Quick and Dirty

This one’s fun.

Tongue Sticking Out Exercise

This is the single most effective exercise I know for an immediate impact on your voice and elocution. If done correctly, it really brightens up the tone of the voice, loosens the jaw and works out the speech muscles.

You may feel a slight ‘gag reflex’ during the exercise. [Mind the scare quotes on your way by.] Don’t worry about this, so long as you don’t feel too uncomfortable, it shows that you are reaching the tension at the back of the tongue.

There are three points of focus.

1. Keep the back of your neck long. Check you’re not sticking your chin forwards.
2. Really open the mouth, as in the picture – don’t let it close around the tongue. Keeping the mouth open allows the sound out and you can really work to shape the vowel sounds with the lips and face.
3. Stick the tongue out as far as you can, and keep sticking it out during the exercise.

Doing all three of the above, say your name, address and telephone number as clearly as you possible can, 3x without stopping. On the fourth time, continue exactly as before but let the tongue slip back into the mouth.

This is to trick you into experiencing your voice differently after the exercise. If you stop before speaking normally you are likely to ‘correct’ back to your normal way. You should find that the voice seems louder, clearer, brighter and more spacious at the back.

More at Speak-Easily.com.

—

An excerpt from his writing:

“Oh, I think you understand more than you let on,” said Dr. Breed.

“Not me.” Miss Pefko wasn’t used to chatting with someone as important as Dr. Breed and she was embarrassed. Her gait was affected, becoming stiff and chickenlike. Her smile was glassy, and she was ransacking her mind for something to say, finding nothing in it but used Kleenex and costume jewelry.

— from Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

I emphasized the particularly good words and phrases. Love this man.

—

All the discoveries of science get turned into weapons. All the achievements of literature become advertising. If you want to destroy a revolution, give it corporate sponsorship.

[/angst]

—

“Pure research men” (and women) study only what fascinates them. The free exercise of their curiosity is considered to be of more potential benefit to science because it is often playfulness and sheer accident that lead to the groundbreaking discoveries.

Give me one irresponsible bastard with passion over a whole army of robots.

Behind Every Smile

I get jealous of musicians sometimes. They get to practice their craft in front of an audience. They can see people react to it. They can appreciate the effect it has. Music is alive.

Writing would make a dull performance. Reading aloud doesn’t count. I’m talking about the writing itself. Imagine an exciting scene from one of your favorite books. I think of the final battle in Ender’s Game — impossible odds, dogfighting starships, the fate of humanity hanging in the balance — and then I think of Orson Scott Card sitting at his desk, typing.

Pause. Click, click, click. Pause.

Not so exciting. The second two clicks are the delete key, anyway. Writing by hand is even worse. Apart from the swearing and the violent cross outs, it is silent. Old manual typewriters are best. When you get rolling on one of those things, the noise is thunderous. You can hear how hard you’re working and so can the neighbors two floors down.

The main reason I am jealous of musicians, though, is that they can always take their instrument down to the street corner. They can plunk down the open case, start playing, and hope for some spare change.

Pennies through PayPal, anyone?

– – –

I am languishing here. I can’t sleep. I crave movement. Can you tell? All I can write about is writing.

Bah.

Kids, don’t listen to dwarfish Thai pharmacists. Xanax is not a sleep aid. It is, in fact, a vicious drug that is horribly addictive. Withdrawal sucks. I feel like my head is caving in and the world is coming to an end.

According to clever marketing executives, Thailand is the Land of Smiles. According to the guy who sat next to me on the plane, behind every smile there’s a set of teeth.

No Muay Thai today.

The Future of Books

Writers will respond by going viral or by going feral.

— James Warner

[Publishing today] is like the Klondike. Nobody knows what’s going on. All they know is that there’s gold in them thar hills and they want to try to get hold of it.

— Neil Gaiman

Not so long ago, I felt pretty glum about the future of books and the publishing industry. Give it another few years and everyone will be reading on Kindles, Nooks, or iPads. Borders has fallen (its own damn fault, really), paper books are on their way out, and the tablet war is on. I imagined Kindles firing lasers at paper books and playing sound bites of flat, robotic laughter.

Lately, though, I’m fine with all that. Even the lasers, if it comes down to it. I am even *gasp* hoping to buy a Kindle in the near future, once I boost my financial status safely above the poverty line. It’s paperless, it’s convenient, and you can get a ton of classics for free.

What grieves me isn’t the loss of “that smell” or the act of turning pages or underlining favorite passages — lightly, in pencil, because I’m not a goddamn barbarian. It’s not even that stacks of books are my only idea of décor and that without them, whatever room I occupy could easily be mistaken for a prison cell or the dormitory of a monk. As for independent bookstores, sure, I’ll miss wandering through the aisles and browsing. I’ll get nostalgic and old-timey and wonder what kind of life those store owners have carved out for themselves following the book apocalypse.

