Do you know someone who when they say “Right now I’m reading…” they really mean “Right now I’m listening to…” ? Then this is just the thing for them! Be a good friend and switch them on to DESPAIR PRIORITIES.
See the previous post on this website to download a free pdf of the novel!
Eugenio Negro built a $75 Survival Hut and a $750 Survival Hut!
Click below to download the PDF and enjoy! Absolutely free, no selling no how under pain of dismemberment. I am very excited to do interviews about it, so hit me up at negrocomics@gmail.com.
Read it? Changed your life? Consider giving a tip via Éxitos Gnosis, either Venmo @Exitos-Gnosis-Art or paypal exitosgnosisexg@gmail.com
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Here’s an “audiobook” chapter as well!
FREE DOWNLOAD COMING NOVEMBER 2023 FROM THE AUTHOR OF BYEBYE AND SHLORT
Go over to the ever-excellent Defiant Scribe now and read their latest edition (after an absence of harrowing duration), which includes Negro’s short mystery “Flood Line” for your education, enjoyment and reflection!
Defiant Scribe are doing the ancestors’ work, go read all of it and support them any way you can.
All of a sudden my screenplay MESTRA has come back as a quarter-finalist in the SFISC. Not sure what it means but it’s nice to get encouraging emails!
The email says to share the news on the internet, so as a good social-media trumpist this is me uncritically following orders and sharing the news on the internet. At least I have a source. It’s probably lame to post about this when readers haven’t read MESTRA but anyhow. I worked really hard on it, and as soon as it’s made into a movie, yall will be first to know.
Meanwhile, DESPAIR PRIORITIES, the most personal thing I ever never intended to write, is looking for a literary agent, so hit me up if you like funny literary writers!
Aspiring screenwriters: I’ve done just a little business with San Francisco Screenwriting through the ever-helpful Film Freeway, but both have been super classy, given good feedback and been good communicators, and I highly recommend working with them.
Up here on the fifth floor of King Library typing into a computer instead of being outside in this sublime and perfect October weather: enough to cause you DESPAIR PRIORITIES!
Some sample lines:
…”Chava and me laughing at Brian’s usual self, Brian trying to meditate in my tent while going through his phone, focusing must really be a compromise for him, a forced march of bread slices into a bag, looking over his shoulder at the breadbag’s twist anus.”
…”We don’t have convincing arguments for existence-level stuff, dude”
…”Hater is himself again, and follows her out. —Yeah, that Joe. Now he’s gone on to his rest.— On the porch we’re distracted by some little kids jumping at our right. I didn’t see it before, a big bunch of balloons pull at their strings, tied down to the banana tree. —Yeah. Jump!— says Hater with that tone of the uncle who doesn’t care at all.
But then the little girl painted like a cow does manage to get a balloon loose, only to have it slip away up into the yellow sodium night. —Hey!— screeches Hater, and leaps down over the girl. —Don’t you know nothin? There was a fifty rolled up in that balloon! Manny!— shouting at no one, —get a god damn bee-bee gun!
I look at Josefina, who gives me a stern look. Hater’s still spitting at the little girl. —You go to your mom and teller whatchou did! … Ahhh shit … happy Halloween, homeless.— The little girl runs off terrorized, bawling. The uncle returns pleased to the landing. —Yer not gonna dress up?”
“I do not want to acknowledge the pain.“
Whether Nagamatsu’s eagerly-awaited (at least by me) novel is meant to be a “quarantine novel” or if he just had good timing within his obviously long-planned trajectory of climate-catastrophe fiction, it certainly worked on me, hoping to leave my own quarantine chaos after 2 years and unable to let it go, as a catalyst for a fair sight of reflection and catharsis.
Catharsis if that’s what happened when I broke down in shaking sobbing despair twice in chapter 2, but I didn’t kill myself after finishing the chapter so I guess that’s an artistic failure for Nagamatsu on this one. Also, with all the accurate place-names, what’s with San Jose General Hospital, it’s Valley Med, come on man.
After some deep breaths (I read the book in one go on a flight, just what I needed, nerves already shot), I found lots of truth and beauty in the characters. One huge theme was feeling, balancing the different needs and circles in one’s life, that one has not done enough for one’s kid or family. Personally I have a huge problem with this and will probably never recover from it, so that’s another reason why the first three chapters had me such a mess. The guy next to me on the plane watched Fox News on the chair-back TV the entire three-hour flight. I don’t think he noticed me hide in my shirt while bawling in despair, both times.
