Why is it that when the end of a long run is nigh, there are those people who would still rather skip corners or take blind shortcuts because they don't want to struggle up hill for a few more minutes? I live with my parents and we are finally in sight of a little relief because my sister and her two children moved out. This cut many of our bills in half. But, my parents don't want to have to struggle for even one minute, it seems. Twice a month, I borrowed money, grudgingly, from one of those awful check-into-loan places. We'd get $190 dollars and have to pay back $230. We lost forty dollars each time, which is eighty dollars a month or $960 a year. We were losing $1000! I hated it. But, for the most part, we did it because the bills wouldn't wait another five days because they were due (*cough* behind *cough*). Now they are all caught up except one, which will be caught up by March 5 if we just struggle for the next few days.
We just have to get through the next three days until my father gets paid on Friday, then everything will be all right. But, we don't really have many options and money is tight. We have food but we'll have to make some crazy, surprise, make-em-up kind of meals out of it. We have gas, but it means that all other people will have to be told "NO!" when they ask us to take them to their girlfriend's, then to work, then to their house, then back to their girlfriend's, etc.
But you see, my parents don't want to have to worry about struggling. So, they want me to go get another check-loan thing so we can buy some groceries but then we'll lose out on that $230 we would have to buy groceries on Friday. Why can't we just wait a few days and struggle and get out from under lost money? I ate cheese, summer sausage, and crackers every day for dinner for my first month of grad school. It sucked but I lived.
Anyway, I refused to go get the loan. My father threw a fit and my mother cried, but you know what? It had to be done. I told them that if we never did it - if we always said, "Maybe this will be the last time," it really never would be the last time. So I'm saying, "The last time, it was the last time. We'll live."
February 22, 2010
February 21, 2010
Big Words
I'm reading a book about hitchhiking called Riding with Strangers: A Hitchhiker's Journey by Elijah Wald. I can't tell you the page because I'm reading it on my Kindle PC, but somewheres about 75% of the way through the book he uses the word lagniappe.
February 18, 2010
Sylvia Plath, Aldous Huxley, and Freddie Mercury
My reading goal this week was to read two relatively short books. The first was Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. I enjoyed it well enough. I can see its significance but didn't find myself ripping through the pages worried about what would become of the narrator. I did very much love the similes she used throughout. It was charged with a lot of breakthroughs for its time period, with raw descriptions of depression and sexual revolution and the true meaning of asylum. I would personally give it a "C," though I think it important for every generation to read to understand how far we've come and how much farther we need to go as far as understanding our own psychologies.
The second book was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It's been a long time since I've had to abandon a book. I just cannot read this. I have never been the biggest fan of science fiction, especially that which depicts an elitist future. I think it's that I get too angry and I don't want to spend the whole of a book being too angry. A professor gave me Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale for my birthday one year and I tried to read it but had to stop. It's on my list of books to read this year, but I'm dreading it.
Right now I'm watching live concerts of Queen on Youtube. Freddie Mercury was the greatest performer. I really do wish at times I was a gay man. I found myself singing along with crowd - Freddie Mercury always used to lead the crowd in doing some trilling and the crowd would try to mimic him as closely as possible. I had to participate. Long live Freddie.
The second book was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It's been a long time since I've had to abandon a book. I just cannot read this. I have never been the biggest fan of science fiction, especially that which depicts an elitist future. I think it's that I get too angry and I don't want to spend the whole of a book being too angry. A professor gave me Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale for my birthday one year and I tried to read it but had to stop. It's on my list of books to read this year, but I'm dreading it.
Right now I'm watching live concerts of Queen on Youtube. Freddie Mercury was the greatest performer. I really do wish at times I was a gay man. I found myself singing along with crowd - Freddie Mercury always used to lead the crowd in doing some trilling and the crowd would try to mimic him as closely as possible. I had to participate. Long live Freddie.
February 16, 2010
Writer's Block
Oh-my-friggin'-god...I'm going to call myself an artist.
Because that's what I am. I'm an artist. I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Not just Arts - Fine Arts. I'm a fine artist. Except, I've abandoned my art because I've become a little yellow scaredy pussy cat. "Are you sure this was written at the graduate level?" she asked. "It feels like undergraduate writing to me." And my first (and current) inclination was to say, "Where do you draw that line?" Because I knew a good deal of undergraduate writers whose art blew the socks off of some graduate writing. Off of most graduate writing, really.
