yes, great, well, okay... now what?

to think that someone thought they saw me and had a mix of emotion is surprising. i tend to think that the emotions i evoke in people range from insignificant to nonexistent. strange how some parts of me are so past high school melodrama and others are caught in catchphrases like self-esteem.

recently recieved an email from a friend. the relationship never really got started, but we'll call it friends anyway. i don't have so many of those that i can discount those lurking in the pre- and post- stages of friendship.

not sure how things are here. with the semester coming to an end and me wondering whether i have accomplished anything. papers due and tests looming. stories unfinished and finishing. revisions waiting, waiting. and me wondering if i have accomplished anything.

why am i here? do i really think i can write? why am i even asking these questions?

the touchpad on my laptop failed inexplicably today. when i try to go into the settings to fix it, the settings application fails and closes. perhaps this is only the beginning of a long slow stage of shutdown. let's hope people don't start mimicking computers anytime soon. although perhaps they already have, since computers have begun mimicking people, so if people mimicked computers then they would really be mimicking a mimic of themselves... echoes of baudrillard.

this is a long way to say that thanksgiving was great in philly, and i am sad to be back facing the same set of scholastic problems that i was when i left.

again...

why am i still talking about this?

pynchon gets praised here.

pynchon's day has come

Pynchon gets mashed in a NY Times book review here.

Publisher's weekly has a few better things to say, and Pynchon weighs in with his own, now official, blurb at amazon.

A bit of history, mixed with myth, about the man himself.

If you really want to dig in to the past, read the wikipedia entry.

But what do i think? Don't know. Haven't read the thing yet. Whether he has put out a book that reads like an imitation of himself, as the times review alleges, or whether he has forged a bright new piece of steel from a heap of slag is neither here nor there. the truth is, his time has passed. the day he has been piling up silence and public avoidances against is the day that he will be no longer relevant to the written world. That day has come and gone, but he doesn't seem to realize it yet, and still lives in fear for that note to sound. If he hasn't heard it, perhaps the response to his new book will make it reverberate in his tone-deaf ears.

As much as i would have liked to re-immerse myself in his oeuvre in preparation for the new novel, i found that i couldn't bear to do it. Whether this is a reflection of a possible maturity i have reached since my undergrad days, or whether i am simply not in the mood, i don't know. What is clear is that his work is not useful to me and my own writing at this point in time. He was, once, something i aspired to become. Now he represents particular pitfalls that i wish to avoid in my own writing. Why the shift? I realized that his work shows several aspects that hamstring me in my own work, namely: indulgence, ridiculous wit, bizarre and implausible plot, underdeveloped characters, and the big one, a sense of mystery that is largely unfounded and which will never pay off in the course of the narrative. So the question of whether or not the new Pynchon novel is a good one is the wrong question to ask. The real question is, why should i read the novel at all? If you can solve that one for me, and justify the massive amounts of time it would take to finish the beast (all 1120 pages of it), then maybe we will have something to talk about.

caprice and the word

how is it i have no control over my muse? how is it that one morning, in a matter of scant hours i can turn out five pages and the next i fail to string together a sentence? why can't i control the thing that so hauntingly dictates the steps of my own life? though i press on in spite of her abscene (and have done so occasionally, not entirely without benefit) i find myself struggling to understand the caprice that governs my ability to conceive language, to generate it as it drops fresh from the mouth of the oracle. mysticism seems to be so apt, but is, i suspect, the wrong approach entirely; the muse is perhaps better ignored, so as to prick her curiousity and entice her to return. and should she fail to return as she has not yet done (for more than several weeks at a time, that is)? then i will be utterly destroyed.

as yet untitled

finishing a draft has a certain pleasure to it. knowing that you have gone as far as you intend to go in pursuing the thread of a particular character's life is sad, but also wonderful, in the same way that losing a friend who you have spent too much time with and knows to much about you is both bitter and freeing because of the weight of the bitterness. being without that person gives you the freedom to alter their meaning in your life. the same holds true for fictional characters. before the point of departure has been reached, they extend their particular jargon and traits deep into me, their fingers rooting into my synapses and they seem like young saplings rapidly maturing into a network of redwoods, unable to be knocked over.

but when i decide to leave them, they have to finish their lives offstage, and whether they have resolved their particular dillemas is of no concern to me. it was, but is no longer. knowing that they now have to enact their dramas on a different stage gives me the freedom to revise, to come back and bore holes in the base of the trunks to run roads through, to cut roots that were reaching outside the limits, to trim branches heavy and shaggy with unnecessary weight. coming free from the spell of a given piece is an awakening that leaves space for only one possible thing: the opporunity to be entranced by another newer, more enticing piece.

this is how i feel on the evening of finishing a draft. in the morning i will probably say upon reading this post, as i have so many times before, "delete this post. delete this drivel. rewrite."

i have yet to come up with a name for the piece.

note

there is the impulse to post (write) though there is nothing to say. there is a disembodied voice that cannot be owned. in time reasons and events murky will become even more so. the passage of time does not clarify but further dirties the waters of memory.

