Colin Brush on the Penguin Blog has the cojones to suggest I’ve gone insane from doing the 60 in 60:

It is a sad thing to watch a writer go off the rails. But in these Twittered, My-Faced, Spacebooked, blog-rolled times, any meltdown is bound to be tragically public…[long garble about my insanity]…Then on Tuesday, this post appeared on his blog (see the not-at-all-disturbing screen-grab above). Who knows what possessed him when he wrote it? Guilt perhaps. Shame maybe. Alcohol certainly. But also there is a kind of insane defiance at work here. The 60 days have long passed. The war is over, the battle lost. Yet he’s soldiering on nevertheless.

It’s true the news that a fourth army of 20 titles is forthcoming put a momentary icicle through the part of my brain not yet numbed by my reading thus far, but I am not in any way insane.

To prove, it, I am posting selections from my Facebook status messages for the last day or so (along with related comments), since these should provide a valid snapshot of my state of mind. Proving, of course, that I’m just fine.

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“In the early era of cybernetics and information theory following the Second World War, two distinctly new types of machine appeared. The first, the computer, was initially associated with war and death–breaking secret codes and calculating artillery trajectories and the forces required to trigger atomic bombs. But the second type, a new kind of liminal machine, was associated with life, inasmuch as it exhibited many of the behaviors that characterize living entities–homeostasis, self-directed action, adaptability, and reproduction. Neither fully alive nor at all inanimate, these liminal machines exhibited what I call machinic life, mirroring in purposeful action the behavior associated with organic life while also suggesting an altogether different form of ‘life,’ an ‘artificial’ alternative, or parallel, not fully answerable to the ontological priority and sovereign preprogatives of the organic.”

“The streaks running down the stucco front of the Palmyra were black, but that wasn’t surprising because it was bang in the middle of the rough end of Earls Court, and everything was black round there. Once, like the others in the street, it must have been a family house, but as far back as people could remember it had always been known as a hotel called the Palmy, the last two letters of its name having tired and dropped out of the game. Weeds sprouted out of the cracks in its roof and raddled Victorian portico, and it looked what it was, a fifth-rate rooming-house with a heavy turnover in transients much frequented by the bailifffs, plain-clothes filth, and debt collectors. It was the kind of place where the week’s rent always fell due the day the rain came down, when depression drifted into the room like smoke under a door and the money ran out.”

(Jango and me, checking out the links.)

A few links for a Wednesday–some really interesting stuff, I think. I’m pretty happy with how the Lennon review turned out, too.

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As the above photo shows, I’ve been preoccupied with shooting down deadlines. The 60 in 60 on the Penguin Great Ideas series should resume next week–who knew I meant 60 books in 60 years–but in the meantime, I’ve been prepping by reading the back covers and first page of each one (cheating? who knows). To give you a preview based on my gleanings, here are my three-line non-trad haikus on each. Prepare to be horrified.

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Picked up some used CDs. A couple of these folks I’d never heard of before.

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Via John Coulthart. I’m having my mushroom suit custom-made.

Another entry from the old blog I’m just bring back over to here, loosely under writing tips. It’s actually kinda funny, because I realize I’m talking about Finch. And I sound kind of bitchy. Still–I was right, I needed the extra time to think about it. Meanwhile, this year is shaping up to be an even mix of fiction and nonfiction, a balance I rather like. Archiving complete.

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(DeVotchka covers the Velvet Underground, transforming the song by re-envisioning it through their own musical imagination.)

The imagination moves beyond passion: it is a life-long relationship with the world that transforms both the world and the writer. All of the best fiction hums and purrs and sighs with the imagination, and in this way fiction mirrors the best of life. But no imagination can long survive without recourse to curiosity and receptivity and discipline as well. It needs all of this as fuel for both its serious and deeply un-serious aspects. On the one hand, it is the most visible manifestation of a “soul” and on the other a quality that allows us to express the most absurd and silly aspects of play. During Medieval times, the imagination was often associated with the senses and thus thought to be one of the links between human beings and the animals. Only with the Renaissance was the imagination firmly linked to creativity and thus the intellect. The imagination defies easy measurement, even though we “know it when we see it.” It brings yet another level of uncertainty to an endeavor already supersaturated with the subjective — and yet that uncertainty is a kind of blessing. (Is it true that imagination cannot be taught? Yes. It is a brutal truth, too. But one with an escape clause. A latent imagination can be drawn out of its shell. A change of topic, focus, or even setting can also reveal in a writer an imagination not previously in evidence.)

(The Velvet Underground had a different kind of musical imagination, a different fundamental vision of the world. Sometimes texture and pacing and cadence are a form of imagination)

I’ve finally, with Luis Rodrigues’ help, created a separate tag and drop-down option for all Evil Monkey posts. So you can now review Evil Monkey’s sordid, drunken, disgusting history in one place, if you so desire. Let’s take a little trip down memory lane, shall we…

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Another entry I’m posting as a refugee from the old blog. In this case, the context is messy because it’s in response to Jenn Reese publishing the Growth Cycle of a Writer, which no longer on the net. As she says, it doesn’t apply to every writer, so this post was not meant to castigate her for outlining her own course as a writer–what she’s saying is, of course, perfectly valid. (Even though she mixes stuff about career and stuff about the actual writing–which are two different animals that must be kept in different cages so that they do not devour each other or you.) Still, maybe you can grok the context from Evil’s responses…begin old post…

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