It wasn't about my writing, though. It was about putting me in a class of writers because I enjoyed playing with that red-headed step-sister we all know as "genre writing."
Fucking literati.
It's a problem with the writing programs in general. They are brainwashing writers into using the same dull, safe techniques in order to be considered "literature" as opposed to "mainstream" or the dreaded "formulaic." Um, I really hate (love) to tell them this, but when I've cracked open the past few years' worth of the Best American Short Stories I can't help but feel all of the stories are so...FORMULAIC. I feel like I can open any page and read it, then skip ahead to a totally different, random story and it's as though I never stopped reading the first story. They all want to talk about the psychology of their mundane lives, or the pain of trauma A, or the details of trauma B...blah blah blah!
I love trauma. My characters are always cliched-ly abused or perverted in some way. I know I fall into this habit, as well. But isn't there an interesting way to weave it into a captivating story anymore? Are we past the point where we want adventure, or entertainment, or fantasy when we read? Are we past the point where those things can mean intelligence instead of immaturity? In the world of graduate writing programs, the answer is "yes." The lady from the second paragraph, the one who had to make a distinction between graduate and undergraduate writing, said that Harry Potter isn't deep or complex. Pardon? This, of course, led to my infamous retort to her that made all of my classmates go "OHHHHHH." I don't even remember what I said because I was so angry. After this conversation, she took every advantage to make me feel like I didn't deserve to be there anymore. Which, for a long time, I began to believe.
You wanna know the formula for current literature?
Small town + trauma + feelings = literature.
Slice-of-life. Ugh. Double Ugh. I'm fully aware this may be my preference for epics coming through, but I know I've read exciting slice-of-life fiction and this current crop of writing ain't exciting. Earlier in one of my posts I talked about the Virgin Suicides, which follows the formula and is still riveting.
Small Ohio town + multiple suicides + narrator's feelings = fuckin' awesome.
I think here it is the absolute obsession of the narrator with what went wrong, and the fact that we are removed from the actual feelings of the sisters, that make this story so engaging. We won't ever really know why the girls committed suicide, we can only speculate, we are only given clues. The story isn't told from the "I" point of view. The boys in town are telling their obsessive "we" point of view.
I feel like every current short story is "I." Because that's the narrator who can tell his own feelings best.
Maybe I can't just talk about feelings. Maybe I have to be cryptic. Maybe I feel all icky and maybe I feel like it's telling instead of showing and maybe I feel like that goes against the grain of good storytelling and maybe I feel like people can't understand someone else's feelings unless they're shown where those feelings came from in the greatest detail possible. Current short stories...all they do is give the least amount of detail possible to set a scene so it can showcase all the FEELINGS the characters are experiencing.
And so, for a long time, I tried to write about feelings. I tried to mimic those stories in the Best American Short Stories, because a book called about editing told me I should do this. Well, what it tells writers is that a writer should follow all of the advice these two editors (who wrote the editing book) give in the book if you ever want to be published, and then they go on to give examples of writers who did what they were told and got published, and writers who did not do what they were told and got nothing. And then...AND THEN...they take excerpts from The Great Gatsby and re-write them using their advised techniques to show how the book could have been better.
To show how The Great Gatsby could have been better. With their help.
And you know what? After they laid their hands on those books and stories and the Great Gatsby each piece of writing lost all of its character.
But I thought, what if this is what I have to do to get published? What if this is what I have to do to be called "serious?" What if I have to abandon my own voice in order to have any voice at all? I was scared.
No fucking more.
I will do as I please.
Watership Down reminded me of what I love to read and why I love to read it. I tease my best friend about her romance novels, but in the end I understand what they give her. What did a book about rabbits give me? Adventure and suspense and characters I gave a damn about. They, in effect, ceased to be rabbits and by that point the story is all that mattered and it was a BRILLIANT story. So is Harry Potter. So is The Dark Tower series. The rabbits are a metaphor for survival, war, and brotherly love. Harry Potter is a symbol of the abilities of everyday human beings who aren't really all that "special" but are clever and heroic. Roland is an obsessive, abused, smart man who feels he must save the world and feels he must personally lose everything to do so. How are those things less artistic than: Watership Down vs. Animal Farm; Harry Potter vs. The Old Man and the Sea;
The Dark Tower vs. The Grapes of Wrath?
