Psychology

My sister has been bugging me. What else is new? She claims a friend of hers is a gazillion times better at writing than myself. I asked her to show me a sample of her work. She gave me a poem. I stopped reading it after the first two lines:

Life is a roller coaster
It has ups and downs

So now I find myself asking: Did I really think that poem was a piece of shit, or was just because it was from a female underclassman and (bonus points) is a friend of my sister. I admit it: I do have a much greater respect for a piece when it's been published or is by a well known author. If someone wrote The Death of Ivan Ilych and published it in The Ridge or Kaleidescope I probably would have thought that it wasn't very good. So I try my best to keep my judgment at bay from the warping of opinion, but the battle isn't going too well. I stopped reading my sister's friend's short story in The Ridge after the first paragraph.

On that note, I decided to type up a sketch from my notebook this morning. It's basically telling the story of the freshmen orientation from a senior anti-socialite. The name of the city is Blue Town. It's only a sketch so don't expect a masterpiece. Enjoy.

I came into Blue Town on a Friday morning in late August, but the weather would have been fine for mid-December. When you walk into or through Blue Town you feel like you're going to get swallowed by the crowded streets or devoured by the tall green trees. Of course, I would never have felt that way when I moved. It was thirteen years ago.

Today, which is also in late August on a Friday morning at eight o' clock, I am in an auxiliary gym at a high school. The high school, I should say. Mind you, we never called it Blue Town High like the adults, it usually went by School, or Fucking School.

I am being plagued by loud music and bright lights working seamlessly together to make life hell. This along with the din of thousands of laughing and chattering students on the bleachers. They are freshmen and they're all wearing uniforms: white button-down shirts with black pants. They look like an array of ghostly tombstones in a volcano.

I am amongst the seniors who are shepherding kids to their seats and prodding the quiet intellectuals lurking in the back to join the inferno. The only thing missing to go with their seizure-like waltzing and chesire cat smiles are the martini glasses in their summer-tanned hands.

Philosophical Discussion: What Do We Live For?

First, a grumble.

Ever since freshmen orientation I've felt like my mind has been regressing, and soon I will have the brainpower of a single-celled organism, and earlier I would be asking a professor to give me an evolution chart to track my progression through time (he could've at least typed it).

The point is, I ask all freshmen who didn't attend to thank their lucky stars.

Actually, the real reason why my mind is regressing is because I hit a snag on my short prose project. So I'm putting it on hold, and I probably won't get back at it until sometime later in the fall.

The highlight of the orientation was the game Sixty-four Squares in which you embark on a spiritual journey through an array of 8.5x11 sheets of paper. The players line up and the first person proceeds to step on any square in the first row and presses on until he/she hits a "road block." Then that person goes back in line and the second player attempts to follow that route or try a different one. Basically the premise is to work off of the results of the last attempt and thus everyone acts as one (a la 300) to press on to the end of the array. It was a savage labyrinth of adventure and treachery.

That was sarcasm. This "Spiritual Journey" was supposedly a metaphor of your journey through high school. Here's my interpretation:

I am a big fan of Tolstoy's philosophy, and it is prominent in War and Peace that his idea of happiness is to live not for yourself but for others. I think this is also clear in the game, since your actions are really for the benefit of the other players in line. Also, the group of players can't work against each other but must act as a single body much like how there are competitions within the freshmen body, but in the long run it is their struggle as one through school.

It makes sense, but of course our "Link Leader" people had to ruin it all by associating the game with a shitty anecdote about going not caring about academics but then pulling his/herself together and succeeding.

...Lame.

Words Like "Fuck" May be the Missing Link to the Orgin of Human Language

No shit.

I'm just throwing this out because it's neat, but some psychologists and philosophers are thinking that swearing relates to the more basic parts of the human mind. For example, today I hit my head on a cupboard door and I shouted, "fuck!" Well, I also stepped on our cat's tail and naturally she shrieked very loudly. But psychologists and philosophers think that these responses animals make to sudden disturbances like that and my response to hitting my head are one and th same.

In fact, they believe that words like fuck and shit and damn were the earliest vocabulary. So I implore you to celebrate the genesis of human language. Hell yeah.

Notebook, part I

Welcome to my mind.

This is a scan from my notebook concerning a short prose work I've been perusing over the summer. It's gone under three rewrites and three revisions.

This is the second draft of the opening paragraph along with some notes and a few drawings. Nothing special. The manuscript is a maze of scribbles scrunched between letters and surrounded in bubbles with little arrows and stuff.

How Raymond Queneau Deals with Prose Block, an excersise

Sometimes it pays to be a smart ass rather than a smart person.

When Raymond Queneau had writer's block, he used a simple scenario:

A man walks onto a bus (the name of the bus is bus S) and sees a man with a long neck and a chord on his hat rather than a ribbon. This man is yelling at the other passengers on the bus.

Mr. Queneau would write a paragraph from the point of view of the man who walks onto the bus. He would write his observations with a different personality/view each paragraph. Here are some of mine:

THE ANGRIEST MAN IN THE WOLRD

After a stinking wait in the vile sun I finally got into a filthy bus where a bunch of bastards were squashed together. The most bastardly of these bastards was a pustular creature with a ridiculously long windpipe who was sporting a grotesque hat with a cord instead of a ribbon. This pretentious puppy started to create because an old bastard was pounding his plates with senile fury, but he soon climbed down and made off in the direction of an empty seat that was still damp with the sweat of the buttocks of its previous occupant.