Not to spoil anything, but the talking pig, especially after that intense beginning, is worth the price of admission by itself. It’s the stand-alone short story that PETA staff never had the culture to write, when they were still relevant. One of the book’s great artistic strengths is that it finds space for sections that totally stand on their own. By the time Laird is exposing what I hope is Nagamatsu’s music taste (I’m desperate to find fellow bitter punk rockers), I’m thinking thank gad, only adults are dying in the rest of the book.
Marketing comparisons to Cloud Atlas are fair enough as all such are useless, but I found the coda that ties the book all together a little out of place. Watch, he planned that bit first and then the book got away from him. More effective were the sudden third- and flipped-around first-person later chapters in which we meet who was only narrated by other characters earlier. Nevertheless I appreciate his spiritual approach to his writing and I have to give respect for the Tiptree-like elements whence he derives the book’s title, particularly reminding me of Up the Walls of the World in subtle ways.
So, if you got into “cli-fi” five years ago and found many books labeled such lacking, this is something better, it’s something in motion. I put it next to Fifth Season. Smarter than cli-fi. Nagamatsu first puts us through the adults watching their world collapse, then gives us the perspective of the kids who survived it, and for whom luxury funeral skyscrapers are just a granted part of the environment, what’re you gonna do. It’s not hard-science optimism like Kim Stanley Robinson, it’s the optimism of little details by which families keep on. Again, as with his story collection, those interested in Japanese culture will get many lessons, never stereotypical, always well-placed.
I really don’t have any criticisms, only a few matters of taste like the note above on the ending: though I really can’t stand singularities and near-lightspeed human salvation junk (excepting Robinson’s Aurora), I must say that this book’s singularity/wormhole is the freshest one I’ve read, accounting for Fiasco, Aurora and Altered Carbon. A solid, sometimes punishing, beautiful piece. If I had to comparatively mutate it into a Swans album, I think it’s somewhere around White Light from the Mouth of Infinity. Thanks to my friend L for showing Nagamatsu’s stuff to me.
Been meaning to post something about this and here we are a week later.
On 10 February at approximately 2:15 I put the radio on and tuned it to 89.3 KOHL Ohlone College in Fremont. Figure they need listeners, right? Some boring piano indie emo stuff is playing, we hope you enjoy your stay, and he misses the end of the bar, restarting the riff very off-time. I listen again just to be sure. Sure as hell, there’s about a 45-second play with a regular skip, both beginning and end. This happens, for example 88.1 KZSC has apologized profusely for CD skips over the years.
I call the school what, seven times, call the radio station. Nothing. I look it up today and Ohlone’s website says “REMINDER: Any in-person face-to-face instruction scheduled for the Spring 2022 semester will meet on Zoom for the first 3 weeks (through Feb. 13, 2022). We are making this temporary modification to the Spring 2022 semester due to the increase in COVID-19 exposures in the region as a result of the Omicron variant.“
I turn the radio on just now and it’s still skipping. It can’t have just started that Thursday. I couldn’t say now when was the last time I put the station on.
So the mystery is: has this thing been skipping since December? Aren’t radio stations supposed to take decisions as to whether and how to keep broadcasting with the adjustments for coronavirus at “a full time FM broadcast facility”?
Why hasn’t someone come checked on it??? This is yer radio station’s reputation here! You guys are killing me!!
What’s really funny is if you hit “access webcam,” you see the dead ass desk, but there is a random (proven by turning it on several times) soundtrack that does not match broadcast.
If you reading this feel inclined, contact them so maybe they’ll realize the issue. Reminds me of that scene in Spun where he handcuffs her to the bed and puts “her favorite” loud music on so no one will hear her screaming and the CD immediately starts a half-second skip.
Should we do a little contest?? The last reader to tell me that the thing is still skipping before they fix it gets some Eugenio Negro obscene art swag!
UPDATE 18 February: They fixed it. Ass-punk flowing as normal.
UPDATE 3 March: The SOB is skipping again, this time it seems like a whole song, which according to the internet is The Strokes. At least since 6:40 this morning and now it’s 3:40pm. Time to get a new studio CD player?
Have you put your script in for the San Francisco International Screenwriting Competition? I have! Get on it before February for the early-bird deal! Submissions are through Filmfreeway.
As the environment that we NEED keeps collapsing, we keep coming up with stuff we DON’T NEED! Here’s how consumer teleportation, though super-convenient for those who can afford it, could get complicated:
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