Small Space

Diabetes and Distance

2009-10-31T06:58:00.000-05:00

My problem in writing about experiences with diabetes lies with my complete lack of distance from diabetes itself. The daily routines are ritual: Multiple pokings of fingers, followed by measurement of blood-sugar; fussing over what to eat; dosing measurement and injection of insulin. What else can I expect from a chronic disease? Chronic, Khronos. Time. Diabetes is a disease set to time, like music, almost like jazz, but without the slightest pleasure or enjoyment derived from listening to it. The erratic beat persists either a few short years (for those diabetics unconcerned about the forthcoming destruction sugar will wreak upon their body) or a lifetime (for those stubborn, survivalist diabetics such as myself). There is never a moment of distance. I am always aware of this condition, the way a teenaged boy seems always aware of sex. The human body and temperament (regardless of the latter's nature) function poorly together when required to maintain manual control of blood-sugar levels. I cannot escape the center of the thing itself. I cannot escape to the periphery and look in upon it as an outside observer. I cannot see it with "a stranger's eye and a stranger's severity".

McGlynn

2009-10-31T06:39:00.000-05:00

David McGlynn's essay Hydrophobia, at the Missouri Review.

Time For a New Post

2009-10-25T09:28:00.003-05:00

Look at this picture. It's frightening, is it not? Just in time for Halloween, too. I have a small pile of books to get rid of. Among them is Descartes, a text called Teaching Grammar in Context, and A Teacher's Guide to African American English.

Now that I have finished the Comps, I actually want to read more poetry. The flow has resumed. Studying is one of the most loathesome and malignant activities one can undertake. I rank studying just below washing dishes and just above cleaning the litterbox.

2009-10-03T12:23:00.002-05:00

Yes, I am a weblog. But where has everyone gone? No one has updated me in nearly a month. A month! Am I to be cast aside, forgotten, abandoned like 95% of all weblogs eventually are? Is this my fate? Answer me, please! Someone.

I am . . .

2009-09-06T21:53:00.002-05:00

I am a professional monkey-juggler.
I am a sideways boxer.
I am a pathetic excuse for a hairpiece.
I am turning around.
I am a spanking machine.
I am bound by a code of honor.
I am a king cobra.
I am a little man atop a rook on a chessboard.
I am a queen. A queen!
I am a broken link.
I am Ron Hansen.
I am a silverback gorilla.
I am disproportionately authentic.
I am a malingerer.
I am a six-armed potato-person.

Fuckups

2009-09-06T20:31:00.002-05:00

I am typing this post on a replacement computer. The computer I've had almost four years went raspberry. It was only the latest of problems and interruptions. The yellowjackets, far from defeated, ignored their eviction notice for a time. The landlord hired a professional fumigator, who said that maintenance guy did nothing to destroy the Queen and did not adequately plug the entrance to their hive. Professional fumigator inserted bombs and plugged the hive with a wad of this yellow shit like styrofoam. I've been swatting stragglers ever since. My swatter has eight notches in it and I feel like an ace. The computer, the original point before my digression, had begun to distort the image on any monitor plugged into it. The computer still works but is difficult to work with.

The band Anal Cunt has a song called "Technology's Gay". I agree.

Armstrong, Monotony, Yellowjacketness

2009-09-02T10:15:00.005-05:00

What's with the dullness on campus nowadays? Monotony! Why do I feel sometimes like I'm back in junior high school? Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon?

On an unrelated note, the Yellowjacket invaders have been squelched:

These buggers (the lower right picture, Vespinae) were living in a tiny opening where the air conditioner's power cable ran through a wall from outside. They began using my office for conference calls. They have been evicted by force. Their hole, plugged. Two more nests, one in the front yard and one in the back, have also been eradicated. Maintenance guy poured gasoline down their nest-holes. I would have chosen a less noxious method, but they got too comfortable here. It's in poor taste for a neighbor to take one's hospitality for granted.

Buy Buy Buy

2009-08-20T10:02:00.002-05:00

Wow. People are actually buying my old, and rather useless, Dungeons & Dragons books off Amazon. Perhaps it helps that I have been pricing them significantly lower than anyone else. I am amused that I have deflated the price of many of these books: other sellers with the same material have been coming along and lowering their prices too. When that happens I just lower my prices even more. I'm the Wal-Mart of out-of-print gaming books.

No Accounting For This

2009-08-15T23:27:00.002-05:00

Strewn about my office in various slidover piles are one-hundred-twenty-three Dungeons & Dragons books which, until today, had been sleeping in boxes in the closet. I threw away one box along with some of its contents because they were damp to the touch and smelled icky. The rest I have piled and sorted, catalogued, and eventually will sell or give away. Some I will keep. Most I will not. It's satisfying to throw away things I have held onto for so long. Who needs all these books, anyway? Nobody. I have no use for them. Few who play Dungeons & Dragons even have use for them. The books have nostalgic value, but little practical value and almost nil monetary value. (You almost can't give them away, like genre paperbacks.) I have itchy toes and hot ears. A strange phenomenon, Reynaud's. The capillaries in my fingers and toes (and ears and cheeks on occasion) constrict involuntarily in response to changes of temperature and mood. When the capillaries relax, however, the inrush of blood brightens the skin and it feels hot. But if you were to touch one of my burning ears, it would not feel hot to you. The human body is such a strange contraption. I am currently reading Richard J. Evans' The Third Reich at War, the final volume of a three-volume work detailing the rise and eventual downfall of the National Socialists in Germany. This historical work is amazingly easy to read; the research is meticulous; the sources, which include scholarly works, war- and holocaust-survivor's memoirs, soldier's diaries, archived memos and reports, intelligence service records, sermons, and many others, detail the German war machine through so many different lenses that the statistics and passive voice one generally finds in books on history become invisible. Reading Evans' work is not a struggle but an engaging and unabashed presentation without embellishment or opinion to cloud the view of a terrible moment in history. I'd better stop. I keep coughing up adjectives.

Addendum: List Time

2009-08-15T12:28:00.003-05:00

I forgot to add to my list the James Taylor concert we saw courtesy of free tickets from my mother. A lady seated in the row behind us stood frequently to gyrate and at one point she announced that she "would drink his bathwater."

List Time

2009-08-15T01:15:00.002-05:00

Old men retired from moshpits and whatnot, sitting around the fire and reminiscing about bygone days, have aroused a mild desire to list all the bands and live music I've been bothered to witness at the risk of my own health and safety over the years. The list shall form as names float up into mind.

Coal Chamber (twice)
Ozzy Osbourne (five times)
Black Sabbath (thrice)
Neurosis (once)
Marilyn Manson (once)
Rob Zombie (twice)
Tool (once)
Soulfly (twice)
Motorhead (once)
The Melvins (once)
In Flames (once)
Arch Enemy (once)
Nile (once)
Napalm Death (twice)
Hatebreed (twice)
Agnostic Front (once)
Diecast (once)
Gizmachi (once)
The Berzerker (once)
Pantera (twice)
Type O Negative (once)
Superjoint Ritual (twice)
Slayer (once)
Mudvayne (twice)
Black Label Society (twice)
Fear Factory (thrice)
Strapping Young Lad (twice)
Insane Clown Posse (once)
Slipknot (twice)
Static-X (thrice)
Suicide Silence (once)
Bury Your Dead (once)
Assassin of Youth (four or five times)
Slitheryn (once)
Union Underground (once)
13 Days (once)
Machine Head (once)
Downset (once)
Taproot (twice)
Vision of Disorder (once)
Limp Bizkit (once)
Sevendust (once)
System of a Down (twice)
Incubus (once)
Snot (once)
Ultraspank (once)
Deftones (once)
Primus (once)
Godsmack (once)
Hed PE (once)
Puya (once)
Methods of Mayhem (once)
Kittie (once)
Disturbed (once)
Slaves on Dope (once)
Pitchshifter (once)
Crazy Town (once)
Godhead (once)
Mushroomhead (once)
Avenged Sevenfold (once)
The Black Dahlia Murder (once)
Testament (once)
Full Blown Chaos (once)
Biohazard (once)
Dark Tranquility (once)
2 Live Crew (once)

Bands, Boobs, Bushy Beards

2009-08-13T23:21:00.002-05:00

We went to a concert last night, the first we’ve been to in a long time. We saw Black Label Society, Static-X, Mudvayne, Suicide Silence, Bury Your Dead, and an accompanying freakshow called Hellzapoppin (a midget with hands for arms; an Australian crystal ball manipulator; an old fellow called the Torture King, who ran wire through his arms and other muscular tissue; and Betty Bloomers, a striptease sword swallower whose nipples were taped over).

I know that many people dislike heavy metal music. Dislike may be too mild a word for some. Regardless, one must love heavy metal in some capacity in order to tolerate it. There are those who simply enjoy pumping the devil horns in the air, slam-dancing, screaming obscene slogans, and jerking their head back and forth or in a violent circle. Then there are those who have grown past all that and just love the music. And of course, there are those who are insane enough to try to make a living as heavy metal musicians. The latter category loves heavy metal more than any of the others. To be a heavy metal musician is like being a poet: you will not make any money doing something you love to do. Yet they do it anyway.

I fall into the middle category. Moshpit days are well behind me. I don’t want to be slammed to a concrete floor by a dozen or more hairless three-hundred pound gorillas swimming in circles through the sweat haze. I just want to enjoy the music the way it’s meant to be enjoyed. The epileptic strobelights. The dull cigarette fog over everything. The air thick with the taste of beer. The bass pummeling through the core of your body. Such volume as one would find on a runway at O’Hare. The great buildup of energy that binds a group of four or five musicians to hundreds of drunk and sweaty young people for thirty minutes, goading one another on, feeding off the ruckus.

The concert was great. Zakk Wylde can play a guitar with all the effort involved in picking one’s teeth. The bass player of Suicide Silence resembled Clisbee in some of his more pained expressions, though I have a hard time picturing Clisbee bent-and-squat with an electric bass, swinging his hair and his entire head in great revolutions at 245 bpm. The singer of Mudvayne performed several songs whilst encased in a furry bear suit which I imagine was an entirely unpleasant experience. At least one member of each band had a beard of considerable bushiness.

I didn’t much like the Alltel Center though. Everything seemed choreographed to begin and to end at an early, reasonable, respectable Mankato hour (eleven p.m.).

So that’s part of how I spent my summer.

Updated: Books

2009-07-31T11:48:00.003-05:00

What books were available have been laid claim to. The rest shall appear at the Blue Earth County Library on the paperback exchange shelf. I am quite fond of the paperback exchange. Sometimes you just can't give books away because nobody wants them. I don't know what happens to the books I leave at the library but I can only assume that people snatch them. Most of the books I find there are romance paperbacks, mass-market westerns, and the like. I leave literary journals, quality works by quality authors, hardback novels; books, I hope, that people are eager to find and eager to read.

In his essay "Hermes Goes to College" (Upstreet #4), Michael Martone advocates Stealing Things In: making your own books and leaving them in libraries, airports, cafes; in short, any place where lots of people might find your book, pick it up, and take it. And why not? "I point out to [my students], that they have to distribute their books as well, that libraries and bookstores have elaborate apparati to prevent you from stealing a book out of their stacks but they have nothing to guard against you stealing your work into the bookstore or the library. And that's what they do, shelving their own work or leaving it to be shelved, allowing the librarian to affix the catalog number, enter it into inventory."

Now, one problem I'll soon have is what to do with my glut of role-playing game books. I know I can sell some of them; I will keep some of them as well; but the rest, you almost can't give some of them away. Any ideas?

Waiting on Rejections

2009-07-25T11:16:00.002-05:00

I have become accustomed to editors rejecting my work. I don’t mind. I don’t blame them. Sometimes the work just isn't good enough. There’s always a better story or ten or a hundred ahead of mine in the queue. What I haven’t grasped yet is the wait to receive the rejection. Here’s why.
The longest wait I’ve had so far has been about three months (generic review X). The shortest wait I’ve had has been about twenty hours (generic magazine Y). It took generic review X three months to reject one story; generic magazine Y rejected not only that same story but a second one, with a personalized note for the second, in about twenty hours. Both journals are not among the littlest guys; each has been around a while, has a significant presence, and is accessible via such sites as Duotrope and the CLMP.

Among the easiest things in the world to do is to read the first dozen lines of a story from a slushpile, see that said story is (incomprehensible / syntactically sloppy / a first draft / hackneyed / insert various other flaws here), and reject it. A dozen manuscript lines might take about 30 seconds to read, another two seconds to sneer at, and another ten seconds to secure in the NO pile (or shunt to the NO folder in a database). Let’s say a story a minute. A determined editor who knows how to read and knows what a quality story looks like could eliminate fifty stories in an hour; one-hundred stories in two hours. (No excuses. It could be done.)

I know that generic magazine Y did read, in full, the second story that I submitted; the personal rejection letter proves it. Someone took a lot of time and energy to reject me very quickly, and made sure to let me know they did.

What are the discrepancies between one journal’s sloth and another journal’s celerity? Some requirement to read the entire body of each story? Quotas? The use of graduate student labor? Volunteerism? Intrajournal politics and disagreement? Can anyone explain this, or am I pondering something entirely disagreeable that no human being should ever think about?

