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

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?

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

Spikes and Crashes

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

(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

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...

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!

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

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

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

I have no title

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

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

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

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?]
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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

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.
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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.
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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

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.
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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

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?

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.

Some things I have never heard but would like to hear before I leave college forever

"Please rewrite this paper in the future tense. I can't make heads or tails out of it as it is."

"I agree with you completely. T.S. Eliot was a goddamn lunatic for writing that nonsense."

"We in the administration value you as a student, not just as a dollar-figure."

"Please put your pants back on."

"Yes, your student health insurance will cover that."

"We don't know how they escaped. But you'll need tomato sauce, believe us."

"The university has decided to play 'opposite fiscal year.' This year the English department gets the athletic department's budget, and the athletic department gets the English department's budget."

Process II

From a Joy Williams story: "Once I dreamed of baking a bat in the oven."

(The rest is not from Joy Williams stories.)

(!) He made a throne. His friend said it was supposed to be uncomfortable. They argued. They cited historical examples. (!) He wanted to be a brigand when he grew up. (!) Point of order. Restraint! Restraint! Handcuffs!
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Dare, chance, gamble, risk. . . . . How do we ARC? What is arc? Trajectory? Something -- someone -- must set an arc/trajectory in motion. Up & away OR down & away. What sets trajectory moving backward? How would this happen/work: UNDERTRAJECTORY? . . . . fire into the ground? Digging? Underground. Diving? Underwater. Descending movement. Descending but moving forward. Underway. Unterweg. Back and forth? Hin und her? How much is hidden among what is shown? How much is presented and how much is overlooked?
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Considered thus far or soon-to-be considered:
Process.
Revision.
Rewrite.
Heart.
Spine.
Truth.
Tension.
Arc.
Trajectory.
Pace: of narrative, of writing.
Pace: of emotion, of logic.
Can we know the process of another?
Limits.
Limitations.

Update (11/18/08):
I apologize for this post. It makes no sense. I don't know what I was thinking but I wrote it during a class. That was wrong of me. Perhaps I was distracted or off fighting evil in another universe. I don't rightly remember. Sorry.

No, I take it back. Some of it makes sense, with tweaking:
He made a throne. The throne was made of scrap lumber and carpet samples. His friend said it was supposed to be uncomfortable. "It's plenty uncomfortable," he said. They argued. They cited historical examples. The friend said, "Genghis Khan rode a horse all day. That gets uncomfortable." His rebuttal was, "This isn't a horse. What the hell are you talking about?" The friend stared at him in disbelief that they were arguing about this in the first place. Then the friend said, "I can't believe you made a throne. You're no king. How presumptious." He said, "Get the hell out of my garage."

Close-Read Tension

A bad haircut. A cricket pushes a button. A bake sale gone bad. An enterprise consisting of boing. A farmer has a lizard problem. We recycled our housekeys on accident. Research indicates gibberish raises blood pressure. The mayor claims to have made water flow uphill. A flea infestation leads to hangings. A bad instinct. None of the dolls wear pants. The dolls wear shirts and boots but not pants. Her pirate rides a pteradactyl to the fire station. Her pirate. The pirate wench conceals a flintlock pistol behind her back.

Something for later. An unknown at death. A will. A snack to preempt hunger. An extra $20 from the ATM. Something for later.

Tension. We understand 1st drafts (garbage). We understand revision. The question now becomes How do we create and effect tension among characters and reader? The nuances have yet been lost on me. Certainly tension works differently in every story. What is the tension-organ? Nerves?

[Not that one, this one.] With tension the comfortable are disturbed. (With truth the disturbed are comforted.) I have never murdered a characer. I have never characterized a murder. I don’t think especially about killing. To kill would change a story, its dynamics. Imagine the effect of killing a character, of murdering a character mid-story. That would create tension. [Tension with a subtle-B.]

If I know where I’m going when I set out, then I’m not lost; I’m on vacation.

A tunnel in the sand. An overwhelming selection of pens. Discarded helmets. Why are there golf clubs in the storage freezer? Night of the toads. A police cruiser, an ambulance, and a fire truck at a suburban house at the climax of rush-hour, a case of domestic violence, spousal abuse, jealousy, all of it seen through the front window and reported by many dozens of motorists.

Hidden Heart

It's amazing how easy the act of revision comes now. "Revise" used to be the most difficult part of the work. It never went anywhere.

This story I wrote almost two years ago has been evading me. Today I captured it's hidden heart. Or at least a ventricle, perhaps an aorta. But I would guess that about 75% of the story was a narcissistic celebration of youthful whining. The 25% that wasn't all about me showed enormous potential. And yet again the character with whom the heart of the story lies is a woman.

In many of the stories I write the focal character is female. I set this as a personal challenge a long time ago, to write a female perspective. I did, and then I wrote more. They keep coming back. They are more interesting than just about every male character I've written (a juvenile bunch of ne'er-do-wells, with the occasional highly isolated neurotic thrown in). The female characters have more personality too. They are more complex, more complicated, more vulnerable to every possible extreme I can imagine. They are also more resiliant. They seem in many ways more human. I wonder why this is. (No reason for me to think too much about it, or I'll just end up confusing myself.)

Perhaps through them I can say all the things that I cannot say through male characters. I don't know. This requires more process.