Looking Out

Looking Out
Originally uploaded by Corbie.

Greg has done a few Neighborhood Public Radio shifts before, but Saturday marked the first time that all three of us (Greg, Matt, and I, operating under the Oneiromantic Ambiguity Collective moniker) have gotten together to do a broadcast together. Sometime before the event, Greg, using sound culled from past improvisations, put together a backing track for us to read over, and read over it we did, with varying degrees of success, to a theoretical internet audience, a possible radio audience, and a nonplussed live audience consisting of pedestrians (and one small pig, trailing a leash) strolling past outside the old movie ticket booth temporarily serving as the radio station. Check out the NPR website here.
The stories we read (two each), were old, dating back to the mid to late nineties. When trying to decide what to read, I noticed that most of the stories I considered were all from the middle of our most productive period of writing. I don't care for the early ones, and in my opinion the more recent ones are lacking something as well. The whole experience made me want to go back to writing fiction. It's been awhile, and I think my writing style has changed a bit thanks in part to this blog. Only one way to find out, of course...

Looking at the newspaper coverage of the latest averted terrorist attack makes me think that reality is still managing to compete quite well with fiction in terms of excitement and ironic humor (lets not forget utter stupidity, insanity, and tragedy - they're always very much in evidence too). Some might say that the terrorists have scored a minor victory here because at the moment it is against the law to bring a Christian bible on board a commercial airplane. Of course the Koran is equally against the rules, as are all books and just about everything else. Don't want anybody to receive a papercut, do we?. I wonder if you can get a bigger papercut from the Bible or the Koran? I wouldn't know. I do plan to read both someday, just to see what the fuss is about, but at the moment neither of them grace the bedside table. I just wish that people would stop using these books (both of them) to justify all of the killing and hatred. It's making the rest of the Christians and Muslims look bad.