Legos Again

2009-07-18T10:43:00.000-05:00

[This is an update of an earlier post, "Happy Boom Day".] I ended up buying my daughter two Lego sets. One is a basic set of blocks, which comes in a blue plastic box with a lid, wherein the tiny, cat-attracting Legos may be safely stored so as to prevent loss, or "shrinkage" as Wal-Mart calls loss (I have worked at Wal-Mart, in produce, and I hope never to work at any Wal-Mart ever again, but I digress). The second set is part of Lego’s "City" milieu; essentially, sets that, when put together, form a functioning Lego city. I bought a set of people. They include a deliveryman with a hand-truck; a woman with a ghetto blaster; a uniformed policeman with a megaphone, white hat, walkie-talkie, and a mustache; and one fellow who I can describe only as being a liberal arts professor, given the appearance of his hair, sweater vest, neck tie, full beard, and a briefcase. The city people set also comes with a traffic signal, three road signs, a park bench, and a fireplug (all of the latter must be assembled). It’s delightful! We’ve had great fun swapping the people’s hair. The professor wears the woman’s hair (which I assume is "Princess Hair") and she wears the professor’s hair ("Prince Hair"?). A bit later, Liz bought yet a third Lego set, a Front-End Loader, which comes with another Legoman. This one is a construction worker in an orange jumpsuit. He has a rough beard and a sly expression. He resembles an escaped prisoner. The Front-End Loader kicks ass. You can scoop things with it; namely, a pile of small Lego bricks. Thus far I have built many Lego vehicles of questionable utility. They generally have oversized tires and as many lights and funnels and tubelike devices attached to them as I can add.

Habits

2009-07-17T14:22:00.000-05:00

I am awash in bad habits. Sometimes I eat too much. This can elevate my blood-sugar. High blood-sugar makes me sleepy. I’ve been sleeping too much lately. Not tomorrow though. Tomorrow I refill another prescription for long-acting Vyvanse (12-hour speed). I have gone without these pills for more than a week. Withdrawl symptoms reinforce bad habits, it’s true. I have read a lot this past week. (Reading is a bad habit sometimes.) I finished Moby-Dick, along with two books of non-fiction (Methland and The Curve of Binding Energy). I’ve been growing a beard. A spider lives in the downstairs bathroom. We’ve finally replaced the van: now we own a 2008 Chevy Malibu. It’s a good car. Why have I read so much non-fiction this summer? Look at my list: Five books of non-fiction, one book of philosophy, two story collections, and but a single novel (albeit a goddamn great big novel). On a lighter note, one of the nestling robins I mentioned in a recent post did survive the opossum attack. I found the nestling at the bottom of one of the basement window wells and scooped it out. The parents were dive-bombing at the time. Baby birds are so ugly. It pooped when I tried to pick it up.

Close-Reading: “A Day in the Open” by Jane Bowles

2009-07-17T13:54:00.003-05:00

This summer I have been close-reading stories in preparation for the comprehensive exams in October. Right now my attention has been drawn into "A Day in the Open" by Jane Bowles. If you have read the short fiction of Joy Williams, you would already have passing familiarity with Bowles’ work.

[NOTE: The following analysis, like much of the extraneous work I do, is to-date incomplete. You have been warned.]

The first time I read "A Day in the Open"–—I’ll admit it, I had no idea what to make of the story. It tells about a day in the lives of two prostitutes, Julia and Inez. Over the course of twelve pages, Julia and Inez wake up; their pimp tells them to get ready; Señor Ramirez picks them up, and he drives them out to the country for a picnic. That is the story at in its briefest summation.

A cursory reading might leave you confused, helpless to understand, much like reading Joy Williams for the first time. Thus, the miracle of close-reading. Read the opening paragraph:

In the outskirts of the capital there was a low white house, very much like
the other houses around it. The street on which it stood was not paved, as this
was a poor section of the city. The door of this particular house, very new and
studded with nails, was bolted inside and out. A large room, furnished with some
modern chromium chairs, a bar, and an electric record machine, opened onto the
empty patio. A fat little Indian boy was seated in one of the chairs, listening
to the tume Good Night, Sweetheart, which he had just chosen. It was playing at
full volume and the little boy was staring very seriously ahead of him at the
machine. This was one of the houses owned and run by Señor Kurten, who was half
Spanish and half German.

The narrator tells us all we need to know about the setting: a low white house like the other houses around it, in the outskirts of the capital, on an unpaved street. The house is low-profile; it blends in, skirts around the center of power, policy, government, control, etc. The unpaved street suffices to make clear the poverty–—the narrator’s open reminder of this fact serves to emphasize the poverty.

The house is easily overlooked, yet the narrator moves in closer, caught, if you will, by the door, ‘very new and studded with nails...bolted inside and out.’ Why a new door? Why studded with nails? For what reasons would the owner of this house keep people from coming in or going out? The narrator takes us closer still, inside the house: ‘A large room...chromium chairs, a bar, an electric record machine, opened onto an empty patio.’ Such furniture as chromium chairs would be expensive and rather hard to break. The bar, record player, and patio suggest that parties occur in this house; people come here to drink and to dance–—if they can get inside, like an exclusive club. Then we see the first character: A fat little Indian boy, seated in one of the chairs, listening to Good Night, Sweetheart at full volume. He is ‘staring very seriously ahead of him at the machine.’

The boy is the only character in the room. Obviously he does not belong there. Who does he belong to though? Is he fascinated by the electric record machine by merit of its novelty? Or is it the song that holds him rapt? I don’t really know, nor do I think it matters: I don’t need to know. The house, its location, the door bolted inside and out, the room with the bar, the chairs, all of this implies a deeper, if not darker subtext. If the title of the story can be of any help by this point, it is helping us realize some irony is at play.

So then what do we make of the last sentence of the opening paragraph? ‘This was one of the houses owned and run by Señor Kurten, who was half Spanish and half German.’ Señor (Spanish) Kurten (German). One house, of many very much like it. Owned: the house is property. Run: the house is a business. What sort of business would Señor Kurten run in an inconspicuous house that is bolted inside and out?

The details tell us "whorehouse" or "brothel". But again, I’ll admit, I did not pick up on this the first time through. The details glided past under my eyes, but they kept me reading. Further along, the characters behave so strangely, and are described in such unusual terms, that I had no choice but to continue reading the story:

It was a gray afternoon. In one of the bedrooms Julia and Inez had just
awakened. Julia was small and monkey-like. She was appealing only because of her
extraordinarily large and luminous eyes. Inez was tall and high-breasted. Her
head was a bit too small for her body and her eyes were too close together. She
wore her hair in stiff waves.
Julia was moaning on her bed.
"My stomach is
worse today," she said to Inez. "Come over and feel it. The lump on the right
side is bigger." She twisted her head on the pillow and sighed. Inez was staring
sternly into space.
"No," she said to Julia. "I cannot bear to feel that
lump. Santa María! With something like that inside me I should go wild." She
made a wry face and shuddered.
"You must not feel it if you do not want to,"
said Julia drowsily. Inez poured herself some guaro. She was a heavy drinker but
her vitality remained unimpaired, although her skin often broke out in pimples.
She ate violet lozenges to cover the smell of liquor on her breath and often
popped six or seven of them into her mouth at once. Being full of enterprise she
often made more money outside the whorehouse than she did at her regular
job.
Julia was Mexican and a great favorite with the men, who enjoyed feeling
that they were endangering her very life by going to bed with her.

What do these details tell us? 1: Julia and Inez are getting up in the afternoon. 2: Julia appears quite fragile and delicate, almost innocent enough to seem like a baby; but no, she is not that innocent, more an object of pity, so she is like a monkey instead (it is easier to hurt a monkey than it is to hurt a baby). 3: Inez has an unsettling, alien appearance, the way her face and head are described; that she is ‘high-breasted’ suggests that she has not had any children. 3: Julia is either truly ill or she merely believes she is ill; she has some sort of ‘lump’ on her stomach. 4: Inez finds Julia’s lump repugnant, repellant, perhaps disgusting; ‘staring sternly into space’ implies she is thinking about this while Julia asks to come feel the lump. 5: Julia will not force Inez to feel the lump. 6: Inez drinks habitually, perhaps for coping; pimples would make her a bit less attractive than she already was; her attempts to hide her drinking make it even more evident; her regular job is in fact at the whorehouse, but she does something outside the whorehouse (we don’t know exactly what) in order to earn more money, which implies secrecy on Inez’s part.

The brief final paragraph above, about Julia, says quite a lot about her (considering information revealed later in the scene). She is not one to ‘refuse anyone anything’. The men like her so much because they can do things to her that perhaps other prostitutes (such as Inez) would never allow. The frailty of Julia’s appearance seems to reinforce the idea: ‘small and monkey-like.’ The men (read: johns) see her as less a human and more an animal. Easier to hurt a monkey than a baby, as I said.

Note also the repetition that Bowles uses. In the paragraph about Inez’s habits, the word ‘often’ appears three times. The initial physical descriptions of Julia and Inez are reported; the tone is passive, statement-of-fact. Different characters are staring forward in a similar manner. As the two women share a bedroom (physical space), they share space in paragraphs, over and over again. They are crowded together, dialogue-and-action, into paragraphs, as if neither can even have their own textual space.

.....

Forthcoming

2009-07-13T23:49:00.002-05:00

I know some things are forthcoming. "Heart" and "Adderall". Plus some other stuff. I'll get on it soon.

We understand what "forthcoming" means. But you never hear it spoken as non-participial: "to forthcome". Come forth, yes; but never forthcome! Why not? Eventually we'd get used to saying it: I forthcame. Okay, it does sound dirty. Never mind.

Someone Always Has it Rougher Than You

2009-07-13T23:40:00.002-05:00

Until tonight there was a robins' nest high in the bushes in back of the house. But not high enough. At about 11:00 p.m. we heard chicks crying out. You never hear songbirds' nestlings at night unless something is trying to eat them. I went out with the flashlight. The oppossum was fully involved in the nest and not in the slightest intimidated by me. It ate two-and-a-half chicks and left one-and-a-half for me to find. I'm glad I'm not a bird. I'd hate to have to fuck around with hungry predators like oppossums, skunks, racoons, etc.

In the aftermath I took some pictures, like a forensics analyst at the scene of a crime. I won't post them here. Nobody wants to look at that.

Prophesy, Writing on the Wall, Permission Granted, Egg Sac

2009-07-07T16:38:00.003-05:00

It's coming . . .

Sidewalk chalk has a remarkable lifespan.

This, however, did not survive.

She's hanging out in my office. That is an egg sac. Doesn't "egg sac" sound kind of gross? Icky? Egg sac.

Attention! Achtung!

2009-07-07T10:59:00.001-05:00

Almost seven years ago I was placed on academic suspension at SIUC. My grade point average had fallen below the (sub-) standard 2.0 mark. I had to petition the university for readmittance. This process included writing a formal letter of explanation as to the cause of my deficiencies and how I proposed to correct them.

The university gave me another chance.

I was required, however, to lift my GPA to at least 2.0 within one semester; to enroll in a one-credit-hour class called University Studies; to attend counseling sessions through the university’s counseling service; and to be tested for learning disabilities. I succeeded on all fronts but received a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder (Inattentive Type). At that time the psychiatrist said I could try medication to help my focus. I said no thanks. And for about two years or so, I avoided medication, and I did okay.

But eventually, various classes began to feel overwhelming. They weren’t interesting, or they were interesting but not enough to keep my attention, given their difficulty (Core-Curriculum classes, by and large). Here I must go back a step and tell you a bit about my experiences from about third grade on, through high school: struggle, stagger, resist, struggle some more, fail, procrastinate, stagger about, sneer, struggle, fail, and so forth. High school was a joke, and I still don’t quite understand why we submit so many teenagers to the horrific boredom of it. But now, off digression . . . So finally I decided to give the artificial stimulants the clichéd college try.

Ritalin. I still remember how it felt the first time I took Ritalin: Good. On came the buzz, and the room, the table, the book, my arms and legs, the light fixtures, they energized. Particles lent their gravitational chirp to focusing my effort. Around my head I felt a gentle tightening sensation, as though my brain were being squeezed in a plush vise. I don’t remember what I was trying to read. I only remember how it felt. This did not last; soon after I started Ritalin, I began to experience odd pains in my legs, deep-tissue soreness, aching. The pharmacist and the psychiatrist were baffled by this. They both said that they had never heard of such a side-effect arising from Ritalin. Maybe I should try something else. Well, sure. Why not try something else? I liked Ritalin’s effect, leg-pain be damned. I’ll try something else then. What is there that I can try?

[Coming Next Time: Adderall.]

Happy Boom Day

2009-07-04T11:49:00.003-05:00

My daughter is making the transition from toddler-Legos ("Duplo" blocks; or, oversized blocks) to the tiny, miniscule, easily lost, cat-attracting Lego blocks which we all know and love. She has two sets: The Krusty Krab (featuring Spongebob, Mr. Krabs, and Patrick Star Legomen) and a dump truck set (an oversized ore-hauler truck with two Lego boulders and a driver Legoman). She is playing with them in the den as I write. The cats are congregating therein.

The temptation to purchase more of these Lego sets tickles my pleasure center every day. (She just brought me the Krusty Krab to reassemble after the roof broke off somehow.) You should see some of the Lego sets available nowadays! One can purchase, for example, the Millenium Falcon Lego set, which has over 5,000 pieces (including Chewbacca!), for $500.00. Who would buy this toy which is obviously not meant to be played with? Also available is the Death Star (yes, Death Star) set, not quite as grandiose as the Millenium Falcon, but costing about $350.00 nonetheless.

No. For my daughter I’m thinking much smaller-scale in terms of cost and number of tiny pieces. I’ll admit this as well: I want to play with them too. I love Legos. I’ve never been able to build anything except with Legos or words. I am inept when it comes to construction, carpentry, putting together, taking apart anything generally. No good at it. Easily frustrated. Annoyed!