"F**k you, Amazon."

No, what really gets me is the threat posed to linear narrative itself. Okay, that’s too dramatic. That sounded a bit too close to the “one man, one woman” kind of rhetoric from the anti-gay marriage folks. It’s not a threat to linear narrative: it’s a potential shift in the way we tell stories. But when I hear talk of “making books more interactive”, I can’t help but shudder. In an article I read a while back, which I can’t find at the moment, the CEO of Amazon or B&N or some such bastard kept talking about developing e-books with audio/video files and even games bundled into the narrative itself, ostensibly to compete with other forms of media.

Really, this article from McSweeney’s says it all with far more wit and insight than I can. Please read it before continuing.

Now, all that said, I am reminded of the curmudgeons of the past who said that comic books would rot brains and corrupt the youth. Now we call them graphic novels and pay them a little more respect. Possibly this is due to brain atrophy and the degradation of morals. Then again, the regular old novel faced the same kind of abuse in its infancy as an art form.

As an aside, these new color readers like Amazon’s Kindle Fire may breathe new life into the sale of comics. Printing costs for graphic novels are astronomical, which is why reading them is such an expensive habit. It’s the main reason I don’t read more of them, in fact. With a slick device like that tablet, however…

Anyway, storytelling changes with technology. All sentimentality aside, it’s a fact. If Shakespeare were alive today, he would be writing Hollywood flicks and Tweeting from his iPhone. You would be reading his blog right now, not mine.

Which begs the important question: which famous author would make the best blogger? I’m going to say Mark Twain.

Other votes?

Breakfast with the Lord of the Flies

My daily walk through the market takes me past a meat stand on the corner. Assorted cuts of flesh are arranged on the table there. No refrigeration and no ice. Even in the morning, it smells like decay. Fans spin around overhead to keep the flies away and plastic streamers trail from the blades. They remind me of cow tails swatting idly at bugs, except that they remain locked in the same, mechanical orbit.

The pig heads occupy the corner closest to me as I walk by. I always look at them with fascination. There are three of them, exactly the same size. The cut separating head from neck is clean and precise. Every day, I swear, those three identical pig heads are still there, gazing upward, eyes blank, contemplating the Void.

Are they really the same heads? Surely they can’t sit out in the sun longer than a day. Assuming they are bought and replaced each day, who buys them and what do they do with a pig head, anyway? I remember seeing “face meat” tacos on taqueria menus in Mexico. So, I imagine old Thai women slicing off the cheeks, or maybe frying up some crispy scalp meat like bacon. The tongue, sure, I can see that getting put to use. But what about the eyes? The ears? Are those the parts you throw to the dogs? Do you boil the skull for stock, or do you crack it open and scramble the brains in an omelet?

How much does it cost for a pig head, anyway?

If you put it on a stake and talk to it in the jungle, will it talk back? If you put it in a novel, will it give high school students an image to puzzle over and write essays about?

And if you put it in a blog post, what then? Will your vegetarian friends leave angry comments or will people just shake their heads and mutter at your morbidity? Will they search for some deeper meaning?

I have cut off two pig heads myself. I hunted them for a short time while living on the Big Island of Hawaii. I was helping a farmer protect his crops. As far as he was concerned, the best thing to do with a pig head was to leave it where it was. This way the others will smell the blood and the death and remember what happened there and find other, safer fields to ravage. Plus, that head will decompose and fertilize the crops.

So I know what I do with a pig head. I throw it in a field and let it rot. I try to forget about it, but then I see these reminders every morning on my way to breakfast.

For those of you still curious about the culinary questions raised above, I found answers here.

Incredibly, I was right about the brain omelet.

Dispatch from the Ministry of Indecision

If you write every day, then you are a writer.
— Alan Moore

I faced that old demon again today. He’s the one who puts all these crazy ideas in my head about skipping town and pursuing some new scheme that I know, deep down, I’ll lose interest in before two weeks are out. But this crafty devil, he plans ahead. The collapse of one scheme leads naturally into the creation of another, and the chain of unbroken bad decisions leads precisely nowhere. In my more intense moments of paranoia, the ones that bring on a relapse of Christian fantasy as vivid and disorienting as an LSD flashback, I feel this demon to be, quite literally, real.

"Poor son of Earth, how couldst thou thus alone / Have led thy life, bereft of me?"

In other words, today brought another crisis of indecision. A friend of mine at Lanna is traveling to Laos tomorrow morning and invited me to come along. I have been itching to get out of Chiang Mai for a week now, so initially, I agreed.

Then I looked at my bank account.

At first I thought, whatever, I’ll just do it anyway. A client owes me a bit of money (has for a while, actually), and it should (please, God) come through soon enough. I’m over this Muay Thai stuff, anyway.