THE MATHEMATICIAN

In a rectangular parallelepiped moving along a line representing an integral solution of the second-order differential equation:

Y'' + PPTB(x)y' + S = 84

Two homoids (of which only one, the homoid A, manifests a cylindrical element of length...

THE PHILOSOPHER

Great cities alone can provide phenomenological spirituality with the consequentialities of temporal and improbablistic coincidences. The philosopher who occasionally ascends into the futile and utilitarian existentialisms of an S bus can perceive therein with the lucidity of his pineal eye the transitory and faded appearance of a profane consciousness afflicted by the long neck of vanity and the hatly plait of ignorance.

THE JAPANESE POET

Summer S long neck
plait hat toes abuse retreat
station button friend

anywaaaay, once you have all these characters, you can write a few thousand pages of their interactions, thus making writer's block obsolete forever.

In other news, if anyone is going to read War and Peace be sure and read the Rosemary Edmonds translation, because all the others suck.

"It's an epic essay about dialogue," he said.

"I hope the abundance of 'said' won't interfere," he said.

"Nope," she said. "'Said' is a neutral word, it'll recede into the page. Don't worry about it."

"Oh."

"The only purpose of 'said' is to distinguish who is speaking. Although you never really need to use it unless there is more than two characters in one scene."

"Hey, what's going on?" Asked a cat who just walked in.

"Another thing," she said, "'asked' is very unnecessary in dialog, since the question mark already establishes that the statement is in the form of a question."

"Nothin' much, yo," he replied calmly to the cat.

"Ah, there's another thing. Adverbs don't belong after the person who is speaking," she said. "That will come across as lazy on the part of the writer to the reader."

"Sorry," he said shamefully.

"I was wondering if someone could. . . ." the cat began.

"Actually, if someone is interrupted a dash is used," she said, " you use eclipses when--"

"Okay," he said, "here's what I've got so far:"

"But you promised. . . ." Jill said.
"I told you I'd let you know," Bob said.
"Now, look you two, maybe you should, ah--" Larry said.
"You stay the hell out of this," Jill said.

"How's that?" he asked.

"Uh, actually, you used dashes were you should have used eclipses and vica versa, and you tagged your dialog with 'asked' again," said she, "oops, that should be flipped,"

"God damn it!" he fumed.

"Huh? You can't fume words, nor can you smile them or laugh them or glare them or grimace them," she frowned.

"Alright, I think I got this now. How 'bout this?" He said.

"Where do you think you're going?" my mother said.
"I'm going to church," I said.
"Wait, I'll go with you," she said.

"Well," she said, "I think that can be broken up with 'I told her I was going to church' rather than a quote."

"Daymn."

"That's known as eye dialect," she said, "I wouldn't recommend it."

"um, alright. So, ah--"

"Hey, dialog shouldn't totally emulate real speech," she said.

"F--"

"No language. Especially from you. Linguistic shock is long dead, my friend,"

"Poop."

"Wait a sec," she said, "we never established the setting when this dialog began! How is the reader supposed to imaging this scene?"

They were in the middle of nowhere.

"Better."

"Here goes:

"Hello," they said--"

"Stop." she said. "If people are speaking in unison, you've lost."

"Oh." He said.

Poems! POEMS!!

IN RESPONSE TO ISSAC NEWTON BELIEVING THE WORLD WILL END IN THE YEAR TWENTY-SIXTY A.D.

From apple roses,
their broad, twig riddled crowns
glowing in the cold starlight,
the red round elephants
of promaceous fruits
descend into the planet,
like fertilizing gametes
to a large blue egg.

Fiery death!
The harbors, the cities, the countrysides,
are drenched with spray,
lit with flames,
and ravaged in smoke.

The plump red houses bombard the earth!
A barrage of electric pulses on a distraught mind.
The clotting of sweet juices brims into devastation,
marking the second coming
of the Malus Domestica.

Hundreds of miles from any red Goliath.
A small, slack-jawed child watches the succulent
death-balls stream down in blazing streaks.
He reaches out his hand
as if to snatch a tasty treat from the air
and dab it in his melting chocolate bar.

...

PARLOR TRICKS

he is a shimmering pearl illuminating a grand stage,
as if he had been knocked down
into a cavern in the ocean floor.

They might want to light the stage more,
so I would be less suspicious
that his holy miracles aren't just
whistles and fog in the dark.

He hides a lit cigarette in his left ear.
But they are watching his right side.
I wonder if that ear feels like his assistant.
The true mastermind of this swindling con.

Yet here I am, behind the smoke,
and watching the magician's glorious bow
in the floating mirrors.

...

This next one has been published in a literary review called The Spoiler from the press at Marylhurst University. I'll be receiving a copy some time next week. It's got lots of great stuff. The main theme of the issue this poem is in was experimental literature, so I decided to write a poem that sounded broken and constant. There's a great short story in the issue where the point of view changes from second to first person depending on the character's social comfort levels.

BROKEN STEREO

Your train of caterpillar carts are vacant, abandoned, and
cringing at your own cries, your
clamminess, I never would have connected, to
discombobulation, katzenjammered from
the very start.

Complex, complicated, clinks and
clangs, a symphony of kinetic
corruption, of late, your tray of sliver
treasures comes cracking up, stars
scathed out.

Cobwebs, lining decadent crap, inside
your dense, metal cavity, your corpse
was cold, even when alive.

What are you thinking, chanting
contraption, sticking,
to the desk,
with dread,
or unconcerned,
by your,
fate.

...

One last thing: If you want your poems or fictions on here don't hesitate to send 'em to me.