At the website you can order entire sets. Also you can order individual pieces, "bricks", as every piece apparently is called: "Beard for Mini Figure", "Bat", "Brick 1x6", "Brick 2x2", "Brick 2x2 White Dec.Eyes", "Brick W. Shaft 1X8x1", "Camera", "Cherry", "Circular Saw", "Corrugated Pipe 16Mm, Black", "Croissant", "Crossbow" [21 cents!], "Dragon’s Fire", "Dustbin", "Flat Tile 2x2", "Flower Transparent", "Flying Goggles", "Head for Skeleton" [24 cents], "Left Roof Tile 2x3", "Left Shell 2x6 W. Bow Angle", "Life Jacket", "Megaphone", "Metal Detector" [24 cents], "Mini Body Lower Part" [in black, white, blue, red, or green; blue and red cost 35 cents while the other colors cost 31 cents, for some reason], "Mini Cape", "Mini Head" [14 varieties, including a transparent Head, ranging in price from 8 cents to 24 cents], "Mini Upper Parts", "Mini Wig Man", "Parabola 6x6", "Plate 1x10", "Plate 2x10", "Plate 2X4x18°", "Plate 8x8", "Pneumatic Hammer", "Princess Hair", "Quiver", "Rim Narrow W. Hole Ø8", "Rim Wide W.Cross 30/20", "Rocket Step 4X4x2", "Roof Tile 1X1x2/3, Abs", "Roof Tile 1X2x3/73°", "Round Brick 1x1", "Round Plate 1x1", "Skater Helmet", "Skeleton Body W. Shaft 3.2", "Snowy Owl", "Space Skeleton Arm", "Spear", "Spider", "Swim Fins", "Technic Brick 1x8", "Tyre Low Wide Ø37 X 22", "Undercarriage 2X2x2", "Wall Corner 1X1x1", "Whip", "Wig Boy", "Wig, Ponytail", "Windscreen 2X4x2", and others among a total of 1,491 individual bricks. One can purchase accessories for cars; hardware; lumber; corpses, skulls, and body parts; deadly weapons; tools; food; animals; fire; rocket components; new identities; and a whole host of amenities. From nowhere else can you find and purchase such a broad range of things, legal or otherwise.

So anyway, I’m tempted to buy another set for my daughter. By which I mean: for my daughter and myself...I would like to buy skeleton heads, Mini Upper Parts, Mini Wigs, Mini Body Lower Parts, various Mini Helmets, tools, swim fins, spears, Princess Hair, and the like...Maybe I should just stick to a set.

Boo.

Introverts

2009-06-13T10:02:00.002-05:00

This article with two follow-up pieces by Jonathan Rauch, at the Atlantic Monthly, clearly and definitively describes those of my ilk: introverts.

"Caring for your Introvert"
"Introverts of the World, Unite!"
"The Introversy Continues"

A Story by a Four-Year-Old

2009-06-06T10:37:00.003-05:00

Entiteld: "Wingnut, Would You Have This Cake?"
by my daughter
(composed orally to dad, who transcribed by hand)

The bad wingnut. He has red eyes, and catching Care Bear net. He cuts Care-a-Lot down. Then Crizzel the big-haired Care Bear robot bird flies down and he walks but he doesn’t walk. Wingnut has a bathroom nut and it’s light. He has a light behind his back and it makes him bad.

Care Bears went away. They went away from Wingnut. He says words like this: eh, eh, eh eh eh! Then he’s bad and mean and he catches some Care Bears. You saw a purple Care Bear with a heart necklace then Wingnut saw. Wingnut has one wheel. He drives around all over Care-a-Lot, and has one adventure.

Plastic corn. Now you breathe this cupcake. This orange breathes too. Read this fish crocodile with eyes and a fin. Plastic croissant. Glass pizza. Plastic toy soda bottle. I have another one: it says, plastic orange. Or this, what is this? Strawberry. A rubber potato. Glass potato: you put it in your mouth, and it makes a funny noise. A donut but it looks like a ring for a moon. It’s the planet of the Gebernia with all the same aliens. They smell like pastries. These french fries: you eat them, then you draw this carrot down.

Now Wingnut is driving to the tree and he is cutting it. Crizzel was making more power for Wingnut and Funshine was getting him to sleep. Funshine just got him. Then, when Wingnut got up he jumped right out of it! Then, Crizzel was the best of them all. He was in the Crizzel-Castle. He trapped himself again. He said, "So, you want to play checkers again?" He got back out of the window and just hung onto the slide at school.

Closet doors. Then, Grumpy just fixed Wingnut and he fell apart again and he gyrated in a circle, then he exploded and smoke came right out of him. I smell cut grass. My grass! Oh, it’s cut down. And I live with all my robots: Wall-e, Number 5, and September coloring-rain robot. He was best of them all. They can’t explain, and these trees are cut down. These trees are getting long again.

THE END

Turkey Crossing

2009-06-04T09:36:00.000-05:00

This week my daughter began going to a summer school program for three hours in the morning, Monday through Thursday, at the edge of civilization in North Mankato. After I dropped her off this morning I was heading home, careening down Lookout Drive, when a large bird moseyed out from the foliage and into the road. At first I thought the bird was a peacock. But when I slowed and finally stopped, the dangling wattle clearly spelled out turkey. Okay. I waited for the turkey to wander out of the road. Another van was approaching, actually hauling ass uphill in the other lane. Not slowing down. Then a gaggle of chicks (if I had to guess, I’d say there were twenty of them) burped up from the grass and scattered aimlessly into the road. I had stopped; the oncoming van had not. The mother turkey seemed confused. The chicks seemed confused. I could hear them peeping. At what appeared to be the last moment, the oncoming driver braked. No birds were squashed. The man rolled down his window and ogled the turkeys, shaking his head as if they were trying to wash his windshield. By now the hen had returned to the brush from whence she came, but three or four chicks continued to run in circles. They peeped. They stood as tall as they could and looked around. They peeped some more. At last the chicks retreated in the proper direction, and joined their mother in the bushes.

Question for an Alternate Future

2009-05-26T21:01:00.002-05:00

Imagine: Through a genetic test you can find out whether or not you carry the gene for a rare, incurable disorder. This disorder, should you possess the triggering gene, will cause your body to wither and die when you reach a particular age, 28, 36, 44, or what have you. Would you take that test? Would you want to know? Would you not want to know?

Say you do take that test. You do not possess the triggering gene, so your body will not wither and die as described above. However, you carry the recessive gene, which, should you partner with another carrier of the recessive gene, may be present in your offspring as the triggering gene. You may have a child who you know will not live beyond a certain age. Do you even risk having such a child?
***
One day he asked himself:
"If suddenly a cure for diabetes were available, would you take it?" . . . "How does he answer this question?"
What was his first impulse? To say Yes?
"He doesn’t remember what his first impulse was."
Did he answer No?
"He did answer No, after a time."
Why did he answer No to a cure for diabetes?
"He has no answer for Why. It is inexplicable and complex. This is not an easy question. At a later stage of life, he is likely to die from diabetes complications."
Yes, he is. So even if a cure were available, you would not take it?
"No. He is okay with it. He accepts what he will have to face."
That's easy for him to say now. He may feel differently twenty years down the road.
"Stop talking, please."

My Critical Introduction: A Young Draft

2009-05-26T20:43:00.002-05:00

This is a reflection on process. The writing process in general, and the process of writing this collection. They are one and the same. I have neither time nor patience nor space to offer comfort, encouragement, good cheer, or humorous anecdotes. Writing is an obsession both time- and mind-consuming. Little else provokes more aggravation. That is what you will find here: aggravation. There are no comfort zones. Those who write from comfort address only their ego, and egos love attention.

Once you have written all your stories (or poems, essays, etc.), you start again, and write anew. Those who write for awhile and then give up are left with resources they haven’t helped to destroy. Material (or Subject Matter) is used up, re-used, always-already destroyed and regained, reprocessed. Everything has been done. Nothing has not been left undone. This is very simple to understand. Stretching for pure originality in writing dooms you to frustration, at best; failure, at worst. If you have something to write, then write it. If you believe you have nothing to write, or nothing new to write, then you won’t write a word. And that’s okay with me.

I will focus on story-writing process. Stories require two basic attributes: Spine and Heart. First comes Spine, the logical structure (or framework) of sense. A story without a Spine is nonsense: when you read a Spineless story, you become lost, confused, frustrated, aggravated, annoyed, or so thoroughly amused by the bad writing that you will never again bother to read that particular author’s work.

Spineless stories have these and possibly other qualities: Character behavior seems unbelievable, ridiculous, absurd. Events happen for little or no apparent reason. Abstractions abound. Narrative focuses on redundancies, irrelevancies, everyday tediums. Narrative time runs out of control. The text contains numerous and obvious typos, glitches, unnecessary verb tense shifts, misspellings, and the like. When you read it, you have no idea what is going on.

I think of a story as a human body. Without a Spine, the body is paralyzed, almost useless. The human body cannot function without a Spine. (Stories do not have the luxury of wheelchairs, respirators, or physical therapists.) The human body can survive without arms and legs, without hair, without eyes, without a tongue, without sex organs; the human body can survive with only half of one lung, or with one half-functional kidney. But a Spine is a requirement. The Story’s text must be clear, without glitches or typos or bizarre constructions of grammar. The Story needs to make sense when read; characters can do things that make no sense, but in ways that make sense to the reader. Nouns and Verbs make sense to the reader. Simple sentence structures make sense to the reader. Stout Anglo-Saxon words make sense to the reader. Concrete images hold the reader’s attention. Clearly delineated time keeps track of events, and reinforces the sense of a world with laws and rules. The reader should not need to pause (to look up some obscure Latinate word, to computate a pile of adjectival phrases, to translate misspellings and other grammatical glitches). When the reader can read through without stopping, and afterward knows at minimum what is going on in the Story, then the Story has a functioning Spine.

The presence of a functioning Spine makes a story, but not a good story. The best stories have not only Spine, but Heart.

[Forthcoming: Heart . . .]

Captain Obvious to the Rescue

2009-05-21T16:43:00.002-05:00

Uncertainty about what might occur makes people unhappy? No shit!

Eine Schlange ist durch den Holzhaufen geschlängelt

2009-05-20T13:30:00.002-05:00

"A snake slithered through the woodpile."

Today. A few hours ago. From the bathroom window I saw a snake, about the length of my forearm, slither into view from under the porch. It crept along, over the dwindling woodpile. I got my daughter and we watched the snake from the back door, until it disappeared. The snake was black, with yellow racing stripes along the length of its body. Beautiful.

Reflecting on Melville’s "Moby-Dick"

2009-05-19T10:02:00.003-05:00

I began reading Moby-Dick because, well, I wanted to read it. The first time I attempted to read this tome I only got as far as the end of Chapter III. At the time I suppose I was a far less patient reader than I am now. I thought the novel seemed too wordy, too overly descriptive, the diction too elevated, the narrator too...I don’t know what. I just stopped reading it!

Now, though, Moby-Dick holds my attention in ways I never expected. As I’ve been reading, a question has formulated from somewhere, my unconscious maybe. That question is: What can I learn about Writing from the novel Moby-Dick? If I pay close enough attention to Melville’s prose, what can I take from it? What did Melville accomplish 158 years ago that is today not only relevant but also revolutionary? fresh? original? That is, by paying enough attention, what can I learn from Melville that I can apply to my own fiction?

At first glance his narrative seems dense, somehow unapproachable. This is nonsense, of course: everything that Melville has placed into Moby-Dick he has placed for a reason. From outside sources that I’ve read regarding Melville in general and Moby-Dick in particular, the conclusion that many have drawn is that Melville was obsessed with Mystery and the Unexplainable. He struggled to enlighten his readers as to the point he tried so hard to get across: Mystery. The Unknown.

I think again of "Bartleby." Why doesn’t the narrator simply throw Bartleby out on his ass? Yeah, because to do so would be impolite somehow, or unbecoming a man of the narrator’s position, or whatever other seemingly acceptable explanation one might dream up in order to excuse the narrator for his behavior. But the true reason, whatever it may be, runs much deeper. The narrator cannot explain himself, and Bartleby certainly would never be able to explain his own behavior. No proper answer is ever given. Whoever needs a proper reason or explanation for someone else’s bizarre behavior?

He or she who has been wronged or hurt by the bizarre-acting character, that’s who.

Life does not provide answers or explanations for things. People provide answers and explanations, a constant, steady stream of them. An unceasing flow of This is why and Well, you see and Because this happened and God wills it and Shit happens and Because I don’t like you and He did it to himself and so on and so forth unto infinity.

I love characters who act so strangely and without obvious reasons for their odd behavior. I love how they cannot be explained rationally. Some characters simply demand to be witnessed, seen, experienced, discussed, analyzed, gossiped about. They draw us in, whether they mean to or not. They draw us in and stir up our lives in ways that we may not like. Such characters make life more interesting. They make narrative life more interesting. I think of a Calvin & Hobbes strip, wherein Calvin has been playing musical instruments in bed, in the middle of the night. His mom is leaning into his room, half-asleep, and Calvin says, "Geez, I gotta have a reason for everything?"

Characters who raise a racket in the dead of night mean to provoke us, and their reasons are their own. We are not privy to them. I am okay with this.

As I said above, Melville placed everything in Moby-Dick for a reason. Everything points forward, into the depths of the novel where I have yet to plumb...

...Also, I like saying "Moby-Dick" over and over. And perhaps people searching for porn via google will be directed to my post, read it, and decide to give old Moby-Dick a try. Why not?

Code of Chivalrous Conduct

2009-05-15T16:45:00.001-05:00

1. Honor and Defend thy Writing Time. 2. That which cannot Distract, will not. 3. Knowing before you begin to write, that which shall occupy your Writing Time, prevents you from wasting energy in Indecision. 4. Leave your Writing only for that which is essential to your needs. 5. When the Writing cannot move, cannot progress, read from that which moves you. 6. Mood is sacred. Before and during Writing Time, avoid news, websites, blogs, email. 7. Never forget: No Story [or poem, or essay] Comes in a Day. 8. Should you violate your code, you may be the only person who knows; but, that knowledge shall weigh on your conscience. 9. No subject is so taboo as not to be committed to paper. 10. Never forget your family.

Stop All Other Activity and Read this Book

2009-05-14T12:24:00.001-05:00

I don’t know how Wells Tower learned to write the way he does, but it’s fortunate for the rest of us that he did. His debut collection of stories, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, demands that once you begin reading, you do not put it down. (I might ask: Why would you put it down?) The collection begins and ends on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean. In the first story, "The Brown Coast", Bob Munroe incorrectly builds a flight of stairs in a new house. A man falls down the stairs, files a lawsuit, and Bob is fired. Then his wife finds out he’s been cheating on her. Thus the theme of self-imposed exile is set in motion: Bob moves to his uncle Randall’s fixer-upper on the tip of a small island. A neglected aquarium begins to fill with sea life that Bob fishes out of a tide pool. His wife may or may not divorce him.

