What are we up to?

I’m curious what kinds of creative things people are up to.

I’ve been working on the magical-bureaucracy thing, which I’m a bit bored of at the moment, and am kind of awaiting a new idea to freshen it up. It’s on paper at the moment, so I can’t really type it in.

As a bit of light relief, I’ve been looking again at podcaster. This was a silly idea which got out of hand. It’s just a pun, based on the vague idea that Podcaster sounds like a town in Yorkshire, which kind of developed into an everyday tale of co-locating folk, which turned into an Under Milk Wood parody where you go into what’s happening in individual servers rather than houses, with in one rack at a co-lo facility.

Of course, the first step is to read Under Milk Wood carefully, to try to get some ideas for silliness. The problem is that I love the poem so much, that I end up getting so absorbed in it, and following it so closely, that the spoof is overly faithful superficially, whilst lacking any of the underlying talent.

Despite this stupidity, I’m also rediscovering lots about Under Milk Wood, and his other poetry. It’s also incredibly slow. It’s great fun to write, because I get really absorbed in the original, and the reflections of things in his other stuff, even though I go at about a sentence a day (ie hour), and will finish just about in time for the next ice-age. I guess it’s more of a reading exercise than a writing one, really, but I do like to understand-by-doing.

Here’s the opening prologue (about all there is, working on the top machine now, a battered USENET server entangled in constant debate about the good ole days, substituting for Captain Cat, ). I’m also terrified that someone will be upset by what’s just ham-fisted recreational silliness.

But let me know what you’re up to! I’m curious.

Podcaster
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[Silence] FIRST VOICE [Softly] London, the centre of it all.

It is Sodium-stained unseasoned night in the city's east, earthless
and migraine-grey, signals change blindly, a helicoptered,
satellited sky stares unseen down on lead grey, dead grey,
pill-popping downer grey, seastone inundated land. The tops of
towers stand pithed and vacant, abscesses as dead as Lenin, while
the boardmen sleep, sword in hand, in Hertfordshire cottages, and
dream yachtdreams and beachdreams, from slowly unravelling minds.

And storeys below, and seams and eons beneath, here and there,
vigliant, sleep-wrecking lights spot tenured insomniacs, those cold
privateers stooped behind screens, and scuding on the surface of
sleep, wrapped in tickertape and taunted by newsrolling choirs.

Around the city the sleepless stare, anxiously divining
dawn-awaiting skies. Teachers, secretaries, barmen, and solicitors;
postmen, librarians, and cooks, they sit in end-terrace kitchens
and, with closed-circuit eyes worry reasonable furniture, treat
auras with aspirin, and starve hope half blind. From fashionable
laptops balanced on inhereted armchairs; from skip-pilfered
workstations bending inadequate shelves; and from rats-paw
puppet-stage telephones, those sleepless send phantoms to silently
wander through recent and notional lands.

Here's a stylishly murdered pica-point weblog, cascading ornament
and cosecant headache, some tyre-tread text in an immaculate desert,
and beige to within a breath of dispair. And there is a forum
dyspeptic with bawling, soap bitter, and iron-tasting, as salty as
the a knifeedge. Self-important news of wars, armed with trumpets in
sandpits; biographies of footballers now fifty and lonely; a
clockwork bazzar of desire and longing wound up on credit,
billboards, and hoarding: watch the sleepless wander now, rising
from tables, from solace-less beds and from sweating armchairs, watch
them as they rise, like the dead of Revelations, tied into herds
by cables and waves.

Lights in the greyness flicker at their passing, in the deep-digging
basement of Podcaster House.

Aaron and Pete, above in the guardroom, displayed to the street in
reptile-house glory, employed and careerless, and passing the night.

AARON

On a Zeus Five Thousand: deluxe and professional, adjustable,
reclining, the king of all chairs.

PETE

which will one day be mine.

FIRST VOICE

In front of Aaron, in dead-eye middle distance, monitors flicker
from leaf to leaf like fly-tipped mags in a breeze. On coma-grey
screens, silent rooms and alleys march past in silent procession,
as Aaron god-like dozes.

Pete is pining for his motorbike and the weekend coast.  Aaron
dreaming: watching and sleeping. Unbidden and unwanted, we join them
now in their night-light guardroom in Podcaster House.

See, on the pale, paned, monitors, an endless rhythm of
machine-racks, upright caskets in tin-soldier ranks, as still and as
dumb as Eros in the circus; cooled and fed with nursery care. Behind
grills, the shuttered faces, endlessly counting, clicking beads and
hailing Mary, but unrepentently spewing dragon-dry air. Trace the
anenome wires, ribbon-gay, perplexed, as they violate each coffin,
and like the worms surfacing from good loam, see them writhe within
a whisper of goose-bump and shiver, in aisles that vanish to
patterned beyonds.

See the blood spots, dried as brown as autumn, as they fleck and
fall, from nineteen-inch corners where, bated by pumice caresses,
naked cuts of iron have fished for and caught, nameless, careless
flesh. See all of these things, from the street-side guardhouse.

We stay. Aaron and Pete mark time. In a steel pergatory beneath our
feet, before our eyes, devout machines are also waiting.

See, amongst these down-shuttered dead, in the furthest corner, a
glass-fronted casket, its organs displayed to our gaze. Follow me
now as we shuffle toward this tomb, and examine the body screwed
silent within. The carcass is dreaming, swaddled in strings of
carnival lamps -- lucifer red, apple green, crem-fire blue --
twinkling like whores in heaven. Labels, switches, and bulks of
brain lurk earth-caged, grill-grated, underlit grotesques and
am-dram villains, angel-damn rhythm-dancing in paint-dampened
light.

Fall through the dust-grey mesh, now, into winking cloisters
beneath; to where no one else can travel, straight into the dreams
of machines.

A Usenet server, age-ached and weather-worn, its black-brushed face
drilled and filled by parades of bug-track fly-by-night dentists,
askew and wonky and racked into place, expires, spools, makes
history, teases threads and stalks the world along stark reporting
alleys, familiar stew-in-the-pot ginnels, past time-stamped
tub-thumping greasers and cross-post desert-island chemists; tuts
its disks, spits its packets, and drowns in eternal autumn.

And drawn to the heart of its mother-could-love body

            a bubbling sea of teeth-rotting, sugar-blackening vitriol.