The couple sat in the field staring up at the night sky. "Let's make a wish on a falling star," she said to him. "Ok," he said, and they looked up and waited to see one.

They sat there all night, their eyes watering as they kept them open, not wanting to miss their opportunity. They took shifts, she watched while he slept and then vice versa. They saw what seemed like the movement of a star, but it was only the sun coming up.

Every night, wherever they were, they would look up at the night sky for a star to wish upon. Years passed wishlessly, and they got old and older. And finally, one night, just as they were about to give up on the stars, she saw one out of the corner of her eye, trailing a blaze past Cassiopea.

"Look," she said, and he looked. They made a wish and watched the star as it continued to fall, until it fell into Earth and crushed them.

I am obsessed with the idea of writing Daft Punk-inspired stories.

I want my stories to be dictated by something outside my control. I want to be taken out of the equation, to write from inside a coma, devoid of ego. I want to hit rock bottom of meaninglessness. I want to not eat or sleep for days and have dreams and altered states and permeate them and never return and transmit stories from beyond via hash marks unobserved in the night sky. I keep thinking it is possible to write stories inspired by Daft Punk maybe because it is impossible. I want to dissect something, to eat the inside of a cockroach. I want to wear a robot's head and view the world though its diodes.

I want to write something that will free me from having to write. I want to strip everything away. I want to pare it all away, flay the skin of the story until only bones are cluttering up the yard and police are called, people saying, "He was always so quiet, kept to himself." And the papers will quote someone who knew me who said, "Not surprised." And the photographs of me will not be flattering. I will refuse to speak and they will strap me into a chair with leather straps and a switch will be flipped and all of the lights will grow dimmer for the few seconds it takes to transform me into an angel.

The first story I wrote to "One More Time" was about a human woman and a male robot who were married and their struggle to relate to each other. "She treats him like a human, hoping that the way he is treated might be the way he will one day act." He wished that he could forget that he was a robot so that he could experience emotions, and she wished that she could forget that she was human so that his lack of feelings didn't hurt so much.

I tried writing stream of conscious prose while listening to the song: "Everything that was, is again, from the beginning repeating. I feel everything moving through me like waves, the oceans forming from the molecules of water separated out. Everything that was small, inconsequential, has become essential. Twisting together like patterns of something. I sit here enveloped in a moment of time, a repeated history."

I wanted to write something like a piece for the 33 1/3 series. I took these notes:

            At the beginning of French techno/house/rave duo Daft Punk's sophomore album, 
            Discovery, you hear the words "One more time." They are an indication of contin-
            uation. Once more, Daft Punk has put out an album of loops, beats and samples
            perfectly modulated to the dance floor. 

            "A project ... is a flight-in-advance that we can try to pursue without becoming
             impatient. This flight is potentially infinite, as is time-in-advance-of-itself. What 
            is more, when something marked by the Proustian adventure manages to escape,
            it also escapes from itself and returns eternally in reverse, delaying the end, pausing 
            and amassing embeddings and metaphors. It makes more sense to pause for a 
            moment. We shall see one more time."1

            "...Music is merely the highest means of representing and bringing to life the 
            plastic world of myth. Trusting to this noble illusion, tragedy may move its     
            limbs to the dithyrambic dance and surrender itself without a thought to an
            orgiastic feeling of freedom, in which it is allowed to flourish as music in itself..."2

            "Discovery's opening is so obliteratingly great it seems the world might be put 
            permanently on hold."3

            "It was capitalism for the interior. The last bastion of colonialism. Colonize the 
            souls of the masses with pills. Make them yearn for one more disc, one more 
            spin of the turntables, Daft Punk synthesized and re-synthesized into an endless 
            orgasmic unity of techno-utopia."4

            "In theory it implies instrumentals, possibly with a sung phrase looped or sampled 
            in, as in Daft Punk's UK hit "One More Time," ... the BPM [beats per minute] 
            encourages its own frenetic forms of dance which are meant to induce a state of
            trance or hypnosis."5

            The notion of continued time, of time after time, is an effort at immortality. One 
            more time and then another, suggesting an infinite repetition of time. Time that 
            goes forever, freed from the hour of death. 