In "Retreat", the narrator exiles himself to an unfinished mountaintop cabin in Maine, spending much of his time drinking with an old local named George. This is a story about brothers: Matthew, the narrator, invites his little brother, Stephen, across the country to see the mountain and the cabin, part of a continuous state of sibling rivalry.

A man’s father is forgetting his own family members and the short-term details of his life in another story. In "Leopard", you are an eleven-year-old boy who hates his stepfather with a passion. And of course the title story must be experienced for itself.

Wells Tower has a suprising eye for fresh images. The sun, in "The Brown Coast", looks "orange and slick, like a canned peach." The eighty-three-year-old narrator of "Door in Your Eye" describes what he used to write in his diary: "...when I looked back on what I wrote, I noticed I’d become like a cheap newspaperman about my life, only telling unpleasant things–-when I fought with my wife, or how much money I had given my daughter, or a time I was eating at a restaurant and a woman fell off her chair from a seizure." Tower describes a flock of geese calling to each other "in voices like nails being pulled from old boards."

I cannot do this book justice with these few meager examples. How much simpler it would be if you just read it yourself. Please do. Buy a copy new, and support this man’s writing. I hope to see another Wells Tower collection or a novel forthcoming someday soon.

Limitations

2009-05-11T09:53:00.002-05:00

Limits with which to stimulate the brains:

1. Do not use any words longer than 4 letters.
2. Do not use any words longer than 5 letters.
3. Do not use any words longer than 6 letters.
4. Do not use any words longer than 7 letters.
5. Write without using these negatives: No, Not, None, Never.
6. Write in 3rd-Person Objective perspective.
7. Have at least one character speak in rhyme.
8. Write about someone you know, but change his or her sex.
9. Write within a min-max word limit: 1000–3000 words.
10. Write from the point of view of a character who is blind.
11. Write from the point of view of a character who is deaf.
12. Write from the point of view of a character who is dead.
13. Write from the point of view of a character who is dying.
14. Write from the point of view of a character who is paralyzed.
15. Write from the point of view of a character who is confronting his/her worst fear.
16. Write without Flashback.
17. In place of Flashback, use Flashforward.
18. Write a piece set entirely in one scene. If flashback or recollection is used, they must relate to the one scene in which the piece is set.
19. Write from the point of view of a character who is severely hyperactive or who is otherwise far too overstimulated.
20. Write from the point of view of a character who talks to himself or herself.
21. Write from the point of view of a character who is trying to justify to a group of people some act that the group considers unjustifiable.
22. Use an unusual setting or environment: a wine cellar; a bomb crater; a drained swimming pool; a burning building; a hot air balloon; a railroad yard; the inside of a cargo plane; a freeway underpass; a vault full of gold bullion; a hotel room, the address of which a S.W.A.T. team has mistakenly been given.
23. Write about one or more characters procrastinating: the act of procrastination is the source of conflict.
24. Write using one or more characters who have an unusual or off-the-wall hobby.
25. Write using one or more characters who have an unusual or off-the-wall pet.
26. Write using one or more characters who have an unusual or off-the-wall obsession.

Lesen

2009-05-09T16:15:00.001-05:00

For purposes I cannot fathom, my stack of books to read this summer includes several works of literature that are nearly or more than one-hundred years old.

Herman Melville: "Bartleby" (just finished); "The Bell-Tower"; "Billy Bud, Sailor"
Franz Kafka: "A Hunger Artist" (just finished); "The Great Wall of China"; "The Metamorphosis" (re-reading)
Mark Twain: Life on the Mississippi
Vladimir Nabokov: Invitation to a Beheading
David Rhodes: Rock Island Line
Bill Holm: The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth
Bernardo Atxaga: The Accordionist’s Son
J.C. Hallman: The Hospital for Bad Poets (almost finished)
Norah Labiner: German for Travelers: A Novel in 95 Lessons

I find recently that my patience for reading antiquated (if that’s the best word) texts has been improving. A year ago I may have started "Bartleby" but not read to its end. It’s a strange story, mostly interior (character) and reflective. Why doesn’t the narrator just throw Bartleby out of the office? I like how Melville was obsessed with characters in pursuit of unanswerable questions. Nabokov, of course, is a delight to read; what stunning details! seamless transitions! vivid characters! unrelenting precision of narrative! Lolita, Pale Fire, and Pnin all share these traits. I reiterate from a long-ago post: Nabokov is one of the few authors whose long stretches of exposition are a delight to read, and his scenes grab you by your eyelids and don’t let go.

Mining for Language

2009-05-09T16:10:00.001-05:00

What use can be wrung from the oldest stories collecting digital dust in your hard drive? I have called them "White Whales" because, well, they are an obsession. But I’m not trying to hunt them across the sea and kill them. The metaphor is imprecise. These old stories are those I wrote three or more years ago. I didn’t know what I was doing, I just wrote them. Tackier stories have been written. Stupider stories have been written. But these old stories are awfully tacky and generally stupid: embarrassingly so.

But: they contain weird, interesting stuff. Rough images. Raw voices full of grit and dandruff. Narratives bent at odd angles like girders before a collapse. These are fucked-up pieces of artifice, as gangly and awkward as teenagers. And now, a few years distant, I can see what you were struggling so hard to do back then. You were putting in quite an effort. You had something to prove. Your story, it made no sense. But, wow! Do you see what you did without even knowing it? In those days writing a story was a pursuit, a chase. Words added up to pages and pages of this which was not a story, but something better: a story mine.

A mine, as in "coal mine" or "uranium mine" or "gold mine" or whichever mineral you wish to extract from the narrative earth. Bizarre images jump out among the striated patterns. From another, more recent story, I extracted one entirely new story from a single paragraph of about two-hundred words. That is what I mean by a mine. Much the same way that I read with a pen—–writing down unusual sentences, noting images that catch my attention, reminding myself to look up an unfamiliar word later—–when reading a book, I extract the useful and the strange from my own narratives, things I never noticed before.

Do we all have story mines? I’ve heard that Tobias Wolff throws away every rough draft. Why would he do that? I’ll probably spend the rest of my life dragging around binders of notes and papers wherever I go. Words are up for grabs. I must find them and write them down.

Further Sideways Process

2009-05-03T17:29:00.002-05:00

What seen when pondering a cat. The wishing cat. Here, have an elbow. He elbowed him in the face. [verb: to ELBOW] ‘Fatalism’ is a system of belief in those things which cause death. Scratched out and abandoned to all of one’s money. In this place we try to question every answer; the reward is not money, not cars, not appliances, but hard liquor. *** There are times when I feel unafraid. Other times I feel so afraid it’s all I can consider, my fear. Moaning doesn’t help. Nor does groaning. My fingertips tingle. The cat pretends to sleep though she is actually watching me with her ears. I watch her breathing. I watch with my eyes. Pricks are not prickly. Remember the census. The census! *** I took up the cats’ toy and in a great fury pressed it against my asshole and farted; the toy, a miniature plush moose, was now saturated with fart. I proceeded to present the moose to each of the cats. Each cat sniffed the moose and the fart. I felt vindicated. *** Consider the contra-bassoon. And what of? And what of? And what of? Hammer sledgehammer ballpeen-hammer hammertoes drop-forged hammer hammerhead hammerheart lunghammer hammer to the guts Hammer-Smashed Face Imbibe the stomach Drink the stomach Drink it! A racoon bears fangs grinning. It knows something delicate but you can’t tell what no matter how long you squint A racoon just knows and eats your tossings your uneaten and scatters the rest for her offspring. *** People made him nervous. Unreasonable people who interrupted his reverie during lizard-feeding time were in particular prone to make him nervous. He kept a gila monster in a fifty-gallon terrarium with a heat rock and a little cave made of stones. The gila monster feasted on eggs. *** Miniature ampitheaters. In this place dwelt a live scorpion, a black one with enormous fat pincers. It rarely moved. *** An indoor herb garden. We raised parsley, rosemary, and grass of a sort meant to be eaten by the cat, though she avoided the grass and instead waited until we dropped collard greens or lettuce on the floor. *** Abandoned caboose. Hands always feeling about. *** Have you ever driven through a town after a tornado had hit? Like a couple days after, when people are out trying to clean up, but they don’t have any heavy equipment yet, and it doesn’t look like they’re really doing anything but standing around? *** Decorum? *** Unhook your eyes from my chest, please.

Twitchiness and Nonretention

2009-05-02T11:27:00.003-05:00

At this link is a series of charts showing how Twitter can't retain its users. Which I think is apt and funny. What is it, an average of 20 to 40 words per "twitch"? It is called a twitch, right? If not, it should be. Twitter has all the makings of a speed-addict's flightiness, little bursts of information regarding what a person is doing at a particular moment. In truth, each and every twitch implies the act of typing out the twitch itself. For example:

I am staring at Einstein's hair! [I am typing this message]

Why am I going on and on about this?

Exclamation: !

2009-05-01T12:15:00.002-05:00

At this link, a British guy discusses exclamation marks and other punctuation.

What do you think of exclamation marks? Should they, as Elmore Leonard apparently prefers, appear no more than once or twice per 100,000 words of prose? I beg to differ. I love exclamation marks. When used at precisely the right moment, an exclamation mark makes all the difference in rhetorical and/or emotional effect. Exclamation marks convey desparation in a way no other punctuation can. The lesson is use exclamation marks but not to excess!

Attack of the Silent B's

2009-04-25T12:22:00.002-05:00

subtle: subtlety ; unsubtle ; subtlize
doubt: redoubt ; doubtful ; doubting ; doubtless
bomb: bomber ; bombing ; firebomb ; nailbomb ; bombast [The B asserts itself in the describing of "Grandiose but empty language"]
aplomb
debt
comb
numb
dumb
crumb: crumble [Aha! The B asserts itself in the act of crumbling!]
plumb
plumber: plumbing

How many more Silent B words are there? How & Why has such a strange (and decidedly unsubtle) construction entered the English language?

Further Notes on the Writing Process

2009-04-25T12:20:00.001-05:00

[As an actor must perform as if there is no audience, a writer must write as though there were no audience. This at first may seem nonsensical; of course there is no audience in the moment of writing: No external audience. The audience in the moment of writing is internal. Some witness inside the writer judges everything he writes. Is the witness an editor? A censor? A procrastinator? A floating eye? A gossip? An idler? A shiftless layabout? A Roman Emperor demanding to be fed grapes by beautiful women and fanned by eunuch slaves? A crybaby? A gremlin? A deviant narcoleptic? It doesn’t matter. Write as if the internal witness were powerless to stop you.]
***
[Each reader imagines your scenes a little bit differently. This is why the simplest, most direct, least cluttered prose is the easiest prose a reader can follow. The more you try to control what the reader sees in his mind’s eye, the more each reader will deivate from the scene as you wish it to be seen.]

Process IX

2009-04-15T10:21:00.001-05:00

stepping stones gazing balls ceramic mushrooms
coppertone mushrooms, rising among black-eyed susans
like live oil slicks, wizard’s caps.
bird houses: made of? to resemble? located where?
awnings
stained glass windows: what design? located where?
sconces
"conestoga" cupboards
red barstools
tennis balls, baskets rain galoshes
"pergola" "arbor" "trellis"
ceramic rooster

[it’s not about what I want. what do the characters want? what do the characters not want?]
down shit crik a snapper’s back a diving submarine

"ensconced"
-Gone, the stepping stones across the yard. Gone, the calm of the road.
-SWAP PAWS WASP (SPAW) Birds wobbled.
-the logic of "as if". "almost as if".
-a drumbeat through the ceiling. Inconsiderate upstairs neighbors. -A great clattering across the floor, of interlocking blocks no longer locked.
-objects that possess: Houses; Desks; Diaries & Journals; Chests; Trunks; Bureaus, Wardrobes
-neaten, neatening
-secrete / secrete

A Checklist

2009-04-15T08:58:00.000-05:00

1: What does it smell like?
2: Where has it been?
3: Where is it going?
4: How has it come to be as it is?
5: and Why?
6: Is it at risk of infection?

Vertebrae, Nerve Fibers, Prose

2009-04-11T10:03:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I cut a spine out of the newspaper. A backbone, actually. Part of a hip came with it. Presently I shall seal the paper backbone and hip in a casing of transparent packing tape. The backbone and hip will then make an exquisite bookmark: a reminder of the logical foundation of writing. The Spine!
***
Invertebrate writing is out there. Some may know it as "Experimental Writing." Have we ever read a piece of writing that seems to have a bad case of Scoliosis? Or fused vertebrae? The root of "vertebrate," in the Latin, means something like "to turn." INVERT. VERTICAL. VERTIGO. REVERT. PERVERT. SUBVERT. INTROVERT. EXTROVERT. To turn, in one way or another; to make standing; to disorient; to turn back; to turn upon, twist, twist upon itself; to turn under or to turn over; to turn inward, to turn outward; to look inside, to look toward or outward.
***
[Please do not twist my spine]
[Like a mallard’s neck.]
[And do not invert my legs]
[Without first going out]
[Of your way to clarify]
[Whatever it is you want]
[To say - I can’t handle]
[Your perverse prose.]
***
[And do not call.]
[I will not answer.]

They Came in Leopard Print

2009-04-10T07:07:00.003-05:00

Meet the Giant Garden Slug.

The last house we inhabited in southern Illinois had a basement. The foundation was cracked. Water stood upright on the floor. Camel crickets dotted the walls. Mold, black spots of it, along with miniature forests of small mushrooms, grew on the walls. Brown recluses scuttled about. And, at night during the summer, Giant Garden Slugs came up the stairs in a great swarm. I fed them cat food. They seemed grateful for the sustenance. These slugs grew to immense proportions, some longer and fatter than any one of my fingers. Seeing this silent and glistening host at the top of the basement stairs filled me with a sense of paternal pride. They were like my subjects! Never once did I salt them. I miss them today. The Giant Garden Slugs are the only other nonhuman inhabitants of that house that I miss.

