Anybody else love Showtime’s TV hit Dexter? I loved it so much that I decided to write an article about it, which you can find here:

http://www.tqsmagazine.co.uk/what-can-be-expected-from-season-7-of-dexter/

In other news, I’m currently recovering from, erm, passing out. Kind of face-planted the floor. Luckily, my fingers are fine, so I have been writing loads, perched over my keyboard in a catatonic state of bliss.

Be sure to check out the rest of the site! A big shout out to the editor, Jamie, for publishing my material. 

The more alert readers among you will have noticed my absence from the Tumblr webscape over the last couple of months. Well, I have been busy contemplating, philosophising, and doing really hard exams. But I’m back, and I’ve been hitting the web hard… ish. What I MEAN to say is, here’s an article I wrote about crazy super-smart fridges that are taking over Korea:

http://planetzuda.com/news/2012/07/02/samsung-zipel-why-american-fridge-freezers-cooler-than-you-think/

Special thanks to Ryan Satterfield for publishing the article. You can also check out a great article that he has written exposing some of the highly questionable recent activity of internet superpower Google:

http://planetzuda.com/news/2012/06/29/google-exposes-your-password-credit-card-social-security-number-etc-around-web/

For those of you wondering, I got a job doing writing of all things, Yeah, I know, crazy, right? But do not fret - though I have been out of the loop for a while with creative writing, I can assure you, you’ll be finding more drivel uploaded here whenever I write something that is not completely awful. Other than that, my blog might get a bit more ‘updatey’ than it used to be, to give you something else to read that isn’t nose deep in pretentious ideas about human behaviour and life as we know it. Well, I’ll TRY to avoid that, at least.

One forged for me, she stands before the storm.
Two chocolate eyes melt civilised monsters,
Her tongue can dance his truth in spoken form,
And for her he crafts the men that cite his verse.
She stands like Lady Liberty, and sings to me
What seems like overt prophesy
Embedded in her fingers; the hope and love
That guides my focus up above, and onward
As she squeezes, releases me
To fly, because she gifted me with wings.
I try to mend her feathers, but the tools I lose
With clumsy rambling, those words I’m gambling
Will shortcut the journey. But she knows,
She smiles,
                  She waits,
                                   To fly with me someday.

‘You… excuse me?’

‘Yeah, no, I…’

Drink. It’s an expensive red, it needs to be finished.

‘… yeah.’

‘What do you mean?’

She half-splutters, even though her glass is down.

‘What do you mean, what do I mean?’

‘… I mean… what do you mean by dragon?’

She stares. Her eyes are really… lovely? You don’t like the word lovely.

‘I mean a dragon.’

‘Like…’ A slice of cake. Chew it for a little while. Fake that you’re a connoisseur; are there cake connoisseurs? Probably. ‘A kimono dragon?’

‘Komodo dragon,’ she  quips, ‘And no. I mean a scaly fire-breathing lizard. With wings.’

You search for a hidden smile. All you find is a trembling arm. You laugh and she looks a little upset and you turn the volume down and sit up, and pretend you’re like a smart-looking movie guy; a Brad Pitt or a Hugh Grant or whatever that faceless guy replaying his coolness in your head is called.

‘You’re serious.’

‘Deadly.’

‘It’s deadly?’

‘That’s not what I…’

So the wine is gone.

Third date. Not sure how to move this on; the plan collapses everywhere you look. The food isn’t even that good. Must be an off night or an irate chef. Maybe both.

Got to focus.

Third date.

‘So…’ Mouth isn’t working, and you panic. On the inside. She can’t tell… right?

She wishes there was more wine. You do too, just so that you can fill your mouth with something decent. The cake is awful.

Her place?

Inscrutable response. Maybe a glimmer of anticipation. Wait, her place?

‘He won’t hurt you.’

‘And I promise I won’t hurt him.’

HA.

‘…Right.’

Sorry, I’m a little confused. More wine?

And you drink, a silent toast to escape. To hope. To… damn, to just drinking.

‘Do you…’

Want me round? Or should I go? I should go.

‘Hm?’

‘Do you… want to… get out of here? We can walk and talk.’ Smiiiiile. Hold it.

‘Okay.’

Her place. Eventually. After the walk. Not so much the talk. But the sense. You’ve never walked a girl by the canal in silence before. You’ve argued by the canal before. But you’ve never had your mouth shut. Not like this. Not like awkwardness.

This weird respect.

Fear? Fear of what? The dragon?

Her place.

It’s cold. It’s pretty, but it’s cold. It smells strongly of toast.