Entering and Exiting

There are no exits. The doors are flat matte metal under my fingers. They are sealed from the outside. I have no recollection of how I got here. The doors were locked when I found them. When I first put my fingers out in the dark, all I could remember was cold. I felt it for the first time, again. The sensation of being out in the world. Like a birth, the expulsion from the womb’s warmth into the cold dark. Now I am blank, black, mapped out on the concrete floor, which is smooth and seamless. The doors have seams. One splitting them from each other, one reaming the edges. The edge seam feels like two but runs along the floor and must rejoin the opposite seam at the top somewhere to make a complete circuit. I put my eyes to the seam and strain for a sense of light. If the doors join, then they must allow some light in. But there is nothing, just the seam of the smooth metal under my naked eyeball. And then a sudden phototropic swirl of spots swimming in my eyes after I rub them, press them with my fingers. At this moment, the pressure I put on my eyes brings me to recall the moment of entry, a sharp pitching forward. The simple mechanics of my arms catching my body and doing so without my insistence. They reached out until they made contact, and settled the weight of my falling torso into them like useful pistons that have been worn too far. For, they did not stop me completely but let me down hard onto the floor. My cheekbone feels like the skin has split around it. I haven’t run my fingers up to check but the skin is swollen and tight and is making my left eye hard to close. I am lying on the floor. The space of the room is short and dark. I am swallowed in a finite space, bounded by walls. They are rough and blocky to my touch. I rub my limbs against the walls until they are slick with blood. It seems that the space around me is shrinking, drawing in. I no longer have to move to reach the walls. They are closing on me until there is no difference between my body and the wall. I am a function of the wall; I exist as a barrier to motion. I am pure and superior in my finite state, held in a granite density in eternal motionlessness.

The exits are many; they exist all around me. I am held in a space where the light is so bright that it has ceased to exists as a stimulus. I keep my eyes closed because opening them hurts too much. I am standing, but I am not standing. I see through a process of sensing the lack of obstruction, indicating and opening. There is no weight settling on my spine. I do not feel the ache in the ruptured disc in my lower back. I remember a vague statement once made about this condition, that it would be with me permanently. It appears that statement is incorrect. I do not feel the disc. There is no pressure being exerted on my vertebrae. I feel suspended, as though all directions are open to me and I could proceed at any moment through a flapping doorframe. I do so and feel the presence of the door only as a slight breath of air moving across my face. There are no moments of hesitation, no space between the want of a thing and its occurrence; there is only the present state of being. I am moving at will now through doors placed at every angle in the space of cubed walls. That is, there are no walls, only doors at sharp angles to each other. I proceed from cube to cube until a certain turn leads me to a room that is more than a cube. It has several more doors than the previous room. This room is a cube with an extra side, a fifth side, a fifth door. And then it seems that door is a remembered term, one with implications that are now lost—these are not doors but opportunities for motion. Room also seems a false construct. They are really moments in space. I move through the opportunities to more complex moments. These hold me in the bright vacuum of their light until I am accelerating, flipping through the moments in a scattered zag of sharp-cornered turns. The speed is incomprehensible until the moment I reach is so complex that it is simple in its complexity. I understand this all at once and my speed disappears. I am moving at such a high rate of speed that it seems that I am not moving at all. Every facet of the moment is held out to me in a glittering array. The opportunities are limitless. There is no choosing. I cannot enter even one of them. It is impossible to proceed further into infinity than infinity itself. As I begin to ponder this I understand everything, and all is present to me, there is no past, no future, nothing but the moment I am in, which is endless and eternally encompassing in its capacity.

Chinese poster saying: "Shatter the old world / Establish a new world."

library book comment

from the table of contents in denis johnson's Jesus' Son comes this comment:

"This is a f**king beautiful book."

the words were penciled in and then erased, leaving only the impressions of the marks on the page. it was still legible. it was signed by E and dated 94.

i assume that the comment was erased by the either a library employee or the next reader of the book. or at least someone who felt it was not true: two conflicting sets of checks and plus/minus marks, these unerased, ran down the margin next to the titles of the stories.

i agree with the author of that comment.

the only other thing i have to say is that if someone is writing comments like this one in my books in the future, i will be happy.