But then the fear set in. I saw myself trading my Nikes for sticky rice and pawning my laptop for fried chicken. The inevitable conclusion to this trip would be me, belly distended, lying in a ditch with flies buzzing around my eyes. Locals would pass by, avoiding eye contact and shaking their heads. Secretly they would gloat. The irony of this macabre inversion would not be lost on them, nor on me. We would both expect their return under cover of darkness to pilfer my wallet, filled only with library cards from four different counties, and then perhaps they would wrench the fillings out of my teeth.

Heroically, a romantic even in the throes of death, I would slur at my friend to go on without me. “I hear the Laobeer is really quite good,” I would say through cracked lips. “Don’t wait around on my account.” And then I, the Lost Boy, would let out a final, shuddering breath before drifting, aimless as ever, over to the Other Side.

No, these images only fired my passion further. How morbid. How quixotic. How fun! Real desperation, authentic suffering… those would be something novel, at least. Deep down, childish though it may be, my easy small town upbringing makes me yearn for such things, and most of all for that word, so cheapened by guidebooks and pre-packaged tourist deals the world over: adventure.

My mind occupied with these vague yearnings, I began my warm-up run before the afternoon Muay Thai session. As will sometimes happen with me, I got a quote stuck in my head. I have never been the kind of person who gets songs stuck in his head. Rarely, I will – some half-remembered Beatles melody or a garble of Bob Dylan lyrics. But I’m one of the only people I know who gets phrases stuck in his head, and sometimes even individual words. As I was running, the mantra looping over and over was:

Playing things safe is the most popular way to fail.

It’s a quote by Elliott Smith, a gifted but profoundly disturbed musician whom I used to idolize back when my teenage angst was cresting into a tidal wave of existential crisis. I’d like to say it didn’t crash far up the beach into my twenties, but that would be a lie. I still dip my toes in it from time to time, when the tide comes back in.

By the time I got back to the gym, I thought, what the hell, I’ll just change my mind again. Let’s do this… on to Laos! Then I shadow-boxed, hit bags, and finally got called into the ring for pad work. Something began to shift as I hit the pads. I actually managed to throw a couple solid kicks. My punches felt crisper. My mind settled down and approached something like clarity. The Routine was taking hold, and it wasn’t just circling round and round; it was spiraling, almost imperceptibly, upward.

My God, I thought. This is progress! So this is what it feels like to grind away at something every day and then finally notice some improvement. The saying I’ve long suspected is true, that nothing worth having is easily obtained, began to sprout in my mind as something that may, with proper nourishment, become a living philosophy. That’s the difference between a living philosophy and a dead one: if it’s alive, you can see it for yourself without need of articulation; if it’s dead, it’s just a well-spoken cop-out, yelled again and again to convince oneself it’s true.

Anyway, these reflections struck me as a step toward that nebulous attainment I dub “adulthood” – or at least, a step toward becoming the kind of man I want to be. I am seeing, more and more, the impact that Muay Thai is having on my outlook, in general, and my writing, in particular. As I learn to train Muay Thai every day, I learn to train my writing every day. Again, I catch a tiny glimpse of the deeper, philosophical wisdom at the core of this combat art. I am beginning to see, for example, why the Japanese samurai pursued martial accomplishments along with artistic ones.

Muay Thai is not a sport all about blood and spectacle. Approached with integrity, it is like any true martial art: it is about self-mastery and self-knowledge. Not just in the physical sense. I have learned now that when a trainer hits me hard and knocks the wind out of me, I can keep my guard up and my eyes forward, can still throw jabs and make blocks until I can breathe again. The only thing that makes pain debilitating is self-pity, and in those moments, with body, heart, and mind united in singular focus, there simply isn’t room left over for it. The same goes for doubt and indecision.

The training isn’t about violence or even skill, per se. The training is about cultivating wholeness as a human being.

I don’t get those moments of clarity every day. Some days I drag myself through the routine, half-assed, wondering why I do this shit to myself. It’s the same with writing, although less so: my love of writing is such that the hesitance I feel when I get started (sometimes it’s outright rebelliousness) almost always gives way to enthusiasm and occasionally even moments of rapture.

So yes, playing things safe is the most popular way to fail, but I no longer interpret that quote to mean I should go gallivanting off into Laos without the financial means to do so. Taking risks can be more mundane and drawn out, too, like dedicating yourself to a skill or craft every day regardless of its likelihood to yield a return on your investment. Most days, with Muay Thai and with writing, playing things safe would probably amount to giving up. Yet slowly, each day, I am learning to tough it out.

Still, this Lost Boy continues to wrestle with that old demon mentioned up above, the one who whispers all these wild schemes in my ear. My goal isn’t to defeat him. He has, after all, led me into some wonderful, life-changing experiences. As Rilke said:

If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.