Diabetes and Distance

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

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

Time For a New Post

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.

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 . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eine Schlange ist durch den Holzhaufen geschlängelt

"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"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: !

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

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

[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

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

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

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

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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 -----