Post Calligraphic Drawing: Brice Marden

the reality line

bloom is an ass. i firmly believe this. still, many an ass since balaam has had much to say that is useful. bloom makes a distinction between two types of stories: the borgesian and the chekovian. the checkovian are realistic, and serve to promote a kind of truth in life, while the borgesian are fantastic, and attempt to turn truth inside out to find another kind of truth. while this does seem a bit simplistic, it is true that all stories brink a certain line at some point in their creation and existence. i have felt this myself. for my own purposes i will call this the reality line.

the reality line is simply the final divide separating reality from surreallity. once this line is crossed, it is difficult, if not impossible, to recross it. if your story exists in both at once, it is more likely to be finally percieved as belonging to the surreal school, by virtue of that element existing within its pages. stories firmly rooted in either mode can partake of the other, but only by relating it to a certain aspect of the story which does not partake, such as a character, or narrative mode. though this seems wordly and complicated it is finally as simple as the question: could this story really happen (or have happened) or not?

we get at this in workshop by asking what sort of a reality the story exists in. is it a true-to-life? does it utilize mythologizing of characters and so fall off a bit in its realism? is it a phantasm masqerading as the quotidian? after adressing these questions, the details can be picked apart so that the reality the story inhabits, whichever that may be, can be depicted with more verity.

recently i was complaining about this very subject to my brother on the phone. my problem being, i seem to cross and recross the reality line frequently--from piece to piece--and often a story started off in one mode will veer off the road into the other. controlling this is a difficult thing to do. perception provides a set of blinders that also cause trouble once the piece is out in the public arena. often a reader/listener will love a piece, but will make assertions about it that are completely wrong. For example, upon assessing a piece that is realistic, but lies near the line to fantasy (read: not what the reader/listener is used to), a reader will state: "this piece is great! i love how surreal it is." when in fact, for an artist such as yourself, this is the most gritty reality, the harsh-facts-of-life version, in which you spared yourself no amount of grief in rendering its limbs so as to be without the distorting twist of the surreal.

back to bloom: he does not prize one of the modes over the other. does this mean, then, that regardless of whichever school i belong to, that i can write in both? or does this mean that at some point i will find myself caged on one side of the reality line, unable to cross it? and which side to i belong to anyway? (i suspect that neither would have me without reservation.) and how much does any of this blather matter? questions that have little to no relevance to life often have the most concrete and decisive of answers.

kafka

strange resonances with kafka here. a few to get you thinking.

last week i workshopped some stuff with the current visiting writer (new one every week). when discussing my story, he said--have you read kafka? uh, yeah. hello. KAFKA. and then he went on to compare my story to kafka. said it was remarkably like his stuff. crazy. then other members of the workshop (read: my peers) echoed his sentiment.

another:

there is a girl in my workshop, a fellow first year, who has tattoos on the underside of each of her wrists. they happen to be sketches kafka did for The Trial. sketches. by kafka. tattooed. on her wrists. just wanted to reiterate and make sure it was clear.

last:

kafka has always intrigued me, for lots of reasons. now i have a new one to add: i am interested in kafka because i apparently write like him (sometimes). what can kafka tell me about myself that i don't already know? this is assuming i am not just aping the man; i can testify that i am not: first i haven't read quite enough of his work to do that, and second i don't read him with great enough frequency to do that, and third, that would be ridiculous. but anyway. kafka. what a great name.

what i like... (do i?)

this in reply to someone who urged positive assessment of my writing:

-i do language well. by this i mean that i occasionally turn out a phrase or sentence that rings true; more true, in fact, than the image that inspired it. for this i am lucky.
-i have a knack for odd names. without odd names i would be nothing. plain names baffle me.
-i sometimes manage a tone, or evocation, of a mood--this is really just an extension of language.
-if i think of anything else, i will add it.
-i work. hard. at writing. this perhaps pleases me more than any aspect of the writing itself: the work i put into it. not sure why this is.

any attempt at making me love my work is difficult, since the moment after the words spill from me i am revising them, worrying them with my teeth, tearing them. so it is difficult to love any project but the one i am currently working on. which is, right now, absolutely amazing. when i finish it will be mundane sludge. such is a writer's life.

the shop

oh they ranted, they raved, they disected, they ripped and tore--but my first workshop is over, and i don't feel too bad about it. They were also impressed or summarily bored and gave me the usual praise: how lovely! this turn of phrase, that description, and yes! I've heard that already. Tell me about the guts, the raw mechanics.

all that aside, i think that my raw 1st draft was enough to impress upon them that i am a peer. which is enough for anyone to ask of a few pieces of paper.

TBR

Yesterday, the mail came. I checked it. Between the grocery store coupons was the latest issue of TBR. Love it. Love that they are still putting stuff out that I edited back in the prime of my internship.