‘I love toast,’ she says when you ask. ‘I eat it when I watch TV.’

All the time?

‘Me too.’

She’s putting on a film. A rom-com? You’ve seen them all, because you actually like them. No, you love them. You like them because they lie to you that the coil retracting inside is the pangs of heartache. Not mendacity.

She walks you to the toaster, and you eat some toast with her and pretend that tonight has been really fun, and that eating toast is one of those cute things that you’ll remember because there’s something oddly touching about it. But the more you talk, the more you feel her cutting through the cockalorum like the crap that it is. You’ve even practised your accent. She can smell the stink of it.

Got to focus.

Is this still the third date?

On the couch. Watching a film with Zack somethingsomething in it. You laugh even though there aren’t any jokes. And she switches off the lights. You prove to yourself that you are a hyphenate by somehow kissing her and watching the movie. She doesn’t catch you. She’s tired.

You don’t know why you’re still here.

2 am. The TV has turned itself off and you’re awake in darkness. She snores in tiny breaths against your shirt. Probably drooling. Clear your throat and… she won’t budge.

You don’t fall asleep on the third date.

She did.

… You did.

And you hear it. At first you expect it to be a half-heard feminine chant of sub-conscious turmoil. Could have been. You have a short talk with Logic, and he sits down with you and reassures you.

Isn’t self-reassurance weird?

And something is definitely… here. With you. And it’s not her. She’s here but… you sense something and it’s powerful. A tangible something. The room is hot.

You’re engulfed in the blind prospects, and fear grabs hold of you and tightens, and your heart tries to punch its way through your chest. And you forget how to breathe.

Breeeeeeaathe —

Was that a growl? A rattle in a reptilian throat. An alien word.

Crackle.

It speaks to you in silence. Just you and it. Saying nothing, but telling you everything you need to know. And the fear that pumps around your body slowly blends into an odd respect. That being in the darkness, a tiny, nearly-inaudible smoky pur - and you put out your hands to feel it.

Recoil. Stretch again, slower.

You thought that it would bite you but you felt compelled. And now your hand hovers above the unknown.

They season the mud,
Nature’s blood, its testimony proclaiming
Ancestral pride, and a glimmer of a
Far-gone smile.

Salt it with your stupid… condiments?
Compliments and awe.
They call him their best friend
But they have never spoken.

Ignore the pain, the raining in the woods,
In the words; they clutter-clatter-clutter
On the roof.
They’ll evaporate someday.

They broadcast their silent heresies
That speak to me in haiku policies
And prodigies. Self-proclamation sells
Their enigma; their mystery cowers inside a hollow box.

They don’t always have themselves
To answer for, or to, or from, to
See it all. To witness a new beginning
And feel something end.

— and thus the world is born
Out of lashing light, light without
Warmth. Too much kindness was never here;
And that is why beams don’t brighten,
But burn like ice.

Spider’s legs, fleshy and fat,
Crawl beside me, as I try to make
The snow leave, but it won’t.
Its fibers are tangled, around me,
Become my vice.

Where is it? — Treasure entrapped
In the sheets; perhaps. I, the confused
Elephant, feel the pangs that are
Pulling at the anchor. It’s 
Tainting my blood

That is not there, nor here,
Nor does it exist - but did she? Words
Remain to boil my mud, but chill
It’s beat. I myself have none;
I never could

Expand upon my anarchy, or tell
Myself; why these salted cheeks?
My doing some times, and other times
They were too. Smoking the silence
Like it’s the last

Smoke he’ll ever have. The lights
Don’t work, so he eats, whatever she 
Left him from the corpse. It tastes
Bitter, but he eats, and keeps eating what’s
Left. In the past

He might have been wiser. He might still
Steer clear of this future, unless the music
Seduces him to another, or the letters
That tumble out of him tear
Him to pieces.

No no no, see

THAT is where you are wrong and nobody else

Is right. You want the hole filled but it isn’t

Big enough yet. Here, 

I’ll help you dig. 

Those tough questions have become easy invitations

Because somewhere you resiled from being

Someone less. And that must be where the hole

Came from - that makes sense.

So let’s fill it up.

But first, let me help you make it

A little bit bigger.