The Latest Fashion for a Night on the Town:

2009-04-02T08:21:00.002-05:00

This understated lacing of the neck bespeaks a gentle coyness of spirit, does it not? It says, I am willing not only to lace up my bootstraps but also my neck, I am willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done. I will stretch my neck out to please.

In St. Paul, and other Niceties

2009-04-02T06:07:00.004-05:00

We visited the Science Museum in St. Paul yesterday and looked at dinosaur fossils, the Quackery Museum display, the Visible Woman, and so forth.

Who wasn't fascinated with dinosaurs in childhood?

She has excellent bone structure.

This device was purported to aid in curing indigestion or somesuch ailment, among others. It's a chair in a box. I do not understand the purpose of the window. There is also a vibrating chair, and some kind of plug that is inserted rectally and connected by a wire to a blue light bulb. I would almost say "You can't make this stuff up" but someone already has and tried to profit from it at the expense of a gullible public. Thus, some things just don't change.

Reading List: In No Particular Order

2009-04-02T05:43:00.002-05:00

A large number of books are waiting for me to read them:

The Collected Stories of Leonard Michaels.
Rock Island Line by David Rhodes.
Celebration by Harry Crews.
The Gospel Singer by Harry Crews (reading now).
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (reading now).
Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams (reading now).
The Accordionist's Son by Bernardo Atxaga.
Flickers by William Trowbridge (reading now).
The Collected Stories of J.F. Powers.
***
Harry Crews writes in such a way that the story moves quickly without losing the reader. I just finished Body. I never once got lost. The novel, many times, made me laugh out loud. Body meets the criteria for what I consider quality writing, fine writing. 1: Moves quickly. 2: Does not lose me. 3: Keeps me interested. 4: Makes me laugh. 5: The end is surprising but, yes, inevitable.

Not many writers are able to do this. Harry Crews and William Maxwell are two. Not even Joy Williams meets all of these criteria (I am enamored of her writing for different reasons I am utterly unable to explain). Have we all read Harry Crews’s novels? I know some of us have read Childhood: A Biography of a Place. But the novels? My god, the novels! A Feast of Snakes! Body!

Comps, part II: Poetry

2009-03-30T23:15:00.003-05:00

For the Poetry part of Comps, selections from:
The Complete Book of Kong by William Trowbridge
and either
The Dig by Lynn Emanuel
or
The Resurrection Machine by Steve Gehrke

I have little doubt as to the question:
2: Image and Metaphor

The Latest Obsession

2009-03-30T23:11:00.002-05:00

Let's you and me take a walk through the information mud, squish it between our toes, a jowled hound tracking us together across the goo, and we'll stop to pop the bubbles along the way. It's a sculptor's dream. Grab a trowel.

For Whom the Comp Tolls, It Tolls for Thee

2009-03-27T10:53:00.004-05:00

In preparation for Comprehensive Exam Panic Day, I am trying to decide which stories to use for the exam. I have narrowed down my list (if you can call it narrowing) to the following:

"Congress" [from Honored Guest] by Joy Williams
"Charity" [from Honored Guest] by Joy Williams
"The Visiting Privilege" [from Honored Guest] by Joy Williams
"Traveling to Pridesup" [from Taking Care] by Joy Williams
"Winter Chemistry" [from Taking Care] by Joy Williams
"Feast of the Earth, Ransom of the Clay" [from The Ice at the Bottom of the World] by Mark Richard
"What You Left in the Ditch" [from The Girl in the Flammable Skirt] by Aimee Bender
"Quiet Please" [from The Girl in the Flammable Skirt] by Aimee Bender
"The Little Puppy That Could" [from Einstein’s Monsters] by Martin Amis
"The Deal" [from Going Places] by Leonard Michaels
"Scarliotti and the Sinkhole" [from Aliens of Affection] by Padgett Powell

As you can see I am fond of Joy Williams's stories.

And I have narrowed down which questions I will consider:
1: Point of View
2: Characterization
7: Imagery

Decisions.

The Wonderful World of Verbs

2009-03-23T09:21:00.002-05:00

pummel * emphasize * knead * slap * trouble * protest * cast * pout * distress * drift * harbor * salt * prolong * float * allow * bemoan * distinguish * stress * stifle * toss * pitch * concede * brood * proffer * contribute * visit * style * dislike * dip * wilt * wither * waste * pay * delight * stall * freshen * refresh * agree * wring * quell * stagger * sling * hug * pour * gain * remark * crumple * dribble * fence * nest * mark * haul * unburden * decry * weigh * outlay * forsake * sacrifice * reemerge * better * slosh * whirl * betrothe * crinkle * yowl * veer -----

Not ick; more of a Why-would-you-want-to?

2009-03-22T18:06:00.002-05:00

After we get our eyeballs tattooed, we can all go out and have ringlets pierced into our backfat. Look at the pretty pink lace! It's all the rage in England, apparently. One more artifice on which errant hooks may snag.

Oh ick, ick, ick

2009-03-22T13:11:00.002-05:00

This is not a horror movie still. This is actual eyeball tattooing. This is actual eyeball tattooing. I cannot say why I am so obsessively repulsed by this and yet keep coming back to it. There is no reason. But I had to share the image with everyone.

Distraction, Heart . . . Writings from Nine Months Ago

2009-03-18T10:01:00.003-05:00

Characters who suffer Distraction may know full well in what they invest their attention. Consider the slipperiness of prepositions: do characters suffer from Distraction or with Distraction or because of Distraction? Similarly, are characters themselves the source of Distraction or the victims of Distraction or is Distraction something (at? to? on? in? for? by? toward? through? across?) which characters give attention?

I should pay attention to Distraction, not to distractions, in whatever form they manifest, but to Distraction itself.
*
How can one distract one's distraction?
*
Distraction. Loss. A sense of outrage. An inability to think rationally and clearly. A grasping at quick fixes that do not fix, and are not quick. A demand for immediate satisfaction of desires, of wants, of success. (Does desire know only gift and theft?) The chasing of happiness, when happiness itself is unknown and undefinable. What the hell is it? "Happy" cannot exist as a verb. It needs a helper: to make, to be, to become. Or it needs an active verb: to pursue, to chase, to grab, to forget, etc.
*
What about thumbtacks? The empty aquarium? The lava lamp that’s missing its base? What things have Heart? Does a bead have Heart? A bead has Heart. A bead’s heart is its hole, through which a twine strings together one bead with other beads, a string of Heart. A bead without its hole is not a bead, but a marble, a pebble, a bit of glass, something else. But not a bead.
---
Absence is Heart. A treasure ceases to be treasure once it is no longer valued. An empty aquarium, aquarium though it may be, contains absence, it contains something that is not there. A shoe without a foot. A ring without a finger. A day without pain.
---
Does a gun have a Heart? Does a bullet count? Does a will, a want, a desire? Is there Heart in an action: picking up a gun in a moment of passion? Throwing down a gun before a fight has begun? Agreement to the use of force by action of the force itself. Disagreement to the use of force by action of dropping the gun. Is there Heart in fear? Fear that is felt by bystanders, preservation, an impulse not toward action but toward words, paralysis. Prayer? Is prayer action or words or both?
---
In Heart lies desire. What truth is in the statement "Desire knows only theft and gift"? What does Heart know? Does Heart know theft? Gift? Absence? Does the hole through a bead desire twine?
---
"So What?" and "Defamiliarization" share something in common. What is it? A new perspective of an old thing. A different understanding of something thoroughly understood. A sensory experience of something that offers no sensory stimulation.
---
What am I seeking? The language of excess. The language of distraction. The language of stories, and myths, and narratives. The language to move readers. The language to argue, to convey, to understand, to escape. The language of characterization.
---
Listen to the background noise, the hiss and chime behind vertical surfaces. What do you hear? How do you hear it?

Spine & Heart (Process VIII)

2009-03-11T09:56:00.002-05:00

I am agreeable to a fantastic story. Ten years I spent playing Dungeons & Dragons, among other role-playing games. Now I’m not too surprised about having gone on study stories in college (and if I had more time, I’d be playing those games in my spare hours). Dungeons & Dragons allows a small group to create individual characters who interact with a fictional world. It is, quite simply, world-building & characterization & plot development & narrative structure & willing suspension of disbelief all wrapped together in an ongoing storyline with numerous minor storylines branching off and back again over an extended period of time. Almost invariably I served as "game master." The world was my own. All things and creatures and personae and Gods and characters (except for the players’ characters) were my own. It is a living thing. It has voice and reason, myth and tales, heroes and dragons. It is a place of horrible violence where bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. As it must necessarily be so. And, it was good practice.

Onward.

Have any of us read Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton? I am reading this book again (third or fourth time) because I feel my writing has stagnated. Oh I’m producing. I’m writing habitually. But something is stuck. Something in the writing isn’t moving. There is no reason to go out of my way (and out of my wits) to identify what that something is. These somethings happen to us all.

Anyhow. I won’t explain Orthodoxy or summarize it. (To do so would cheapen the experience of reading it for the first time.) Though I will leap into worthwhile passages that have helped me to understand more deeply the Process.

In "The Ethics of Elfland" Chesterton explains the difference between the Reasonable, Necessary logic of actions in actuality and the possibility of the same Reasonable, Necessary logic of actions in fairyland. He is explaining the relationship of what I call "Heart and Spine."

Spine: the structure of literal sense that is necessary for a reader to be able to read the story (analogous to Mathematics, or the Letter of the Law). Without Spine, the story cannot move; it is paralyzed. The narrative has no mobility, no legs to walk on, no arms to wave, no fingers with which to gesture. Without Spine, the processes necessary for a narrative body to do anything cannot happen.

Heart: the figurative and emotional sense that is necessary for a reader to be able to relate to the story (analogous to the Spirit of the Law). Without Heart, the story may as well be a technical schematic, a complex algebraic equation, a health insurance policy. Without Heart, the story lacks emotion as well as the means of carrying the weight of emotion through language.

"The test of fairyland [is] the test of the imagination" (69). For example: "The witch in a fairy tale says, ‘Blow the horn, and the ogre’s castle will fall’; but she does not say it as if it were something in which the effect obviously arose out of the cause. Doubtless she has given the advice to many champions, and has seen many castles fall, but she does not lose either her wonder or her reason. She does not muddle her head until it imagines a necessary mental connection between a horn and a falling tower."

In narrative, Heart embodies mystery. Spine does not. But Spine is necessary in order to understand the story at all. With paralysis the Heart may or may not go on beating; regardless, it is lost to us. When we read the story of a witch who tells a champion, "Blow a horn, and the ogre’s castle will fall", if we immediately stop to question the witch ("Why must the champion blow a horn? That doesn’t make sense. What he needs to do is raise an army, or find some way to trick the bastard, or hire someone else to do the dirty work...etc.), then we destroy the mystery. We rip the Heart out of the story and squeeze the life out of it. The witch’s advice is part of the mystery. The witch herself is part of the mystery. No one can explain it definitively. There is no denotation. You can define what mystery itself is, but you cannot explain any given mystery. That is the Heart of a story. The Thing-in-Itself cannot be explained. And of course, if we rip out the Heart, the Spine becomes a mere spine, a structure without purpose. A structure for the sake of itself. Of what use is such a thing?

So long, house & a Catnip Orgy

2009-03-08T09:45:00.004-05:00

Controlled Burn at the corner of Fairfield & James.

. . . as seen through the trees.

CATNIP ORGY!

. . . Resting after the seizure by Dionysus.

Something To Do

2009-03-05T09:51:00.002-06:00

Everyone should prepare a list of nonsense. Listen to people at the store or the mall or the Student Union. Make a list of all the weird, odd, bizarre, unintelligible, decontextualized garbage they say to each other or into their phones. Look at Farm-and-Fleet catalogs and imagine the possibilites in what they sell. Browse the Yellow Pages index for jobs. These people actually specialize! Lawn Maintenance! Bolts & Nuts! Magicians! Mattresses, Meat Processors, Quilters! Weight Control Services! Flag Poles (and the subsequent entry, Polishing Equipment and Supplies)! Searchlights and Floodlights! Call these people. Ask them about their jobs. I'm sure they'd love to talk to you. I'm certain they'd love to tell you all about themselves and what they do. How many people watch Dirty Jobs these days? It's still on the air, right?

Goddamn Jackrabbits

2009-03-05T09:42:00.001-06:00

This semester I teach four stories: Joy Williams’ Taking Care; Mark Richard’s Strays; Sherman Alexie’s This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona; and Denis Johnson’s Emergency.

What do these stories have in common (aside from how much I love them)?

Except for Strays, there is a scene in each story, in which two characters are riding together in a car and either witness or cause the death of a rabbit. (In Strays, there is "an exploded chicken in the grill of Uncle Trash’s car." Similar, yet so very different.)

How does the same fundamental scene appear in three different stories? In Taking Care, Jones is driving along with his granddaughter strapped into her carseat next to him. He sees a hare running through the snow. The next thing that happens, a hunter shoots the hare, which tumbles to a dead flop in the road. In Phoenix, Arizona, Thomas Builds-the-Fire takes over driving from Victor in the middle of the Nevada desert. Immediately, a long-eared jackrabbit dashes out in front of the pickup, and Thomas runs over it. The rabbit is "first living thing" they see in all of Nevada, and Thomas kills it. They are quick to tell each other that the jackrabbit’s death must have been suicide. In Emergency, Georgie the Orderly is driving along with the narrator, Fuckhead, sitting beside him. Georgie hit a rabbit. They didn’t notice right away. Georgie stopped, then "threw the truck in reverse" and "zigzagged back to rabbit, almost running over the poor animal a second time." We all know what Georgie did to the rabbit next.