And then the table of contents...

scan, scan, HEY! Myself! scan some more, scan, Myself AGAIN! scan, scan, HEY! no, no more me. But two reviews coming out unexpectedly in one issue was cause for celebration. we bought sour cream donut holes.

now if i could just get some fiction published as well... *


*this may seem like whining, but don't take it that way. i am absolutely pleased and happy publishing reviews. but i would also love getting some of my own stuff published, so that other people could do the reviewing.

the death of B&N

I quit. Yes, you whip-cracking booksellers, I quit. I want this to sound strong and life-affirming and other jargony terms that empower me, but let's face it, I was scared. Always am when it comes to dropping the casual hey-i'm-quitting-but-i-still-like-this-place speech.

but this is good. after two weeks, well, one-and-a-half now, i will be shut of the place. let's hope this means the beginning of a new epoch for me. it will certainly give me enough time to plan a few epochs, if i want.

here's to quitting. here's to feeling inferior in a graduate context and admitting it to myself and faking the smarts and quitting my job so i can stop faking and get intelligent.

please let it be true. TP's first in a decade. please let me get a pre-release copy. that would be unutterably great.

Wandered, Swamplike

Though there were thirteen of them at one time he had reduced it gradually to three. This constellation suited him, no Cygnus blinking back, head severed.

He shuffled them along the cross-hatched surface of the stump, end up, planted on the porch.

The checkers were slow, blind to his mistakes. He had chosen them as silent participators in the scenes he desired and manipulated with his brown fingers.

And though he had arranged for senseless examination of facts, there was more sense floating in square pools of space than he would allow.

There was no symptom that could not be corrected. He had only to allow time, to think, ponder the problem. Assign names to circles, class them in two colors: red, white.

After translation, simple movements remained. Forward over the squares. Plain diagonals. And backwards, in any fashion, for the kings. These motions repeated became symbolic of larger patterns he saw in the world around him: they became relationships.

Contact was an actual barrier to forming relationships: it was so easily misread. Example A: he fingered a red checker forward, one named Hannah. He knew this piece intimately; he directed it about the board with delicacy. Fully aware, fingertips burning accumulated touch.

Hannah was in close proximity to another checker, this one white, given the name Clarence.  Though one square remained between them, they held this space diagonally, looking askance at attempts at reconciliation.

He eyed the pieces, pondered the third, a red, deep in the briars of the double corner.

Stagnation was never something he had concerned himself with; rather, it had been concerned with him.

Spine-knobbed stone rose against reddened sky, wedging black rifts into the seams of his mind. The sun set; he waited for the next move to reveal itself.

Clarence had a habit of skittish movement. Confrontation was not his thing. A strong feeling, in word only, for literal behaviors manifested in him as hypocrisy.

Panned the board, summed the squares, 64, finite movements, action or reaction. Recant, why not cant it out if both allow? Sinew shrinking the span of his fingers from eight squares to five.

High trees shaded the porch. One by one, the leaves begin to fall. A chance breeze pushed one onto the board. He grasped the withered stem with his fingers, and twirled the leaf slowly.

To bridge the space separating two individuals, a girder, or artificial support, can sometimes be used to great effect.

He placed the leaf silently on the board, then slid the third checker out of the double corner. When kinged after the long march, he would break the standoff. He put his hands on his knees and watched the sun slide below the horizon. The leaves continued falling in the dusk, collecting at his feet. He shucked his way through them and wandered, swamplike.

How did this happen?

Now, I would never be insensitive about someone's death.

It is never funny when someone dies, especially under tragic circumstances. But, well, just let me highlight the subtitle to the lead article here.

"A stingray barb through the heart kills the beloved Aussie Adventurer... How did this happen?"

Well, I'm not sure how it happened exactly. I do know that it could never have happened to me.

Irwin's death occured under suspicious circumstances: he was swimming with a 7 foot bull manta ray.

Let's refer to another picture to refresh in our minds what sort of person Steve Irwin was.

"Oh, that's him exactly!" I hear you say. And it is. To put it bluntly, Irwin was a man who played with the sort of animals--Poisonous snakes, crocodiles, and stingrays--that most of us avoid. Why do we avoid these animals? Because they all share a certain aptitude in areas that are, well, linked to those tragic deaths you hear so much about these days.

So while I do think an article about Irwin's death, a man who did get people interested in fangs and claws and stingers, could be a great spot for questioning (what is our fascination with dangerous animals), I don't think the one to ask is "How did this happen."

Let me just say unequivocally that the first day I swim with 7 foot bull manta rays is the same day I expect to be killed by them.

chinese

Ahar! Chinese has just begun, and it is taking a TOLL. note the use of the verb take. the implication is one of violence, of coersion, of prizing something away from tightly locked hands. That something is my time. i have so little of it these days, it seems.

so what am i doing here? venting. that should be obvious. what sentient being can remain so without a little good-natured bleeding?

and so i am off to chinese again. it is by far the most regular element of my schedule.

and the teacher is a wretch who treats me like a child.