Last night, I read the final chapter of Chuck Palahniuk’s career-making novel, Fight Club.  And I felt a lot of things. I felt in awe of an author who can command the attention of even the most passive reader with a unique writing style that demands that the book be read. I felt envious that I hadn’t written it, that I hadn’t ‘figured out’ the ins and outs of writing with blistering pace, or the way in which Palahniuk can talk his reader through an anecdote about waiters urinating in minestrone and the ins and outs of life insurance, without making it feel pointless or clumsy or, most importantly of all, dull. I felt a duty to live out the pro/anti-anarchic message, that ultimately nobody can escape life, not even a split-personality insomniac, with a chain-smoking headcase sort-of-girlfriend from whose mother bags of fat are stolen and turned into a ‘collagen trust fund’. We’re all different but we all have to face life.

But the biggest thing I felt was guilt.

You see, I am one of them, in this case. One of the people that watched the film first. I am one of the people that reeled back in thrilling revelation when ‘the big twist’ was revealed, completely unaware that, hey kid, you know that this film was a book first? That someone actually sat down and wrote it and provided you with a framework for the great anti-novels that succeeded it? The truth is, I love the book and I love the film. Equally. Controversial I know but it’s the truth. There are parts of the story that the book did way better.

But there are parts of the story that, dare I say, the film did better.

Before you burn me at the stake, let us regard these cultural masterpieces with objective eyes. Throw aside the attitude of ‘the original is always better’, because, for one, Palahniuk actually addresses this in the afterword.

‘Now this is the first rule of fight club: there is nothing a blue-collar nobody in Oregon with a public-school education can imagine that a million-billion people haven’t already done…’

                                    - Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club Afterword, pg. 218

So haters, stop hating. Palahniuk even tells us himself that the pursuit of originality lacks validity in such a media-saturated culture. People have ideas every single minute of every single day, so no matter what you come up with, there will always be someone on this planet that has thought it, tried it, seen it, heard it. Maybe even written it.

The difference is what you can do with an old idea. Isn’t this essentially what David Fincher’s screen adaption of Fight Club is doing? He’s taking the idea from Palahniuk - the seven page story that eventually grew into a culture-defining novel - and expanding it. He expands it in a bunch of ways, the same way that he fails to expand it in others, which I accept; no film-maker has every been fully faithful to the book.

But critically, he manages to expand on Tyler Durden.

This is not because of Brad Pitt, even if I do have a man-crush on him (not in a gay way, I just think he’s a beautiful man). Fincher made more of a character of Tyler Durden than Palahniuk did, in my opinion. And it works. I feel that the Tyler Durden I see in the film is a little more complete, a little more believable and whole than his literary counterpart. And visually, we can see why Jack/Joe (depending on your allegiance with either the book or the film) looks up to him; he is well-built, strong, fearless, and funny. He isn’t funny in the book. And some may disagree that Fincher made a bad call with this - making the eventual antagonist a witty one-liner machine - but I feel that it just brings about another enviable aspect to his character. ‘Do I go with ass or crotch?’

Let’s not forget about the book. The book makes Tyler someone that you only catch a fleeting glance of, that you hear about but you never really meet, and this works better for other reasons. It provides a truly innovative insight into the world seen through the mist of insomnia, that people are only defined by the glimpses that you catch of them before they go, and so how could Joe distinguish him from reality? Reality has ceased to be - we are constantly caught somewhere between a dream and life. As a result, Palahniuk grants himself permission to ‘cut to the chase’; to evict the unnecessary transitional bits in between each event; to blend anecdotes and the immediacy of action in the present; to drop in phrases that function only as exclamative thoughts, feelings and fears, cleverly compiled in a motif of ‘I am Joe’s _______’. The way everything blends yet doesn’t blend, the uneven edge to the plot structure and the pace, these are all things that a film couldn’t get away with. It would be unfollowable. Fincher had to find a more rigid backbone to the story, because in some places, the story is more an encyclopaedic scrutiny of capitalism, of attitudes of uniqueness and sameness, of dissatisfaction with existence. One all.

I could keep going, but that would lack reasoning. I’ve made my statement. I’ve tried to back it up. But really, I loved every word in the book. It is beautifully crafted, seemingly effortless and sharp and fast. It will eat you up if you read it, race you faster than any other book has, and spit you out the other end gasping for air. But that doesn’t mean the film doesn’t live up to it. For once, we have a movie ‘spin-off’ that is actually brilliant. Yes, it’s based on the book. Yes, it can’t follow the book completely. But let’s not let this undermine Fincher’s incredible achievement; he made Fight Club a book that movie-goers actually wanted to read. That I wanted to read. And that’s pretty cool in itself.

So yes, if you have only seen the film, go and read the book and have your mind blown. But if you are one of the tiny minority left that has only read the book, go and watch the film. You might be surprised.