But all of the second entries in each comparison are considered "literature." NO FUCKING MORE. I think there is some kind of unspoken rule that if you enjoy the book, grotesquely enjoy it, it is not allowed to be literature. I have decided not to care. I have decided that if I enjoy reading about an 800,000-year-old cybernetic bear who is taken down by a gunslinger and his white, heroin-addicted sidekick and in turn his black amputee lover, I will enjoy writing said sort of story and, therefore, others will enjoy reading my story. Will these stories win me a Pulitzer Prize? Nope, not in a million years. Is that what I'm giving up to save the world? I believe so. I believe art cannot be homogenized anymore. Something must be done. It looks like I'm going to be the one who does it.
Longest. Post. Ever. (not really)
Because that's what I am. I'm an artist. I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Not just Arts - Fine Arts. I'm a fine artist. Except, I've abandoned my art because I've become a little yellow scaredy pussy cat. "Are you sure this was written at the graduate level?" she asked. "It feels like undergraduate writing to me." And my first (and current) inclination was to say, "Where do you draw that line?" Because I knew a good deal of undergraduate writers whose art blew the socks off of some graduate writing. Off of most graduate writing, really.
It wasn't about my writing, though. It was about putting me in a class of writers because I enjoyed playing with that red-headed step-sister we all know as "genre writing."
Fucking literati.
It's a problem with the writing programs in general. They are brainwashing writers into using the same dull, safe techniques in order to be considered "literature" as opposed to "mainstream" or the dreaded "formulaic." Um, I really hate (love) to tell them this, but when I've cracked open the past few years' worth of the Best American Short Stories I can't help but feel all of the stories are so...FORMULAIC. I feel like I can open any page and read it, then skip ahead to a totally different, random story and it's as though I never stopped reading the first story. They all want to talk about the psychology of their mundane lives, or the pain of trauma A, or the details of trauma B...blah blah blah!
I love trauma. My characters are always cliched-ly abused or perverted in some way. I know I fall into this habit, as well. But isn't there an interesting way to weave it into a captivating story anymore? Are we past the point where we want adventure, or entertainment, or fantasy when we read? Are we past the point where those things can mean intelligence instead of immaturity? In the world of graduate writing programs, the answer is "yes." The lady from the second paragraph, the one who had to make a distinction between graduate and undergraduate writing, said that Harry Potter isn't deep or complex. Pardon? This, of course, led to my infamous retort to her that made all of my classmates go "OHHHHHH." I don't even remember what I said because I was so angry. After this conversation, she took every advantage to make me feel like I didn't deserve to be there anymore. Which, for a long time, I began to believe.
You wanna know the formula for current literature?
Small town + trauma + feelings = literature.
Slice-of-life. Ugh. Double Ugh. I'm fully aware this may be my preference for epics coming through, but I know I've read exciting slice-of-life fiction and this current crop of writing ain't exciting. Earlier in one of my posts I talked about the Virgin Suicides, which follows the formula and is still riveting.
Small Ohio town + multiple suicides + narrator's feelings = fuckin' awesome.
I think here it is the absolute obsession of the narrator with what went wrong, and the fact that we are removed from the actual feelings of the sisters, that make this story so engaging. We won't ever really know why the girls committed suicide, we can only speculate, we are only given clues. The story isn't told from the "I" point of view. The boys in town are telling their obsessive "we" point of view.
I feel like every current short story is "I." Because that's the narrator who can tell his own feelings best.
Maybe I can't just talk about feelings. Maybe I have to be cryptic. Maybe I feel all icky and maybe I feel like it's telling instead of showing and maybe I feel like that goes against the grain of good storytelling and maybe I feel like people can't understand someone else's feelings unless they're shown where those feelings came from in the greatest detail possible. Current short stories...all they do is give the least amount of detail possible to set a scene so it can showcase all the FEELINGS the characters are experiencing.
And so, for a long time, I tried to write about feelings. I tried to mimic those stories in the Best American Short Stories, because a book called about editing told me I should do this. Well, what it tells writers is that a writer should follow all of the advice these two editors (who wrote the editing book) give in the book if you ever want to be published, and then they go on to give examples of writers who did what they were told and got published, and writers who did not do what they were told and got nothing. And then...AND THEN...they take excerpts from The Great Gatsby and re-write them using their advised techniques to show how the book could have been better.
