Blockbuster went up for sale today. For a while now, I’ve been seeing some funny hacked-by-bankruptcy Blockbuster signs as embattled locations have had neither reason nor resource to change old lights or fix broken letters.
My favorite of these is one that simply says BLOC. It’s not that the rest of the letters are burned out. It’s just that there are no other letter letters left on that half of the storefront. I’ve been making the joke for a while that this must make Netflix like NATO.
Because I have other things to do, and because it was a lot of fun, I decided to sum up this thesis in a nifty infographic. This is my first attempt at an infographic, and I only used public domain/fair use images and iWeb. It’s sort of a hack all the way around. I put it together earlier today before I knew Blockbuster was officially for sale, so the timing seems right to share. And please, share and share alike if you dig it.
When deep space exploration ramps up, it’ll be the corporations that name everything: the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks. – Fight Club
We all know that companies (and specifically, the economic polices set forth by mercantilism) played a huge part in the founding of European America. It’s probably safe to assume with The Narrator that when they run out of stadiums, giant companies will, indeed, have a hand in naming the stars in the next push of industrial expansion. Behold, friends, The Facebook Nebula.
There’s a reason “branding” has become such a ubiquitous noun-verb in recent years, and it’s obviously tied to our increasing consumption of dynamic visual media. In a nifty meta-critical move, sites like Brand New and Brands of the World help we consumerist natives remember our lives in corporate logos even as they help curate (you knew it was coming) good and bad design features from which emerging and veteran creatives can draw inspiration or caution.
I’m working on a new infographic for the blog that I hope to put up later today. During my research, I was struck by the succinct political history implicit in what’s going on here:
Put your shoe on, Nikita.
Considered in light of the grist-milling Soviet system, “designer: unknown” and “contributor: unknown” become rather chilling political statements. “Status: Obsolete” heralds the world we still live in: Soviet weapons and technology still unaccounted for, Soviet scientists still off the grid, regional economies still shaky, but also millions and millions of people more free; in some places, truly, in others by comparison and in degree. Imperfect, even dangerous as all of this is, we’re reminded again and again that people cognizant of their dignity as human beings will rise to demand that dignity recognized, that sovereignty civilly reckoned with if not yet fully honored.
The CCCP’s obsolescence was as far from inevitable as is the rise of true freedom in Russia even now. Consider all that remains to be seen as revolution moves through North Africa and possibly beyond. We have seen freedom ramp up, and if and when it coalesces into free societies and governments, it will be the people that name everything: Free Egypt, Free Tunisia, Free Libya. Free Iran. What might these emerging societies teach us about our own bondage to the Dutch West India Companies of our day, and to entrenched political attitudes that keep us from the business of prudent, engaged, informed civil life? Might this be the end of the world as we know it? Let’s hope.
Every now and then, the highly esteemed Shawn Rosler drops something on my Facebook wall that amazes, confounds, and renders me generally useless with fanboy delight. Maybe it’s something about Noel Gallagher or Ken Burns. And maybe, just maybe, it’s a link to an old-school-NES-style game based on The Great Gatsby.
Earlier today, I Facebook-officially liked this text art Gatsby poster, mostly because of the sublime touch of the famous green light in an otherwise black-and-and-white homage. Major points there in my book. Like Tom Buchanan at a West Egg tennis tournament, Shawn countered with this.
When I was in my MFA program, I felt like the luckiest person in the world. My classmates were amazing, my teachers brilliant. My job in that course of study was to learn, as best I could, how to build a story. Ann Hood told us that whatever our latent talent, we were there to learn how fiction works, and how and why it doesn’t. She taught us to be merciless with the things we thought we’d been so clever about, and, in short, to blow them up.
Joseph Conrad reminds us that revision literally means to see anew. Ann might say that revision isn’t a necessary evil but a necessary good. Someone else said “anyone can write, but only a writer can revise.” Most honest writers will tell you that the story is really written in the revision.
Beginning writers sometimes feel so beholden to their initial muse that they mystify everything and end up producing very little. Writing is a craft. Yes, it requires inspiration. There are days when I stare at the page or the screen and do very little with my hands. Then there are days when the ideas and language flow. I can’t control which day is which, but I can do by best, on the slow days, to prepare myself for the fast ones. The later are more thrilling, for sure. But they don’t come without the former. Feeling stuck? Read a book. Watch a well-written show. Listen to a song that keeps raising the narrative stakes.
A few months into any Golden Age comic book archive, you’ll come across the origin story of the title’s featured character. Blogging, really, should be no different. Comics emerged from the frenetic, sensationalist media of the early 1900s, and blogs emerged from the frenetic, media-saturated lives of people living on the other side of a century that saw the best and worst communications innovations in human history.
Lazily.