            "One More Time" perpetuates the myth that time is infinite and that one can enter 
            into that eternity by perpetual repetition of the dance trance. By repeating the 
            mantra, one frees oneself from the plastic world which Daft Punk constantly reminds 
            us that we are mired in.

            In an interview with DJ Times' Peter Woholenski, one half of Daft Punk, Thomas 
            Bangalter, says, "Criticizing the vocoder is like asking bands in the 60's, 'why do you
            use the electric guitar?' It's just a tool... no big deal."6 Except for Daft Punk, it is more
            than just a tool. It is why they appear in robot costumes and have song titles such as:
            Digital Love, Short Circuit, Human After All, Robot Rock, etc. It poses a distinction 
            between the human element and the machine. 

            "The more vigorously man pursues the ultimate dream of modern technological 
            science - the conquest of the final limit, death - the more rapid that dream seems to
            recede and the more imminent seems the historically unprecedented nightmare 
            that technology visits upon man... Technology tends to impose on man an 
            inauthentic existence."7

            So what Daft Punk does is simultaneously create a sonic pathway to the infinite, 
            giving us the possibility of transcendence with regards to stagnant linear death-
            obsessed existence and also reminds us that we are humans, we are alive, made of 
            flesh, the stuff that will die which is why this moment is so essential for us to 
            celebrate, to once again love, dance, sweat and get lost in transcendence. 

            The solution to the technology vs. man conundrum is to become immortal by 
            embracing death. "Hour to death and I feel so free."8 The only way to embrace 
            death is to embrace being human. The only way to become human is through 
            detachment. "It escapes itself and returns eternally in reverse." With regards to 
            time, Shakespeare said that music was both sweet and sour ("Music do I hear?/
            Ha ha! Keep time!/How sour sweet music is,/When time is broken and no proportion 
            kept!"9), indicating that the solution is the problem. You have to reconcile these two 
            opposing thoughts within yourself. And at that moment, the discovery is made.

                1 Kristeva, Julia. Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature. Columbia University Press, 1988. p 331-332.
                2 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Nietzsche Reader. Wiley-Blackwell, 2006. p 81.
                3 Clover, Joshua. Spin Magazine, June 2001. vol 17 no 6. p 145.
                4 Butler, Jonathan. Return of the Native. Breakwater books, 2007. p 47.
                5 Loosely, David. Popular Music in Contemporary France. Berg Publishers, 2003. p 183.
                6 http://www.djtimes.com/original/djmag/may01/daft.htm
                7 Lentricchia, Frank. New Essays on White Noise. Cambridge University Press, 1991. p 71.
                8 Smith, Patti. Early Work. Norton and Company, 1995. p 25.
                9 Shakespeare. King Richard II Act V Scene IV.　


I thought that I could take the physical manifestation of the song, "One More Time" and use it to control prose patterns.

The song was 5:20 long, which would represent the length of the story. There were distinct parts that could represent paragraphs.

And then each paragraph itself was made up of word segments.

I thought that this kind of structure would probably produce a bland story. I wanted the ups and downs of its cadence to somehow influence plot and more abstract choices of sentence crafting.

Will I continue writing Daft Punk stories? Even if I were to write the most eloquent and inspired story it won't be enough. Nothing will ever be enough for me to relinquish the thing I hold about my life, my life being worthless, unless I release it myself. And once I release it myself, I won't need these external gestures. Which almost makes me not want to give them up, because then what would I do? But of course, the point being I wouldn't need to do anything. The result being the more you do, the more you'll need to do; and it is only when you stop doing that you will be able to stop.

