R. Scott Bakker's Blog, page 44

Daily Aphorism I: The best caveats are made of grease.

Daily Aphorism II: A blog is where opinions go fishing for affirmation and land embarrassment.

Okay… I think I'm finally finished railing at my insignificance.

How many people have I blamed? Let's see: the literary establishment, the Canadian media, and, oh, the entire human race. They're just too stupid to get me, you see.

Starting to sound like a suicide bomber's internal monologue. I'll show them…

Before, when these hard-done-by moods got ...

Daily Aphorism: The foolish speak from the stomach, the clever from the tongue, the wise from the rectum, for they alone know where their shit comes from.

I've found myself thinking about my little Canadian Literature experiment of late, and what it means to belong to a culture as fractured and compartmentalized as ours. (I find it spooky that some of you, quite independently, have been thinking the same thing!) First and foremost, the idea was to write a genre piece, a work that conformed to ...

Daily Aphorism: Confusing critical for pompous is the refuge of the ignorant. Confusing critical for ignorant is the refuge of the pompous. All that distinguishes a pompous fool from an ignorant one, you see, is their favourite brand of confusion.

The brain sorts far more than it ponders. This fact dominates so very much of culture. Nothing goes untouched. Nothing comes away unscathed.

My argument has been fairly simple all along. The more you cater to in-group expectations with your writing...

Thought I would pop in with the real cover for The White-Luck Warrior.

WHITEluckWARRIOR_CR2

I like.

Feeling even more of a Lunatic in the Wilderness today. I figured I would lay this latest twist out so you can see just how frustrating and capricious this business is. I'm used to bad breaks: My first meetings to discuss the sale of The Darkness That Comes Before were cancelled because of 9/11. The second because of the SARS outbreak. And the financial crisis happened pretty much the instant Chris Weitz found someone willing to invest in the pilot for a cable serialization of The Prince of...

To write is to judge.

To write is to fume and to pine, to hanker and to despise.

To write is to hope.

To write is to dwell in contradiction: to be all-powerful within the text, and utterly helpless without. Nothing is so egotistical and frail as the written word. To dictate meaning to another soul. To remain pinned to the page, motionless, while the thoughts you would tether run cruel, cruel circles.

To write is to seize another's hands with your throat.

To write is to be a forgotten Son of God...

Daily Aphorism: The human inability to distinguish projection from discovery, fabrication from revelation: if God's laughter had a sound, that would be it.

I ration the amount of time I allow myself to spend working on this blog to prevent it from cutting too deeply into my writing. As a result, I really don't have time to give the resulting debates the attention or care they deserve.

And yet…

So, Mina: I was actually biting the hypocrisy bullet, not trying to absolve myself. So in this case...

Aphorism of the Day: A blog is what happens when hypocrisy gets knocked up by vanity, and decides to put the baby up on the Internet for adoption.

Make no mistake, I'm pimping a very specific world-view–and a controversial one at that. At the South Park end of the cartoon spectrum it comes down to: humans are too stupid to see their stupidity. At the Marvel end (because there's no escaping cartoons): humans unconsciously game ambiguities both to affirm their mythical self-identities, and to...

Daily Aphorism I: Nine times out of eight, 'open-minded' is shorthand for saying, 'I've already considered and rejected your point-of-view.'

Daily Aphorism II: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, go fuck yourself, you dirty bastard, I'm still voting Republican, because I mean, really, what could be more true than football cliches?

Once again, I would like to thank everyone for their support of this strange (to me) little experiment. It's good to know I'm not the only three pound brain...

Aphorism of the Day: Persuasion is the art of convincing people that you had simply duped them into disagreeing with you in the first place.

Thanks for all the encouragement, guys. I'm going to press onward with the blog and see if I can't have it both ways. Why not, when its been the story of my life this far? I still have a host of concerns, the amount of time and concentration required among them.

So, the final draft of The White-Luck Warrior is now officially 'in press,' as they say. All I ...