Chriscocca.com started as christophercocca.wordpress.com in January of 2007. I used the Hemingway theme, and the goal was very simple: I wanted a place to share my publishing news. I was submitting to online and print journals for the first time and had some very early success at those venues (Geez, Brevity, and elimae being the most notable). Eventually I started blogging about craft, which really means I blogged about instinct. One thing I knew for certain was that there were still way too many people using way too many adverbs. To wit, a post from November, 2007, currently in the classified archives:
I hate adverbs. I loved them as a clever little kid, but that was before (insert your own defining literary experience here). Except joyfully, and only when used in reference to the way Uncle Feather flew around Fudge’s house and pissed off Fudge’s family.
I should say about word here about Uncle Feather. When I was 10 or so, my dad helped me write a book report about Superfudge, and we had a good laugh describing UF’s manic flight around the Hatcher kitchen with the world joyfully. First of all, joyfully is a pretty funny word, not because joy is funny, but because it’s kind of one of those words you save for big, important experiences. The thought that a myna bird would do anything joyfully cracked me up. Also, visualizing a myna bird joyfully flying around a room while exasperated keepers try in vain to bring him down, well, I don’t care how old you are, that’s a) hilarious and b) extremely gratifying.
I was writing a lot of terse, evocative microfiction in 2007, and my blogging style from those days reflects that. Eventually, I developed a fuller style, but it was still a very at-arm’s length approach. I don’t think I blogged for fun, even when I was blogging a lot about things that were important to me. But I suppose I thought writing wasn’t supposed to be much fun, either. I mean, this is serious business, after all, and I didn’t want people thinking I was some lamebrain goofball blogging about episodes of LOST and He-Man. My, how things have changed.
My love/hate relationship with blogging in this space went on and on and on. Last year I took a big long break to focus solely on my fiction, and I think was a good move for a few reasons: 1) It gave me time for fiction and 2) it separated me from the constant head-checking I was doing before every click of the WordPress publish button. I needed to get out of my head and into my gut, and I needed to say what I needed to say in ways that weren’t so tied up in my own personal narrative. There were great discussions happening on the blog by then, but all of the sudden I knew that if I was going to dedicate the kind of time and mental energy that a book would require, I was no longer going to be blogging about the ontological grounding of being (okay, okay, it’s God) for a while.
Maybe the Desk Inspector should mind his own damn business.
This year, I lightened up. I don’t know exactly why or how, but I have a few guesses. One thing I know for sure is that I started blogging more as soon as I finally designed a banner I really, really liked. When I started playing with the images and thinking of what to call this new welling up of whimsy, The Daily Cocca popped up from the suppressed creative places I’d been trying to cram other projects into. Simple as it sounds, a new banner and new layout energized me to have fun with content, to get out on the WordPress ecosystem and to make connections. Specifically, the picture of me as kid really makes me happy. Look at that smile. That kid is happy, fun-loving, and full of a million crazy ideas. That’s the kid who had the messiest effing desk you’ve ever seen, sloppy handwriting, poor time-management and every other awesome thing no one should really have to worry about as long as they’re young enough to wear a clip-on tie. Seriously, what was the deal with the clean desk obsession? If my desk could close, it’s none of your business. If it can’t close, give me a minute. No, no, I left that book at home. You should be happy…it’s not cluttering up my desk.
Where were you when I needed you, Lego Charles Dickens?
Side note: One time in elementary school the teacher was going on and on about something, and I started drawing awesome totem-pole-like doodles up and down the margins of my notebook. This was in a pretty early grade. We passed the books in and I didn’t think anything of it. A few days later, the teacher called me in from recess to talk to me about my doodles. I thought she was going to say how cool they were. Instead, she made me stay inside and erase every single one. I didn’t realize then what I stifling act of idiocy this was. I knew she was being stupid, but I didn’t relate it to this whole idea of feeling like you have to parse your creative side and intellectual side until recently. So let the 31 year-old speak now for the 8-year old who only wanted to draw comic books or play baseball for a living: hey, any grown-up who cares more about order than innovation, more about clean lines and desks than creativity, compassion, nurturing, sustainability and raising up kids into whole people: not cool.
Yeah, so the messy desk thing is sort of mantra for me in this sense: it means be who you are in each of the ways that matter. Write your fiction and your poetry as starkly (adverb!) or as richly (stop it!) as you want, and do your blog whichever way feels right. People are complicated, people have different interests, different modes, different ways of communicating in different circumstances and for different reasons. Why should you or I be any different?
Yesterday, I linked to a post on BookMunch about Stuart Murdoch’s new book of blogs. Will Fitzpatrick says that while Murdoch’s art is “existentialism through fiction, allowing his characters to project his worries and fears that maybe this life isn’t all we want it to be…. his blogs, on the other hand, are much more confident. Murdoch still tells stories, of course, varying from taking pictures for Belle & Sebastian album sleeves to his opinions on the Olympics. But this time, he’s the focal point. And he turns out to be much funnier and more confident than you might have imagined. That’s not to say that he’s arrogant; he’s still self-deprecating at times, but it comes from a man much more comfortable with his own sense of self than his lyrics would suggest.” Despite being a big fan of Stuart’s music, I’ve never read his blog. But it sounds perfect, doesn’t it? Since about the beginning of the year I have had this new, strange confidence in my voice as a blogger, separate and distinguishable from my voice as a writer of fiction or literary nonfiction. The realization that we’re allowed to speak in many voices compels us, I think, to start.
