The Closet Contains a Sump Pump

[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

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

Shift to past tense, omniscient narrator: allows the story to unfold immediately. No need for the non-action, the internal thought processes, & expository frivolity.
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Exploit your cuts. If it seems unnecessary, it probably is.
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The emotional deadness doesn’t work. It serves no purpose other than to deaden. Show the character’s emotional suppression, not deadness.
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How much of your language merely repeates or restates for no other reason than to repeat or restate?
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Consider butterfly plates; a stinging bird. Consider getting dizzy.
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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

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

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

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 . . .

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

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

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?

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

Crappy Old Year, Happy New Year.

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?

---

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.