So, what’s with the common scene? Why does it repeat itself in three different stories? Taking Care was published first, in the 1970s. Emergency second, though much later, in 1992. This Is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona third, in 1993. This is a baffling sort of mystery, the running over of rabbits with vehicles in contemporary fiction. I have no explanation for this phenomenon. But I am curious to find other examples of the same scene.

Gooooo . . . ooooogle

2009-03-04T11:36:00.003-06:00

Gooooooooooooooooooooogle is now entwined, entangled, interwoven, admixed, enmeshed, knotted, tangled, zusammen, engaged with publishing and authors and (it appears) every book ever written and ever to be written, according to this article in the New York Times book review page.

VERBS

2009-03-04T10:08:00.002-06:00

You who have read my stories know how much I love verbs. Verbs make a story go. The right verb at the right moment is like a small magical explosion, or a glamer of gnomic wizardry, or a burst of forbidden fruit on your tongue.

There are two stories in particular (neither of which are mine) that make especial use of verbs: Steve Almond’s My Life in Heavy Metal (sensory verbs) and Leonard Michaels’ The Deal (action verbs). I’ll start with Mr. Almond.

wag (pp. 1): to walk suggestively; said of the narrator’s fiancé
punch (2): the effect of a powerful odor; in this case, lard used in Mexican cooking
glow (2): said of lighted swimming pools; "glowed like sapphires"
bang out (3): to type against a deadline
blossom (4): said of the effect when the Mexican lifeguard switches from English to her native tongue, Spanish
dance (4): said of the tongue moving against teeth (linked to the example of ‘blossom’)
vault (7): the motion of a woman’s pelvis moving suddenly upward at orgasm
beard (23): wrapped, or enveloped, in an odor; "bearded in the smell of Claudia"

More examples lie scattered throughout the story, but I find these in particular impressive. Almond’s use of verbs in this manner gets me thinking about how I use verbs. How might I describe, say, the feel and taste of capsaicin on a character’s tongue? Rather than saying something like "The hot pepper set his tongue on fire" or "...burned his tongue" or "tingled intolerably" (geez, that last one), I would try to find a sensory verb that does the job in an unexpected-yet-fitting way....Of course nothing comes to mind immediately. It’s hard to do. I’ll figure it out.

Now on to Mr. Michaels (I didn’t keep track of page numbers):

Jammed. Poked. Tucked. Cut. Rode. Slipped. Cracked. Plucked. Looped. Tipped. Nudged. Tilted. Swelled. Yowled. Swivelled. Snapped. Hooked. Cackled. Swept. Steeped. Trotted. Sprayed. Banged.

The verbs in this story wield hard edges. Hard edges and small motions, almost twitch-like in their animation. Which works, because the antagonist(s) is "a raggedy monster of boys", twenty boys total, "jammed together on the stoop." Yowled? That’s the verb used to describe a truck’s gears shifting. Steeped? "The sun was low above the river and the street three quarters steeped in shade." Lovely. After being drenched in summer sun all day, the street is almost relieved to be soaked in shade, itself like water. The angle of light is steeper than the angle of the street, and the shade is now thick, as if one could walk up the incline. Beautiful!

If we haven’t read The Deal, ask me for a copy and I will supply one. (Mr. Camel Cricket has read it. He knows what I’m talking about.)

Process...VII?

2009-03-02T19:52:00.003-06:00

[A pair of mannequin legs floated by on the current, sticking straight up. A second pair followed the first, and a third in an upside-down kneel.]
*
What sort of character would concoct homemade napalm for use in booby traps?
*
Have you ever lived near an oxbow lake? An engine bloc depository? A rake forest? A place you could swim naked without fear of being seen?
*
Flute music will come through the wall from the neighbor's apartment. Someone above will be running a blender. You will be chopping a pineapple on the counter with too small a knife. You will not realize your sweater is backward. Later, your date will wonder where all these fleas came from, and you will hope the fleas have gone unnoticed.
*
[A writing challenge: "One character has an unexpected scar."]
*
If you take offense to Kong in Trowbridge's Complete Book of Kong, you're probably the kind of person Kong would squeeze too hard.
*
-spect-
spectate - respect - introspection - inspect -
spectral - specter - disrespect -
circumspect - [prespect] - underinspect -
overinspect - overcircumspection - subspect
*
It isn't that difficult. Do you understand it? Yes or No? Then, Why? and How? (yes or no . . .)
Small, local context? or Universal context?
-Does it matter?
-Don't do this, Don't do that, Avoid all advice good and bad.
Unless the advice works, or doesn't work.
*
Looking forward to going to bed.
*
I am fond of the word "malingerer". Self-abuse. Smacking.
*
"What's the limit on skulls this year?"
"Scram, you assholes."
"Blunt yourselves."
"PILED FOR QUALITY!"
"They hosted parasites."
"Do pugs bay?"
"The mayor's noose-"
"What about the mayor's noose?"
"Paw, as in 'grope.'"
*
Wooden Eyes.
*

A Selection: 20 minutes of Elocution, by my Daughter

2009-03-01T15:37:00.001-06:00

IT’S JUST A LETTER FOR MAMA. OH, THAT’S JUST MY TRUCK DOWN THERE. AND LOOK WHAT I MADE. IT’S CALLED THE FISH COLLECTION. IT LOOKS SO GREAT IN THIS. HERE’S THE CAR. HERE’S SOMETHING. WE ALWAYS HAVE SKIN. WE NEED TO HAVE DOG FOOD DOWN HERE. AND CAT FOOD. BABY, I’M GOING TO DECORATE IT WITH CLAM SHELLS. DON’T GET ANY IDEAS. GETTING UNDER MY SKIN! BOMBS AWAY! BOUNCE AWAY! OH, TAD, BACK SO SOON? BUT REMEMBER, WATCH OUT FOR THE GHOST OUTSIDE. IS IT TIME TO ROLL? NO, I’M STANDING ON THE TABLE BECAUSE IT’S FLYING. I SEARCH HIGH AND LOW. MY CAP. YOU MEAN THAT I’M TURNING MY ELBOWS BACKWARDS. YOU MEAN I HAVE NO HANDS. I HAVE NO ELBOWS LIKE AN ALIEN. IT LOOKS LIKE A BUBBLE. IF YOU TURN IT UPSIDE-DOWN IT LOOKS LIKE A BUBBLE. I DON’T WANT HIM. I WANT MY LITTLE DOG. I’LL BE RIGHT BACK INSIDE. WHEN I WAS SCRATCHING MY HAND . . . YUM. BACK SO SOON? HEY, MAKE THIS A RIVER! I’M LAUGHING IN THE RIVER! FIRST, WE GET TO SHARE THE PLAY-DOH. WELL LET’S PLAY BABIES RIGHT HERE. WE’RE HERE. PROFESSOR PICKLES. AND I’M PLAY-DOH KITTY. NO I’M PLAY-DOH DOG.
*
[Recorded by hand on the evening of 28 February, 2009. Medium: Crayola markers on yellow college-rule legal pad.]
*
You can't make this stuff up.

panic

2009-02-28T06:05:00.002-06:00

I have officially designated Saturday, August 8 as Comprehenesive Exam Panic Day (CEPD). I am not allowed to panic about the comps except on this arbitrarily designated day.

Body, Ailment, Treatment; & Books

2009-02-25T12:37:00.002-06:00

Extremities: fingers, toes, hands, feet, ears, nose. Neuropathy, poor circulation, numbness, injury, infection, gangrene. Amputations! [Phantom limb phenomenon; phantom pain.]

Moving on.

Kidneys: Corrosive damage by sustained hyperglycemia. Reduced kidney function, infections. Renal failure. Dialysis, transplant!

Moving on.

Pancreas: Doesn't work.

Moving on.

Eyes: Natural aging and wearing out. Corneal damage, retinal detachment. Burst blood vessels due to increased blood pressure, sustained hyperglycemia, eye trauma or injury. Poor vision in one or both eyes, decreasing in quality over time, eventual blindness in one or both eyes. Seeing-eye dog! Helper monkey!

Moving on.

Heart: Increased strain. Higher blood pressure. Sustained hyperglycemia leading to damage of the heart muscle. Circulatory system damage. Heart attack, stroke, leg clots. [!]
---
Curiosity has prodded me to buy two books recently:
Freaks: We Who Are Not As Others by Daniel P. Mannix
The Re/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids by Paul Spinrad

Those of us who have read Katherine Dunn's Geek Love understand "Freaks." Hardly a spectacle, this book is more of a look at the everyday lives of midgets, dwarves, hermaphrodites, giants, pinheads, half-people, the multi-legged, and the like. Maybe the Freaks are normal, and the normal people are the freaks.

Of course bodily fluids are disgusting. We remember Georgie the orderly from Denis Johnson's Emergency, don't we? "There's so much goop inside of us, man," he said, "and it all wants to get out." But who isn't curious? Who?

Mornings / Strange Words

2009-02-22T10:47:00.002-06:00

How I have missed the early hours. At one time, several years ago, I would go to bed at 8:00 or 9:00 in the evening and wake up at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, and write. I have spent much of the past year-and-a-half pursuing that schedule. I’m finally reclaiming it: up yesterday morning at 6:30. Up this morning at 5:45. My goal for tomorrow is up at 5:15. I would like to rise by 5:00 on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Friday and Saturday, I will try 4:45.

What Julianna Baggott said about writing despite distractions (children, in particular) is very very very very true. We have to carve out our writing time with a fine blade. Free time? Time is what we make of it.

On a related note, I have successfully held, used, and kept a calendar book since February 13. Hooray. I think this is a new record.
---
flummox, v. colloq. or vulgar
[prob. of English dialectical origin; cf. flummocks to maul, mangle (Heref. Gloss. 1839), flummock slovenly person, also hurry, bewilderment, flummock to make untidy, disorder, to confuse, bewilder (see various E.D.S. glossaries, Heref., Glouc., S. Cheshire, Sheffield). The formation seems to be onomatopæic, expressive of the notion of throwing down roughly and untidily; cf. flump, hummock, dial. slommock sloven.]
1. transitive. To bring to confusion; to ‘do for’, cause to fail; to confound, bewilder, nonplus.
2. U.S. colloq. To ‘do up’.
3. intransitive. U.S. To give in, give up, collapse.

flummadiddle, n. U.S.
slang. Nonsense, humbug; also, something trivial or ridiculous.

The Mold that Grows on the Mold

2009-02-21T10:44:00.002-06:00

I would like to argue in favor of something awful, something without a vocal majority's support. Something that makes one into a social pariah. Something only the Bill of Rights protects. It's good practice. I want to argue on behalf of the funk that builds up on the inside of a garbage can. I want to know the pervert inside the bunny costume. I want to map out the underside of the underside. I want Charlton Heston and Ronald Reagan to crawl forth from their graves, gibbering and spitting, shaking their dessicated fists in righteous outrage. That kind of awful.

Any ideas?

Yet Again More Words: Obsolete and/or Unexpected

2009-02-18T22:02:00.002-06:00

strummel, n. slang. Obs.
1. Straw.
2. Hair.
3. Comb.: strummel-patch a., a contemptuous epithet for a person.

strumpet, v. Obs.
1. transitive. To bring to the condition of a strumpet.
2. To repute as a strumpet; to debase (a woman’s fame, name, virtue) to that of a strumpet.
3. intransitive. To strumpet it, to play the strumpet.
Hence strumpeting vbl.n.

studmuffin, n. slang (orig. U.S.)
A sexually attractive young man. Freq. humorous or ironic.

stuffage, n.
1. The act of stuffing or filling full; concr. the material with which a receptacle is stuffed.
2. Path. Obstructed condition, stoppage. Obs.

[Oxford English Dictionary Online]

Play Areas

2009-02-18T21:55:00.001-06:00

In the mall there is a crossroads, between Barnes & Noble and Scheel’s, and in this crossroads there is a great circle. The circle has but one opening, an ingress point at which stands Dr. Bear in all its loveable menace. The bear wears a doctor’s coat but not pants. Just inside the circle, on either side of the opening, there are cubby holes, ostensibly for the storage of children’s footwear, and a single hand-sanitizer dispenser. Padded benches line the circle’s low wall most of the way around. The carpet is spongy, but firm. Around a necessary structural pillar a padded mat has been attached like a bootie. And of course the playthings themselves: an ambulance, a thermometer, a stethoscope, a blood pressure cuff, a Band-aid, a building in the likeness of the Mankato Clinic, and a teddy bear the size of a great big fat man. The playthings are made of a pliable material both soft and firm. Everything in the circle rebounds, with the exception of the cubby holes and the structural pillar itself.

Watching a rampage of children play in the arms of the circle is like looking into a moshpit from balcony seats, except no one is smoking cigarettes or drinking beer or wearing earplugs. Adults behave no differently from children as far as I can tell. The distinction is that adults have learned how to control themselves to various extents. Among children, drama unfolds quickly, plays itself out, and soon evolves into another game. Adults squeeze drama out of drama, drama out of rocks, drama out of thin air. It is refreshing how quick children are to judge, like cats. How many times has the play area carpet been puked on? The absence of visible stains suggests that puking incidents are quickly cleaned up, rarely happen in the play area, or do not happen in the play area.

My sister would tell you a story about me, when I was seven years old. I had just eaten a bowl of cherry cordial ice cream. I shouted, "I’m a human vacuum cleaner!" and instantly fell on the carpet in complete imitation of the vacuum cleaner. In a matter of seconds I had inhaled something, a piece of fluff or fuzz, on which I choked. Coughing didn’t help much, not right away. The fluff or fuzz stuck long enough to teach me a lesson, and then I threw up all the ice cream I had just eaten, on the carpet I was attempting to clean. Why am I telling you this?

I’ll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours

2009-02-17T20:58:00.003-06:00

Over the past week I have been opening neglected folders on the computer, one of which bears the label Starts & Stops. The Date Modified column of the document files contained therein reveal that these gems come from that ancient epoch known as 2005 (though a few date to 2006 or 2007).

For example, the first document is titled A Frog and a Horse. I open it. What does the text say? "A Frog and a Horse." That’s it. I typed "A Frog and a Horse" into a word processor file, saved it, and have been toting it around since 12-16-06 10:38 AM.