I’ve never had this much fun blogging, and I’ve never been this productive at it. I owe much of this to my teachers and peers in my MFA program, to the kid in the picture, to my messy desk, and to everyone who reads The Daily Cocca, everyone who comments, Jay and future guest posters/contributors, and all of you folks on WordPress I continue to connect with. Thank you!
Yesterday, I came across these great shots of The Burren at Vintage Pages. I was reminded of Buzz Aldrin’s description of the “magnificent desolation” he witnessed on the Moon, and of Joan Didion’s essay “At the Dam.” I was also reminded of my own experience in Sedona, Arizona last summer, and I thought I’d share this piece about sacred space, published previously on Huffington. I wrote this months before I’d read Didion’s fantastic work, but well after I’d heard Aldrin talk about his own.#
What Is Sacred Space?
The Chapel of the Holy Cross rises from a 250-foot abutment in Sedona’s ferric sandstone, a sort of redundant decoration in this part of Arizona where I-17 and the Red Rock Scenic Byway seem to follow God’s own early steps across the Earth. Out here in the desert, among the great open tables of a vast, imposing communion, the idea of sacral man-made space registers in the viscerally absurd, feels essentially and obviously offensive. From the road, the innate need our species has to seek the holy seems corrupted by the building’s hubris, its imperial theology, by the categories and catechisms that value the work of fervent hands above the sublime, enduring witness of 300-million years. As my friend Jeremy and I park our rental car below the chapel’s massive cross, so meager in this scheme of things, we confess our doubts.
We’d set out on a slow course from Phoenix after breakfast. As I-17 wended north and east through desert, brush, and forest, we considered the physical reality of everything we saw in relation to the mountains we know so well back home in Pennsylvania, the trees that cover them, the interloping cities and still-interloping suburbs that never suggest this expanse of material, the planet’s bones, an endless stretch of at-rest atoms testifying for the universe. At home there are no resources unturned; limestone and slate and iron-ore are subdued and spent, the mountains are worn-down by glaciers, time, and strip-mines. I know next to nothing about the natural or industrial history of Arizona, but from the highway I am happy to believe that the stones and dirt and desert floor lie just as they rose from dry seas and tectonics. From the highway, that so much matter rests within my sightline reassures me: reality is big, our theologies are small, we must go about sincerely rendered spiritual pursuits with a humility that mimics in its depth the vastness of creation. We have a truly cosmic space in which to seek and find the holy.
Our first views of the Chapel are from the distance after three hours of roadside spiritual formation. We decide before we ever see it that we’ll have missed nothing if we don’t. We snake through the Red Rock Scenic Byway towards the Chapel’s foot fomenting reservations. Out of the car, where the rocks can hear us, we say we don’t know why people do this and that then again we do. We ascend the looping road to the Chapel’s entrance, hoping to recover the better reasons humans build religious things: from the need to offer, from the need to commemorate the places they encounter God. Still, the red rocks, the desert mountains and Arizona forests, the dirt and stone and binding heat aren’t going anywhere; the massive dome we’re under can’t be soon forgotten. But we move toward the redundant space, moved perhaps by our investment in tradition, by a certain empathy for what William Faulkner’s Jason Compson Sr. calls “that aptitude and eagerness … for complete mystical acceptance of immolated sticks and stones.” In this temple of the open air, we move to see what, if anything, might move us in a church.
From the outside foyer-summit, the vistas are impressive, just as they are from any point for miles. Inside, the central cross doubles as the altar’s focal point through the Chapel’s glass facade. I am struck by the sanctuary’s stark simplicity: the space is small, the stone walls are unadorned save two crafted rugs each depicting a nondescript apostle. The Stations of the Cross are Roman numerals formed from crucifixion-style nails (they look like railroad spikes); the altar’s ornaments are modern lines and shapes, all unassuming. Though the chapel’s founder, Marguerite Bruswig Staude, meant for its contemporary 1950s design to contextualize the liturgy of building in “a monument to faith…a spiritual fortress so charged with God, that it spurs man’s spirit godward,” I am struck by how underwhelming it is in its setting.
From outside, the Chapel of the Holy Cross is vain decoration, but in the sanctuary I am confronted by the futility that the simple space suggests. The immolated sticks and stones remain as meaningless as ever, but they enshrine in Sedona a natural counterpoint to the majesty that dwarfs them. The Chapel is an iconography of resignation, yes, but not of a surrender to despair. The spare walls and rough metal of the church confirm the higher teaching of geology: in the bare face of cosmic bigness, we might celebrate the room our smallness gives to seek. We might be moved by the fleeting crudeness of our best gifts to consider how deep and wide the holy, how ancient our environs, how vast and long the trek of matter into meaning. How blessed we are in smallness, how godward might we move.
Chris Cocca 