When I write a story, I'm not depicting the real world around me. And when I read good fiction, it doesn't concern itself with recreating reality verbatim. Instead, what fiction does is create an alternate universe in which a parallel reality exists, one that mirrors our own but better. Not better in the sense that everything works out happily ever after, but you can at least tell that things happened for a reason. The circumstances are all under the framework of "a story," which never happens in real life, because life is messy and arbitrary and, outside of faith, without an author.
Fiction, by its very definition, concerns itself with things that are not true. It is made up to help ameliorate the harsh realities of life. And if it were true, it would be a memoir or a biography, nonfiction. So why does it seem like people expect reality from their fiction?
Disregarding genre fiction (sci-fi, fantasy, romance - the sort that seems more acceptably escapist), people want real/realistic stories. Even if the story about a soldier coming home from Afghanistan never actually happened, they want the author to have done the research and depict a real soldier coming to a real home from a real Afghanistan.
Recently I've been putting together my collection of short stories to try and get them published, and one thing I noticed that I am drawn to is the juxtaposition of fact and fiction. What do facts do in a fictional story? I like to bring out an awareness of the insecurity of things. Even outside of fiction, in the real world, there are few hard and fast facts. Are there things that are always true? What happens to those things when you talk about them in a fictional world?
There needs to be order and logic in a story, otherwise everything becomes arbitrary and meaningless and unreadable. If your facts are contrary to reality, they should at least have an internal validity. A truth at the beginning of a story should be true at the end. But it might be possible to experiment with contradictions in fiction, to elucidate upon fictional elements, indicating that there are no truths. It might be a more realistic reflection of the nature of things to be arbitrary and meaningless.
I like to utilize unfaithful narrators. The opposite of omnipresent omniscience. Human authors who make inaccurate assertions. Words like "maybe," "I guess," and "I think." Assurance is never a given in my fictional world where there might not be any facts, or there might.
All of this has more to do with the role of fiction in fiction, a sort of anathema practice outside of genre fiction.
I am also interested in factual content couched in a fictional world, like Tao Lin's Shoplifting from American Apparel. American Apparel is a real store and Tao Lin uses it and other pop culture references like Andy Warhol did to populate his fictional universe. The concrete factual structures scintillate against his absurd plot. Or, having facts in fiction can set a tone of reality, like Hemingway. You get the idea that his stories are things experienced by him if not exactly as he described them.
Fiction is entertainment, moralizing, pedantic, self expression, escapism, fantasizing, reauthoring. What about a narrator who is not trying to edify? Who tells stories to cause chaos and unmake things. A nihilist poet.

 John drove on the highway. The road was hard, but John didn't feel it. He was in his car. The car's tires hummed along the pavement and he hummed along with the humming. He drove for 13.7 miles on the highway before veering off, taking an exit onto another highway. The new highway was the same as the old highway, except it took John in a different direction. This highway went through a city. And so did John. At a traffic signal, John stopped. He watched the other cars pass in front of his, going perpendicular to him. They didn't look at him. The light changed, and he took his foot off the brake and placed it on the accelerator. The speed limit was 55 miles per hour. John went 60.

 There were signs along the highway with green background like the kind actors stood in front of when they wanted to fill in the background later with computers. These signs told John where to go and where he wasn't going. There were other signs with other types of information. John read some of them. He looked at the gauges of his car which told him things about the car, like how fast he was going and how much gas it had. He had enough gas. John was not listening to the radio and he did not have the windows rolled down and he wasn't thinking about anything in particular.

 The road remained hard no matter where John drove, through mountain passes or suburbs. The texture of the street was fairly consistent, and upon them he drove and drove. He turned left, making movements with his arms and his hands upon the steering wheel. He yielded at yield signs. He drove because that was his assignment in life and it was what he could do. His eyes and legs would become fatigued, and the gas gauge would indicate that his tank was empty. But he drove on.

i'm doing a real-time book review of this book on goodreads. go check it out.