album notes and singles charts like poems or moral codes.  Tim Buckley died at 28 and must’ve had some kind of living, but I think it must not be so easy after all, being a god I mean. 

This ran in Issue 5 of Geez Magazine.  I haven’t thought very much about it for quite awhile.  The day John Updike died, I happened to be cleaning my basement and came across this issue, opened to this page, in one of my stacks of papers.  

Looks like I’m not the only one digging on Desmond’s sunglasses. Quite a few search hits to this blog from people looking for those bad boys. I’m pretty sure Liam Gallagher has a few. His scarf was pretty ace, too.

Maybe I’ll do a post about the monomyth and LOST.  Which of our friends on the island is the Hero With 1000 Faces?  Charlie and Mr. Eko were early examples, and like I said yesterday, Des is the moral compass of the show. 

I like WordPress.  I really like the Kubrick theme but I don’t like that I can’t make the side bar show up on every individual post.  If readers follow links to specific posts, these looked sort of orphaned and out of context without a sidebar to sort of situate things.

K-2 is a variation of Kubrick that takes care of this, but I can’t seem to figure out how to change the width or margin of posts…right right they’re running too close to my sidebar content.   It also seems like there’s too much white space between my posts vertically.  Any suggestions?

Spoilers ahead.  You’ve been warned.  

Widmore: I didn’t see the Widmore reveal coming.  Was he on the Black Rock (as I’m pretty sure Richard was)?

Locke and Richard: So Locke shows Richard the compass, which, as you probably figured out last week, is the item that Richard brings to Kid Locke in the early 60s a few seasons ago.  Now we know why Richard went to Kid Locke in the first place: Old Locke told him to come find him in the future/past…so when Richard shows Kid Locke the compass and Kid Locke doesn’t recognize it, Richard is all disappointed.  What remains to be seen is where the compass came from in the first place.  Richard gave it to Locke in the first episode of this season, and Locke gave it to Past Richard last night.  Future Richard will bring it to Kid Locke in the 60s but doesn’t give it to him.  Does Richard retain possession of the compass until he gives it to Present Locke in last week’s episode?  Present Locke then gives it to Past Richard who then takes it to Kid Locke etc.

I don’t care how crazy he gets:  I love John Locke.  Remember when he lived on the commune?  I forgot all about that until just now.

Desmond:  The moral center of this entire show.  I think he’s the only guy who’s always been good, and he’s the one guy I get the sense that all the fans are rooting for. He’s not just the temporal constant…he’s also the moral constant.  And he named his little boy Charlie.  Heart strings!  So, why is Desmond, to use Farraday’s word, “unique” with reference to causality ?  I’m not sure why, but I’ll remind you that Desmond David Hume’s namesake, philosopher David Hume, posited that if you drop an object and it falls to earth nine times in a row, you cannot know with certainty that when you drop it a tenth time it fill not rather rise.  You can’t know that it will fall until it has.  Even though Farraday is convinced that nothing can be changed by interfering with, if this were a comic book, we’d call the time stream, he tries anyway and succeeds in getting a message to Present Desmond in the past. Sweet.

How awesome were Desmond’s sunglasses, by the way?  He looks like he should be the spry middle-aged front man of a slightly pre-Brit Pop Scottish outfit. 

Juliet: back to uber-creepy.  She’s holding out on Sawyer.  I’m surprised he’s not more visibly upset.  I hope he’s planning on using his sick fraud skills soon.  Remember when he sang “Redemption Song” on the raft?  ”Oh Pirates, yes they rob I….”

Writing friend Tara Lazar has some interesting thoughts about the ways writers are using Twitter and similar platforms to connect with readers.  She mentions me in the first paragraph of the linked post, but I’m especially interested in the idea of tweeting, say, a novel, or the mobile novel deal she mentions that’s going on in Japan.  The interactivity (in terms of direction) of the later is probably too much for me, but serialized novels in pieces on your mobile phone sounds right up my alley. 

I’ve been thinking about serializing my manuscript in this space, and I’m especially tempted because of its format.  (It’s told in pieces by various narrators).  Perhaps even more fitting would be setting up blogs for each narrating character, with a link at the end of the first post that would go to the appropriate post on the next narrator’s blog and so on.  I may have to explore this.  Meta-blog novel?

God bless you, John Updike.   You are missed.