Ready Player One finished

Entertaining. Not very enlightening or particularly thought provoking. Kept waiting but never happened. Basically it's a YA novel dressed up for grownups. Cyberpunk has not found its renaissance in this writer. Sounds like Warner optioned it so maybe the movie will be better.

Cyberpunk History

 http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/cyberpunk 

Beta SF Encyclopedia has great list of themes. Here's the lowdown on cyberpunk.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

The importance of being ernest editorials will probably flow from in regards to the latest cyberpunk novelist to make the grade. Only 34 pages in and I am well-pleased.

Writing as bibliotherapy

The thing is, writing isn't about the product. As with most of living  a meaningful life, it's all about process. Whether reading a book or writing a poem, what is of real interest is what's going on in an individual's consciousness. What do we learn about ourselves during the process?

Speculativism

 http://m.last.fm/music/Speculativism/An+Alternative+Steam+Age?fallback=1 

Andre Breton

 http://memorious.org/?id=228 

Anais Nin "The Writer and the Symbols"

Quote: "The creation of a story is a quest for meaning."

In one line, Nin has written the reason for my life. Melodramatic? Maybe, but I don't think Nin would think so.

Continuing to quote: "The meaning is what illuminates the facts, coordinates them, incarnates them."

Anais Nin "On Writing"

Quote: By following rigorously and exclusively the patterns made by the emotions I found that in the human unconscious itself there is an indigenous structure, and if we are able to detect and grasp it we have the plot, the form, and style of the novel of the future."

Nin's novel of the future

Quote Anais Nin from essay Realism and Reality: "...the unconscious creates the most consistent patterns and plots of all."

Dorothy Allison on Dialogue

 http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/podcasts 

Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt

Not the kind of book I normally read. Lame duck betrayed goes back to philandering husband in anticlimatic end. And yet, there is something here. Stories of women and girls within the context of the novel tell a bigger story, one of cruelty and catharsis.

Oh, and one quote: "Only the aged have access to life's brevity."

A list of "mad" poets: Torquato Tasso, John Clare, Christopher Smart, Friedrich Holderlin, Antonin Artaud,

Paul Celan, Randall Jarrell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound, Robert Fergusson, Velimir KhlebnikovL Georg Trakl, Gustaf Froding, Hugh MacDiarmid, Gerard de Nerval, Edgar Allan Poe, Burns Singer, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Laura Riding, Sara Teasdale, Vachel Lindsay, John Berryman, James SchuylerL Sylvia Plath, Delmore Schwartz

And last but not least, a bit of bibliotherapeutic support: "A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other."

Writers tips

 http://blog.janicehardy.com/2010/03/re-write-wednesday-oh-thats-subtle.html 

Eventually, reading for therapy will require writing. It's part of the individuation aspect of the reading process. May as well make it good.