To show how The Great Gatsby could have been better. With their help.
And you know what? After they laid their hands on those books and stories and the Great Gatsby each piece of writing lost all of its character.
But I thought, what if this is what I have to do to get published? What if this is what I have to do to be called "serious?" What if I have to abandon my own voice in order to have any voice at all? I was scared.
No fucking more.
I will do as I please.
Watership Down reminded me of what I love to read and why I love to read it. I tease my best friend about her romance novels, but in the end I understand what they give her. What did a book about rabbits give me? Adventure and suspense and characters I gave a damn about. They, in effect, ceased to be rabbits and by that point the story is all that mattered and it was a BRILLIANT story. So is Harry Potter. So is The Dark Tower series. The rabbits are a metaphor for survival, war, and brotherly love. Harry Potter is a symbol of the abilities of everyday human beings who aren't really all that "special" but are clever and heroic. Roland is an obsessive, abused, smart man who feels he must save the world and feels he must personally lose everything to do so. How are those things less artistic than: Watership Down vs. Animal Farm; Harry Potter vs. The Old Man and the Sea;
The Dark Tower vs. The Grapes of Wrath?
But all of the second entries in each comparison are considered "literature." NO FUCKING MORE. I think there is some kind of unspoken rule that if you enjoy the book, grotesquely enjoy it, it is not allowed to be literature. I have decided not to care. I have decided that if I enjoy reading about an 800,000-year-old cybernetic bear who is taken down by a gunslinger and his white, heroin-addicted sidekick and in turn his black amputee lover, I will enjoy writing said sort of story and, therefore, others will enjoy reading my story. Will these stories win me a Pulitzer Prize? Nope, not in a million years. Is that what I'm giving up to save the world? I believe so. I believe art cannot be homogenized anymore. Something must be done. It looks like I'm going to be the one who does it.
Longest. Post. Ever. (not really)
February 11, 2010
Violently Ill
Well, I haven't posted in a while because I've been incredibly sick. A flu went around my family and I laid in bed for about three days and ate nothing but popsicles. I didn't eat anything from 1:30 p.m. last Monday until the evening last Wednesday. Then I didn't have an appetite for a few days so I ate like a little bird. I lost about four pounds.
Anyway, last week I didn't read the book I was supposed to but I did this week. Hilariously, I read 300 pages of it in one seven-hour period. The last time I read 300 pages in one sitting was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This time, the book was Watership Down .
I've always wanted to read it because I disturbingly look back fondly on watching the movie when I was little. Disturbing because it was bloody and frightening although one redeeming quality was Art Garfunkel singing a song called "Bright Eyes" at the end when the Black Rabbit comes to get Hazel. I played the song in my head at the end of the book.
The book reminded me of everything I love about reading. It's a straightforward journey with a protagonist, obstacles, and a climactic fight. I really wanted to know what happened next at every turn. I also cared incredibly for the characters. Like I said a while back, it's hard to read a book when you don't care about the characters in it.
And it reminded me of a lesson I've learned about writing, one I impart to my students - particularly those who try to write fantasy. Here it is: the language and dialogue does not have to be Old English or fancy or anything of the sort. It can be everyday language. It can include colloquialisms. It can be "wrong" for its time period. I've always had a problem with this. I don't want to read a lot of jargon I have to decode to understand. Furthermore, no matter how the dialect, accent, and language would have actually sounded, to those who speak it and those who hear it on a daily basis nothing sounds out of the ordinary and to their ears it sounds like "normal" speech. And don't get me started on American actors trying to do accents - please, Hollywood, stop it now.
Anyway, in the book, a sea gull says "Piss off!" and though you do have to be paying attention to the "Lapine" (rabbit language) in the book (so there is, in fact, a bit of this problem in it) at one point you realize one rabbit says "Eat shit and die!" to another rabbit. It cracked me up when I figured it out, which didn't take long because I had been paying attention. In John Gardner's Grendel , a retelling of Beowulf from the monster's point of view, the monster, old as the Earth itself almost, says "fuck" and I believe maybe even "dude." I love it. This is okay because the way the two books are set up, you believe the monster would say this and you believe the rabbits would, too. Anyway, it makes the characters more real, in my opinion.