Here is another excerpt, the opening lines of something titled Dirt Stew (05-10-07 12:49 PM):

Dad started the fight. He said Connie’s stew tasted like dirt.
Dad was Ed’s brother, and Connie was Ed’s wife. Ed glared across the table over the pot of stew at dad. ‘What?’ dad said. ‘I had better stew in the service.’
Connie had made the stew earlier that day, as soon as she found out that dad was coming over to talk. It wasn’t a holiday, merely june 12th, but it was the first time
in at least twenty years that dad and Ed willingly sat at the same table.

It has...potential? And here extracts from some kind of list I engineered and saved and never looked at again (02-06-06 8:20 AM):

Do not pay any attention to grocery store tabloids. Celebrities are not generally interesting people.
Swimming pools are not toilets.
Think with your own brain, not with someone else’s brain.
Surrender is an option, if you wish to.
Do you ask questions?
Go ahead and try it, you might like it.
I am beginning to hear phrases such as "non-democratic totalitarian state" in mainstream media outlets.

Your guess is as good as mine. Nowadays any list I deem worth saving will almost assuredly be composed of nouns and verbs, broken bits of overheard conversations, impossible hypothetical arguments, unusual names; little of it will make sense.

Not Subtle Enough?

2009-02-17T20:30:00.000-06:00

The previous post rather lacked subtlety, didn't it?

Merken - To Notice...Subtle, Subtlety, etc.

2009-02-15T20:49:00.003-06:00

Yesterday, February 14, marked a significant date: 8 years since Liz and I first met. Though not face-to-face. Our first contact with one another happened over the internet, in a chat room, and later progressed to letters in the mail and hours-long phone conversations. This went on for six months until we did meet in person, after I rode a Grayhound bus from Carbondale, IL to Austin, TX (a 23-hour trip). Someday I will write this story, but not today.
---
Recently I have thought about two questions, or rather, a question and a statement. (I don’t know why these have come to mind, they just kind of bubbled to the surface while I was taking a shower.) They are the sort of commentary one hears in workshops and in poor-quality reviews and criticism:

"It seems as though the author is trying to be subtle."
"What point is the author trying to make?"

How is subtlety a bad thing? When do authors write anything with a conscious desire to effect subtlety? Is a clear understanding of "subtle" (adjective) warranted? Should we sort through the word’s many denotations?

[Oxford English Dictionary]
1. Of thin consistency, tenuous; not dense, rarefied; hence, penetrating, pervasive or elusive by reason of tenuity (now chiefly of odors).
2. Of fine or delicate texture or composition (Obs. exc. Arch.). b. Of food: delicate, light. (Obs.)
3. Of small thickness or breadth; thin, slender, fine. (Obs.) b. Of a ship. (Obs.)
4. Finely powdered; (of particles) fine, minute. (Obs.)
5. Of immaterial things: not easily grasped, understood, or perceived; (Obs.:) intricate, abstruse. (Now merged in sense 6).
6. Fine or delicate, especially to such an extent as to elude observation or analysis.
7. Of craftsmen, etc.: Skillful, clever, expert, dextrous. (Const. of) arch. b. transf. c. Of animals. rare.
8. Of things: characterized by cleverness or ingenuity of conception of execution; cleverly designed or executed, artfully contrived. (Obs.)
9. Of persons, their faculties, actions: Characterized by penetration, acumen, or discrimination. Now with implication of (excessive) refinement or nicety of thought, speculation, or argument.
10. Of persons or animals: Crafty, cunning; treacherously or wickedly cunning, insidiously sly, wily. (Obs.) b. Of actions, thoughts, etc. (Obs.) c. Of ground: tricky. (Obs.)
11. Working imperceptibly or secretly, insidious.
12. Of weight: = subtile (Obs.)

Also, "Subtlist" (noun):

One who is addicted to subtleties.

Also, "Subtlize" (verb):

Rare. Intransitive. To indulge in subtleties.

Ah, the verb "(to) subtle" (Obs.):

1. Reflexive and Intransitive. To devise subtleties or subtle distinctions, to argue subtly.
2. Intransitive. To scheme, plan craftily. Also with clause.
3. Transitive. To devise cleverly.
4. To attenuate, reduce.
5. ? To pulverize, reduce to ashes. nonce-use.

I understand that what I am doing is devising subtleties and making subtle distinctions; I am also, perhaps, indulging in subtleties. But how is "subtle" a word to be used in a pejorative sense? How?
---
"Subtle" cannot be subtle with a b.

The Uncrossable Boundaries: Revolting Spectacles

2009-02-13T22:08:00.000-06:00

When in the course of life I come upon certain spectacles I feel no compulsion whatsoever to cross them. They are boundaries. The uncrossable. That which is too much for me. I have one example:

Eyeball tattoos. The very thought of someone else having the whites of their eyes tattooed in a different color is enough to make me turn away in disgust...which is silly because I’m thinking about it, and turning away doesn’t help. But we get the point. Eyeball tattooing is far worse and more disgusting than Mr. Dave’s enthralling exposition on zits (which, I have to say, is rather funny). Why would anyone tattoo an eyeball? It seems like a torture you might see in an exploitation film with Nazi characters. Can anyone fathom eyeball tattooing? Am I alone in my disgust? Is anyone listening?

Tongue splitting! Not as disgusting as eyeball tattooing, tongue splitting is nonetheless rather silly. Would you like to walk around with a forked reptilian tongue?

That’s all I have. Eyes and Tongues. Lenguas! Augen!

? (Question; eine Frage)

2009-02-12T16:56:00.001-06:00

Writing cannot be rushed. A story that stops, stops for a reason. You must write something. Set down words in the permanence of ink. Type sentences without the luxury of backspace. Scribble lines in pencil on your desk, your wall, your syllabus. When all else fails, write in marker upon your own arm.
---
What would it be like to have one arm? Surely if Def Leppard could carry on with a one-armed drummer, a writer could carry on with one arm.
---
Wherever it is that you write, consider the images tacked to the wall. For example, on my wall: Das gekrimmte Schachbrett, "Lemuel’s Blessing" by W.S. Merwin, a printed sign that says "Stop doing that and write something.", a photograph of my daughter at age 2 during Easter, a long quote by Georg Foster from Errinerung aus dem Jahre 1790, a map of Blue Earth and Nicollet Counties, a self-interrogation list for the revision process, the MSU academic calendar for 2008-2009 (approved March 2007), a Convenience Bag for use during incidents of airsickness, and two portraits of "Potato Guys" drawn by my daughter. Some of this needs to come down. I get used to seeing things, then I get distracted by the fact that I am used to seeing the same things. Too many inanimate things add up and take on a force almost like sentience. They are aware of me, and I of them. This is my years-long ongoing struggle. The power of things to impose themselves, which exists only and completely in my own head, can distract and annoy to a degree that I cannot describe. It seems limitless.

The Closet Contains a Sump Pump

2009-02-09T20:50:00.002-06:00

[On my father’s desk we found papers dated to 1979. He had just died of a sepsis infection. The papers from the seventies were twenty years old. I was seventeen. All my life he had taught organic chemistry at Southern Illinois University. All my life he had worked in a laboratory. All my life he had streamlined the process known as two-dimensional gas chromatography.]
*
[Sunday morning with Legos. Building robots
together, machines with absurd functions,
towering monuments to whim.
We leave our materials on the floor
among chips (sour cream
& onion), punch stains, crumbs.
There, the blocks not used
lay.]
*
[A wish, immediately granted!] [A brook full of baby crawdads, tadpoles, and minnows. A peaceful setting; a violent happening.]
*
[What’s absurd about diabetes? Having it. Is it plural or singular, that -es? This pancreas refuses to produce. {TURNS TO ADDRESS PANCREAS} Stop making a scene, you ungrateful little vestigial...what will we do with you? How do we work this out? What’s the problem, anyway? {PANCREAS DOES NOT RESPOND} I need an unresponsive organ, truly. I need a nonproductive pancreas. Now we have to import our insulin. It ships from Indianapolis and Germany. We must import it and inject it. The apparatus, a syringe, is an inefficient delivery system. Errors will be made. Too much insulin, sometimes too little. This is inefficient!]

Recent Concrete

2009-02-04T10:26:00.002-06:00

The work of Jane Bowles. An influence on Joy Williams. Characters behaving strangely. Having affairs on a whim. Purchasing a snake and later releasing it beneath the wheels of buses. Characters engaging in risky behavior. Drinking too much and attracting too much attention, falling asleep in a stranger’s bed and later not remembering how she got there.

The short stories of Flannery O’Connor. What poorly behaved characters these are! A Stroke of Good Fortune:

..."Ponce de Leon was looking for the fountain of youth," Mr. Jerger said, closing his eyes.
"Oh," Ruby muttered.
"A certain spring," Mr. Jerger went on, "whose water gave perpetual youth to those who drank it. In other words," he said, "he was trying to be young always."
"Did he find it?" Ruby asked.
Mr. Jerger paused with his eyes still closed. After a minute he said, "Do you think he found it? Do you think he found it? Do you think nobody else would have got to it if he had found it? Do you think there would be one person living on this earth who hadn’t drunk it?"
"I hadn’t thought," Ruby said.
"Nobody thinks anymore," Mr. Jerger complained.
"I got to be going."
"Yes, it’s been found," Mr. Jerger said.
"Where at?" Ruby asked.
"I have drunk of it."
"Where’d you have to go to?" she asked. She leaned a little closer and got a whiff of him that was like putting her nose under a buzzard’s wing.
"Into my heart," he said, placing his hand over it.
"Oh." Ruby moved back....

I'm no fan of unusual dialogue tags, but I just love it when a character's speech is tagged with 'he screamed.'

[Revision] Process V

2009-01-28T12:55:00.001-06:00

Shift to past tense, omniscient narrator: allows the story to unfold immediately. No need for the non-action, the internal thought processes, & expository frivolity.
---
Exploit your cuts. If it seems unnecessary, it probably is.
---
The emotional deadness doesn’t work. It serves no purpose other than to deaden. Show the character’s emotional suppression, not deadness.
---
How much of your language merely repeates or restates for no other reason than to repeat or restate?
---
Narrative events (also known as "plot" or "storyline") must come in a particular order. Sequence. Chapters; sections; paragraphs; sentences; words. Is each word the correct word for the moment?
---
An apt demonstration of your first point: the flashback: "Curt remembers the first time dad put a litter of kittens out of their misery"...Omniscient narrator can get to the point.
---
An old-fashioned character is not likely to make contact by telephone. A letter makes for poor fiction unless appropriately executed. Put it in scene, in person.
---
Can it go in another scene? If so, move it. If not, cut it. Forget 20%. Cut 30%, 50% if you can. The world will not cease its motion, the oceans will not dry up.
---
Consider butterfly plates; a stinging bird. Consider getting dizzy.
---
Consider one of the last lines in Joy Williams’s story Taking Care: "The house is clean and orderly. For days he has restricted himself to only one part of the house so that his clutter will be minimal." This is wonderful writing advice.

Flow-stoppage

2009-01-22T20:38:00.001-06:00

A guiding idea: BOUNDARIES, LIMITS, RESTRAINTS.
Brick wall Pine thicket Body of water Canyon, gorge Security door A young child An heirloom Tracking bracelet or anklet A blizzard Flames, an inferno Exhaustion, lack of sleep, physical overexertion, worked too hard Dehydration A reef A cliff Banishment, expulsion (from a place, a town, an organization, a peer group) Lack of money Rules of a game Another person’s point of view Disguise, costume The dark Solitude Aloneness Fear Unwillingness Refusal (to do something) Hospitalization Out of contact, unreachable A magic circle Locks, deadbolts Race, ethnicity, culture, language A thing unknown to you Handcuffs, shackles, restraining bar, leg irons, gibbet, iron maiden Skin Smoke Highway traffic A moving train Held hostage Forgetfulness Allergic reaction Senility Phobias Deep embarrassment Paralysis Chronic pain Fasting Conditions applied to a contract Contractual obligations Duties, honor, codes of conduct Razor wire An electrified fence Family pressure (to take an action / not take an action) Height, weight, sex, body shape, body image, eye color, hair color A shield wall Phalanx A vast desert An incurable disease or degeneration Lack of faith Skepticism Armor Kevlar Gravity
[dirty chocolate snow]

disinterested

2009-01-15T00:08:00.002-06:00

On hiatus. What awaits? A story about a former prostitute from East Germany, hard-boiled eggs, a retired diabetic Air Force Colonel, and a woman with cancer about a breath away from death.

Auf wiedersehen. Ich muss schreiben.

excessive at times

2009-01-09T20:32:00.002-06:00

Too much writing, too much writing, way too much writing. Satire one could dream about, here. Of particular delight is "Rediscovering the Full Grammatical Sentence."

There are an infinite number of ways . . .

2009-01-08T12:10:00.004-06:00

More things in life ought to be made of Play-Doh. If you disagree, then you are wrong. Look at these tools! They are made to resemble octopus arms. They cut, they roll, they impress patterns in the soft clay. Unfortunately, once a multicolored amalgation of different Play-Dohs has been created, the colors are impossible to separate.

Three-dimensional shapes are both a challenge and a delight! Imagine a green Stonehenge. Imagine a purple cityscape, complete with cellular towers. Imagine neon-blue palm trees on a dinosaur-infested beach.

And, in case you missed seeing it, here is the snow.

Jimmy-Brains

2009-01-08T10:47:00.001-06:00

Lack of sleep. Sleeplessness. Wakefulness, restlessness, jimmy-brains. Sometimes known as Restless Muse Syndrome, or RMS. A condition in which the writer (or other artist) stays up and awake many hours into the night, well beyond any reasonable or healthy bedtime, in order to further develop a work-in-progress, or to read. Not quite insomnia, but neither is it a stubbornness, like that of a child who thinks he’s going to miss something. Symptoms of RMS float in an ether between two extremes. Creation, composition, intuition, and most other cognitive functions remain active and focused during periods of intense RMS activity.

