ash cinema’s first review
by Nicholas Karpuk, from Goodreads:
Edward Rathke walks a tightrope through most of Ash Cinema. I kept waiting for the pacing to collapse, for the stylized writing style to become masturbatory rather than merely indulgent. It was a waveform that seemed perpetually about to collapse.
But it doesn’t.
That’s the damndest thing. He never goes overboard and for all its ambition and need to describe thoroughly abstract concepts it never wallows in any one notion long enough for me to lose my patience. Rathke explores some pretty big concepts, and in attitude almost seems like a tiny dog trying to bite a giant beach ball, and yet you can’t help admire the determination and effort. For a literary novel he does an excellent job of not boring me.
Maybe it’s because of my recent interest in blues artist Robert Johnson, but I can’t sympathize for the issues of all three protagonists, who all have a tie in some form or another to elusive experimental artist Sebastian Falke. Falke’s films as they are described sound like the most utterly squirm-inducing, watch-checking sort of movie experience, but the story really gives you a sense of why these characters are drawn to the work all the same.
It ends on a surprisingly complete note. Normally I just consider the end where the novel stops, so when I actually find myself satisfied at the close of a novel, it’s noteworthy. Mr. Rathke has created a complete work here, one which is well worth the time of any reader.
ash cinema today
Ash Cinema is out today!
Super excited about that. Click the link on the cover art [which is super awesome, yeah?] or on the title.
Leaving for home tonight, a long drive with plenty to read and millions of distractions, and a beautiful girl who just won’t leave my head.
I hope you pick up a copy and enjoy it. If you enjoy it, share with a friend. If you enjoy it, write a review on goodreads. If you hate it, write a review on goodreads and tell your friends never to bother with such filth.
ash cinema tomorrow
But what is Ash Cinema?
All information is here, a new page I made under the Publications portion of this site.
It comes out tomorrow. Unfortunately, I likely won’t have internet access tomorrow because I’ll be driving the long road back to Minnesota. But if I get a chance, I’ll post the appropriate links and so on.
It’s sort of nervewracking to have this novel come out, as it’ll really be the world’s first impression of what I can write. And by world I mean the twenty or so people who will read it. But still!
It’s my love letter to film and so I invented all the films I want to exist that don’t yet. And maybe one day I’ll be able to make them real, because, really, my whole life is the movies and it’s all I want to do. All I’ve ever wanted to do.
Anycase, I’ll let everyone know more on Sunday or Monday.
Till then, StarChild.
there are better worlds than this
Novel five completed in fifteen days.
The running total looked like this:
Day One: 16,500 words
Day Two: 21,000 words
Day Three: 30,000 words
Day Four: 36,000 words
Day Five: 43,000 words
Day Six: 46,000 words
Day Seven and Eight: Spent in Busan
Day Nine: 52,000 words
Day Ten: 58,000 words
Day Eleven: 60,000 words
Day Twelve: 66,000 words
Day Thirteen: 71,000 words
Day Fourteen: 77,000 words
Day Fifteen, 80,000 words
Exhausted. Apartment needs to be cleaned. I need to eat. I need to sleep.
Tomorrow begins edits.
human after all
I woke up at 3pm. I don’t know if I’ll get any writing one today.
Man, even typing that just bummed me out a lot. I really really really need to finish this fucking thing. Two weeks is too long to live in this squalor where I don’t eat or sleep and everything’s covered in dust and my body’s falling apart. I’ve lost eight pounds. From writing. I bruised my index finger. From typing. I don’t know how people can stand to work on novels even this long. It’s driving me crazy, up the walls, through the window to the ground six stories down. Everything’s dirty and I eat only nothing. Only the strange things. Only enough to keep from starving. I sleep only for moments. In my head all day are demons. Demons demons demons. Wolves and demons and seven moons flashing, two suns rolling, and these eunuchs crawling through the shadows. To write is to live within dreams and the dreams stampede. I can’t do it! I just can’t handle living in this constructed reality, even if i’m the author, weaving all of reality, turning the demons into words, pulling them from the sky to put upon the page. It’s a nightmare! Every day, caught in these fever dreams, this delirium, the world grows strange and it expands beyond my skull to take all that surrounds me. I had an incredibly intense discussion about Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and William Faulkner last night across three bars and four hours because that’s how I spend Halloween in Korea, I guess, and it ended with the gentleman trying to take me home, which is always awkward, and all I could think about was Aya, my Aya, this fearsome little heroine who’s had nothing go right for very long and I felt so bad that I ruined her life with each word. The moon was a sliver in my eye and there are no stars in Korea so I didn’t cry but just went home alone where my apartment was waiting and I need to eat but there’s no food and spending money seems, for some reason, ludicrous, and I’d rather avoid it as I sent all of my money home so I only have about $100 to last me the next week and a half, and it’s weird for me to feel that’s a small amount when, even just a year ago, i spent less than that in a month. I lived for four years with $5-$60 of cash for a month. I’m used to being hungry, to being thirsty, but Korea’s made me indulgent, giving myself to whim and fancy. But at least I;m not longer haunted, or the ghosts are kind enough to let me be for a while. But these words pile up to the sky! It’s inconceivable. I don’t know if I have the stamina to write a novel this length again. 77k at the moment with probably only 1-2k left until the ending but then maybe ten need to be grafted to its spine, which, yeah, bump that word pile higher. And that’s the real thing, keeping it all in my head. I’ll get midsentence moving forward and a scene will punch me in the face and I need to go fifty pages back and put it in, realising that it’s one of those crucial moments that the whole thing hinges on. I’ve cried three times while writing this book. Three time! Writing blearyeyed, hoping to make the pain stop, to stop hurting these irreal people, these demons and gods. It hurts my heart. I can’t bear it. To hurt them is not to love them. To hurt is to hurt and I’ve ruined their lives. I broke them apart for the necessity of drama, for the illusion of story and character. Life is brutal and it scars us so. And so I’ve scarred them, my reluctant heroes. All of them hounded by forces beyond their comprehension. A man who became a demon through the misunderstandings between humans and gods. He tried to save it and as a gift the god unwittingly ruined his life, took all that was human away from him. He saved a girl from a fire and raised her, only to make her demon, too. And then with his life he made her human, which only disassembled everything she had ever known. To be human was to destroy all that she was but being a father is hard, especially when you’re not human. And then my poor little eunuch, found burying the dead and taken by the silent monks to be one of them, to be the hands and mouths of Death incarnate, ushering all bodies to the endless Ocean, to the Goddess dreaming reality. His is a search to be human, to find all that he has lost and so he haunts the girl and the demon man and gives all that he is to break from the chains binding him to the immortal. He steps from Death into Life and so he is left with nothing, a place between where he will dwell alone forever. And it breaks my tiny birdheart, these people crushed by the weight of an indifferent fate. Because Life has no favorites and it sweeps us all along, kicking and screaming. And beyond all of these characters, there’s the pain of existence, the destruction of the masses and the hate of their masters. I’ve put so much inside of the sentences that my life stops existing independent from the page and it’s crippling. It hurts. And it needs to finish so I can leave it behind, live and breathe again, but maybe not today. I feel half a man, swollen by an ocean of alcohol and pretty girls who say kind things to me. But I don’t want them. I want none of them. I want nothing and no one. I want my words. I want them endlessly and irresistibly. I want them. I need them. More than the skin of another to drown in, more than the sea of their emotions and the beauty of their hearts and minds. More than all, I need these words. They sustain me. They make me real. I breathe and exist only for these hollow words that I pulse into the pages. I pull them from the demons and visions that surround me, that kill me, that give me life. I’m out of my mind with terror and beauty but the page makes me real. With these words I become human. And all these quests, all these words in this novel, people trying desperately to become human, maybe it’s all me and my constant desire deep at the core of me to one day be human, too. To look at my species, not as strangers, but as sisters. To recognise the self in the other and for that to be enough. To be human. To be one with all of these awful and miserable creatures. What else could it be? The search for love, for understanding, all of that’s secondary. The search for humanity in this vast void of inhumane creatures, suiciding the species and murdering the planet.
One day I’ll be human. It will be a good day.