I used to write fantasy stories and the characters - princes, angels, knights - would speak in horribly affected accents or all in capital letters. A knight might say, "Thou must stay and I wilst protecteth thee." You want to vomit, eh? An angel would say, "I MOVE HEAVEN AND EARTH FOR YOU." Yeah, all in caps like that. Cheesy, "Spew forth this frothy vomit that contains my soul" kind of stuff. Then, when I was fiction editor for the undergraduate magazine at college a story was submitted. Thirty-two pages of elves and princesses and flying and swords and dialogue like I used to write. I ran screaming and decided right then I would not try to change my characters' dialogue. They would just talk to each other, be it ancient times, 1800, or the future.
For a friend of mine, I would also like to warn that not enough rabbits die in horrible ways for you to enjoy this book. These are, inexplicably, good rabbits who don't deserve torturous deaths. I know that's hard for you to swallow. There is one violent scene where many, many rabbits are murdered by humans and though I know you abhor violence I think you needed to know that in this one scene all the your rabbit hate is satiated.
Anyway, Watership Down gets an A.
Anyway, last week I didn't read the book I was supposed to but I did this week. Hilariously, I read 300 pages of it in one seven-hour period. The last time I read 300 pages in one sitting was Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. This time, the book was Watership Down .
I've always wanted to read it because I disturbingly look back fondly on watching the movie when I was little. Disturbing because it was bloody and frightening although one redeeming quality was Art Garfunkel singing a song called "Bright Eyes" at the end when the Black Rabbit comes to get Hazel. I played the song in my head at the end of the book.
The book reminded me of everything I love about reading. It's a straightforward journey with a protagonist, obstacles, and a climactic fight. I really wanted to know what happened next at every turn. I also cared incredibly for the characters. Like I said a while back, it's hard to read a book when you don't care about the characters in it.
And it reminded me of a lesson I've learned about writing, one I impart to my students - particularly those who try to write fantasy. Here it is: the language and dialogue does not have to be Old English or fancy or anything of the sort. It can be everyday language. It can include colloquialisms. It can be "wrong" for its time period. I've always had a problem with this. I don't want to read a lot of jargon I have to decode to understand. Furthermore, no matter how the dialect, accent, and language would have actually sounded, to those who speak it and those who hear it on a daily basis nothing sounds out of the ordinary and to their ears it sounds like "normal" speech. And don't get me started on American actors trying to do accents - please, Hollywood, stop it now.
Anyway, in the book, a sea gull says "Piss off!" and though you do have to be paying attention to the "Lapine" (rabbit language) in the book (so there is, in fact, a bit of this problem in it) at one point you realize one rabbit says "Eat shit and die!" to another rabbit. It cracked me up when I figured it out, which didn't take long because I had been paying attention. In John Gardner's Grendel , a retelling of Beowulf from the monster's point of view, the monster, old as the Earth itself almost, says "fuck" and I believe maybe even "dude." I love it. This is okay because the way the two books are set up, you believe the monster would say this and you believe the rabbits would, too. Anyway, it makes the characters more real, in my opinion.
I used to write fantasy stories and the characters - princes, angels, knights - would speak in horribly affected accents or all in capital letters. A knight might say, "Thou must stay and I wilst protecteth thee." You want to vomit, eh? An angel would say, "I MOVE HEAVEN AND EARTH FOR YOU." Yeah, all in caps like that. Cheesy, "Spew forth this frothy vomit that contains my soul" kind of stuff. Then, when I was fiction editor for the undergraduate magazine at college a story was submitted. Thirty-two pages of elves and princesses and flying and swords and dialogue like I used to write. I ran screaming and decided right then I would not try to change my characters' dialogue. They would just talk to each other, be it ancient times, 1800, or the future.
For a friend of mine, I would also like to warn that not enough rabbits die in horrible ways for you to enjoy this book. These are, inexplicably, good rabbits who don't deserve torturous deaths. I know that's hard for you to swallow. There is one violent scene where many, many rabbits are murdered by humans and though I know you abhor violence I think you needed to know that in this one scene all the your rabbit hate is satiated.
Anyway, Watership Down gets an A.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