Buy This Book Here

2009-01-05T23:20:00.002-06:00

There is a hardback copy of Sherman Alexie's Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven at the Salvation Army Thrift Store in Mankato. I encourage someone to go and buy it. I hope someone buys it.

How does one store nothing?

2009-01-01T12:34:00.003-06:00

Of all the items on the "Year in Review" of the Harper's magazine website, these are perhaps at once the most absurd and the most fascinating:

"New York researchers used carbon nanotubes to create the darkest material known to man. Two teams of physicists, one in Calgary and the other in Tokyo, successfully stored nothing within a gas in the form of squeezed vacuum composed of uncertainty."

I wish I could get away with that kind of abstraction.

Neue Jahr

2009-01-01T09:16:00.001-06:00

Crappy Old Year, Happy New Year.

A Word I Needed To Look Up, To Satisfy My Curiosity

2008-12-19T17:49:00.002-06:00

clusterfuck: n. coarse slang (chiefly U.S.). 1. A sexual orgy. Also Mongolian cluster fuck. 2.orig. Mil. A bungled or botched undertaking; (also) a situation, state of affairs, or gathering (esp. a military operation) that is disorganized or chaotic.

cluster: n. 1. A collection of things of the same kind, as fruits or flowers, growing closely together; a bunch. a. Originally of grapes (in which sense bunch is now the usual term.) b. Of other fruits, or of flowers; also of other natural growths, as the eggs of reptiles, the air-cells of the lungs, etc. 2. A rounded mass or conglomeration; a clot, a ‘clutter’, Obs. 3.a. A number of persons, animals, or things gathered or situated close together; an assemblage, group, swarm, crowd. b.fig. Of immaterial things. c. A group of faints stars forming a relatively dense mass, appearing as a nebula to the naked eye; a star-cluster; also applied to larger coherent groups of stars, nebulæ, and galaxies. Also attrib. d.Linguistics. A group of successive consonants.

fuck: v., n., adj. Too numerous are the definitions, phrases, constructions, and mysterious etymological origins for me to repeat them all here. We all know what this word means, don’t we?

---

Good. Now my curiosity is satisfied, to some extent. So don't go and fuck up your holiday.

Spikes and Crashes

2008-12-19T13:17:00.000-06:00

Blood sugar is an economy like the commodities market. But unlike the commodities market, blood sugar trades only in two commodities: glucose and insulin.

Spikes make you sick. Your face flushes and burns red. Ears especially. So can your fingers, hands, toes, and soles. There are headaches sometimes. Your eyes might scratch as though dried out, dessicated. These symptoms combine and exacerbate each other. Ride them for too long, they are destructive.

Crashes don’t necessarily make you sick. Rather, they threaten your life. After you experience crashes too many times, the symptoms lose some of their effect. What a crash at first causes is shakiness. The shakes, the jitters. This is your brain telling you that your blood is not providing it enough glucose. (The brain feeds on glucose alone. The brain dies without glucose.) Other symptoms can alert you to a blood sugar crash: cold sweat; seeing shapeless electric-blue spots and lines; mental confusion; distraction. But experiencing these symptoms too often leads to a sort of tolerance of them, fatigue. Blood sugar crashes without the usual symptoms, or crashes to a lower level before symptoms manifest.

This happened last night around 3:30. I had been reading Faulkner, and was now trying to sleep. I could not. So I got up and took my glucometer out to the living room and tested my blood sugar. The glucometer read: 22.

The blood sugar low that is considered imminently life-threatening is <21.

What happened? I accidentally overdosed on insulin. Recovery was swift: I ate a vanilla caramel Drumstick and an apple. I was fine by 4:00. I went back to bed.

Good night.

[Last Post Tonight, Guaranteed] Something Guided Me Toward Random Images

2008-12-13T21:06:00.002-06:00

(From a file in which I jot things in order to clear the hot, wet stew out of my head.)

Who are these Chinese people I’ve stumbled across? Why are two of them girls who are kissing? Not "why", as in, "This is morally wrong, I demand an explanation"; but "why", as in, "Why am I seeing this of all things?"

Photos of babies on a train, with Santa Claus, then a white woman.

Last: a series of ethnically diverse cheerleaders.

It means nothing to me. More bizarre images are there to be had, certainly. But it's not the superlative that reigns here. Not even the comparative has much say or sway. That image which appears before you, and holds you captivated regardless of how you feel about it or what you think of it, is the image that reigns.

Some Shit I've Learned Recently

2008-12-13T20:49:00.003-06:00

1. The "Marriages and Births" section of the newspaper is a good place to find contemporary names (albeit many of them are a tad too trendy to be convincing)
2. The "Obituaries" section of the newspaper is a good place to find names which old people have and young people never seem to have.
3. The rapture is almost upon us, though there is no way to confirm this news until it happens.
4. The vacuum cleaner needs a new belt, as the worn-out belt, when the vacuum runs, produces a smell like burning plastic.
5. Writing is not as difficult as it used to be, but it still presents a formidable challenge.
6. The music of crickets in the middle of winter is continually, continually enchanting.
7. Insulin prices have risen by five dollars.
8. _______________. (What have we learned?)

Something as beautiful as snow that falls in a major intersection...

2008-12-13T20:31:00.002-06:00

Part of the trick to observation, to honing the writer's eye, is to look at things with the same amazement and wonder as a young child. Look at things as though you were once again your four-year-old self, and the mystery of the world opens up to you. Look at things in this way, things like Christmas lights, and then imagine your four-year-old self trying to convince an adult how wonderful and beautiful those Christmas lights are. Back away from the sense of things. Look through reasons. Look past your adult understanding. Watch as your carbondated soft drink becomes a magical potion. Tremble and shiver when you hear the sound of a locomotive's air horn carrying across miles and miles of land, because the child in you is hearing something else, something unnatural, something monstrous, a horn--yes--a horn, and a call to war.

The End is Nigh!

2008-12-09T20:21:00.002-06:00

Of the semester, I mean. . . .

Everywhere you go, people act out their holiday-induced neuroses through public spectacles. In stores children are screaming. At Wal-Mart the air is rife with burning indifference for your fellow man. But enough about that.

One of my purposes in life, I've discovered, is to understand what bizarre energy is at work in the fiction of Joy Williams. I have read each of her three story collections (Taking Care, Escapes, and Honored Guest) and two of her novels (The Changeling and The Quick and the Dead). I cannot say I dislike any of it. Not one story would I qualify in a negative light. And I won't comment on The Changeling here (I don't think I could). But The Quick and the Dead merits further attention. What on earth is this novel doing? It seems to lack any plot. Or it has just enough plot to move. Enough plot, as John Edgar Wideman says, "to hang the meat from." I have read nothing else that is so utterly bizarre yet so completely engrossing.

My mind slipped. I forgot where I was going with this. More later.

Point of View Violations

2008-12-04T10:32:00.002-06:00

The headline alone has an intimidating quality to it, but I wonder: perhaps this is the way to demonstrate point of view and perspective to undergrad writers.

Drei Katzen

2008-12-04T09:38:00.001-06:00

Since folks enjoy pictures of cats so much, here are my three ingrates posing as if they care.

I have no title

2008-12-02T12:31:00.003-06:00

A girl in Florida recently underwent a heart transplant. Before the operation, she survived for two months without a heart inside her body. The doctors kept her alive. Despite all the problems with the health and medical professions in this country (chiefly, the problems of for-profit service industry and insurance middlemen), the determination of those doctors to keep the girl alive, aware, conscious, with no heartbeat in her chest, while waiting for a viable donor heart, is nothing short of a gift.

***

Characters in stories are real, as real as movie actors, as real as commercial actors, as real as you and I in our day-to-day lives. Characters in stories suffer for a reason: so we can observe and say, "I'm glad my life's not that bad." By necessity, characters in stories suffer. They embody all aspects of our own actual existence so that we can experience our own flaws, failures, shortcomings, our own tiny moments of light, hope, success, and triumph through another's experience of them. In that way story characters are sacrificial, whether they are aware of it or not. By writing them, we give them life. By witnessing them, we share in the experience of that life.

Denken um denken

2008-11-25T09:22:00.002-06:00

Think about thinking about this: research suggests that rats are capable of metacognition. I'd put money on cats having this ability too, but they're so calculating I'd probably lose.

Brilliance

2008-11-24T00:44:00.002-06:00

Yes:

"The power of [writing] exercises depends on recognition of the value of teaching form, not 'expression.' I believe that unless and until reading and writing are taught together--and are taught together with discussion--there will be little chance that English departments will survive as anything but outposts of sociology. But teaching writing as a way of learning to read and reading closely as a model for careful writing is to guide students to the discovery of the powers of language: should that not be the chief mission of any and all English departments? . . . . Anyone we read with pleasure can help us to teach others to read with pleasure. If we do not aim for instruction and delight, those Horatian values will forever elude us."
(Ann E. Berthoff)

And this one, what brilliance:

"Read it as if it made sense and perhaps it will."
(I.A. Richards)

Process IV

2008-11-22T10:49:00.005-06:00

Have you ever watched a cat play with a suction cup? Have you ever taken a shower with someone who had been mauled by a tiger? Have you ever felt exceedingly jealous of a person many years dead? [Albert Einstein watches over my office from the door and from the posterboard. Is it possible for a person alive today to feel jealousy toward Albert Einstein, for whatever reason, even though he has been dead since April 18, 1955?]
---
Some gems from the book Forming / Thinking / Writing: The Composing Imagination by Ann E. Berthoff.

"Having the capacity to understand means having the capacity to misunderstand."

"Language is not a set of pigeon holes into which we put things, ideas, feelings. We discover meanings in the process of working (and playing) with the means language provides."

"The aim of composing is not to tolerate chaos for its own sake but to learn to put up with it while you discover ways of emerging."

And a quote, by Mary Shelley, that the author uses: "Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it."

Syringes II, section 2

2008-11-22T10:31:00.003-06:00

After I dig through my papers-to-recycle, I find two different package inserts, each from a different box of syringes.

I use a lot of syringes. I've done the math. Out of curiosity.

I'll examine the package inserts when I need to.
---
It's these "Syringe" poems, actually multiple drafts of the same poem, that I have come back to. Five pieces spread across time: 03-21-06 to 12-04-07.
---
Needle or syringe? Needle is the pointed tube at one end. Syringe is the body cavity numbered for measurement of dosage. It is overall a poor, if not rudimentary imitation of an instrument perfected by nature. Mosquitos have them. Jellyfish have them. Pit vipers and cobras have them. Scorpions have them. Stonefish have them. The animal kingdom bears needles at every turn. Needles are wielded. Here, there are no dosing instructions or trademarks.
---
"Instructions for use:

1. Wash hands and gather supplies. To expose plunger, twist white cap to break seal, then pull off.

2. Wipe top of insulin bottle with a BD™ Alcohol Swab. If you are taking cloudy insulin, roll the bottle between your hands until it is uniformly cloudy. Never shake a bottle of insulin.

3. To expose needle, twist orange cap, then pull straight off, being careful not to bend the needle or let needle touch anything.

That is the interesting part. Steps four through eight are rather tedious, businesslike, accounting and number-management.

---

These poems obsessed over form and left nothing at stake. They feature missiles, phalluses, and a fog of abstraction. I thought about this poem again, this was on Thursday. All those silly revisions. Allow Syringes to become another form. [This is what Process told me.] It wants to take another form. [I nodded, it made sense.] Give to it another form. [Okay. I will.]

---

I imagine a gun that shoots syringes as ammunition. A belt-fed fully automatic gun that de-caps and fires syringes, needles-first. There is no turn. It always goes toward images of warfare and violence.

Syringes II

2008-11-21T21:54:00.002-06:00

Syringes as passive things. They are. They do nothing on their own, they have no agency, no motive power. They have no will, no desire, no need, no want. They are.

The syringe body contains air: a sterile body when manufactured to that effect. Sterility. A syringe never contains nothing. It is impossible for a syringe to contain nothing. It must contain something.
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I like to gaze at my books from time to time. Usually when I work. I pause to think or to reflect, and I gaze at my books. Many of them I have not read, not yet.
---
Pharmacies sell syringes by the box: "Insulin Syringes / with the BD Ultra-Fine™ needle / 100 sterile single use syringes (10 packs)". [I wonder why "single use" is not hyphenated.] This is and is not poetry. It is not poetry to me because syringes serve a utilitarian purpose. I use syringes to inject insulin into my body. My pancreas cannot make insulin for some reason I do not know and at which I shrug. Insulin syringes are the type commonly used by heroin addicts and methamphetamine junkies to inject those compounds intravenously. (This, the act of pushing a needletip through your skin into a bulging vein, could not seem any more unpleasant an act, even as an act of mere imagination. I shake my head and clench my face in disgust.) The box in which the syringes are packaged says nothing regarding the syringes' possible misuse at the hands of drug addicts. The box lid flap asks politely, "For safe disposal of insulin syringes, please see package insert."

Process III

2008-11-18T21:28:00.004-06:00

derange (verb): 1. To remove cattle or other livestock from open rangeland. 2. To remove open rangeland from beneath cattle or other livestock. 3. To keep your pets indoors. 4. To keep your busy hands to yourself. 5. To siphon jet fuel, thus limiting the range, in miles, that a jet is able to fly before crashing.

Is this "deconstruction" or is it simple, old-fashioned imagination? How would we like to hone our sense of words to a fine edge capable of severing nerves and tendons? Has anyone ever seen that stupid TV show on Spike wherein absurd theories are tested for the benefit of a male audience? Does it really take an ample demonstration to prove that silicon breast implants don't float whereas breasts do? All you need is an imagination though some encouragement helps.

What can you read over and over again?

2008-11-18T18:37:00.002-06:00

Every short story in each of Joy Williams' three collections.

Martin Amis' Time's Arrow and Einstein's Monsters.

Padgett Powell's short stories (most of them but not all of them).

G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy.