Lazy Snow Day Blues

It’s snowing again. We’re supposed to get another 10 inches or so, for a total of about 38.

I don’t like this because it’s making me lazy! I need to do homework, even though I don’t have class this week. Can’t fall behind.

Bollywood’s “FIRST” Gay Love Story

When I first saw this, I was a little shocked. Hadn’t there already been gay characters (and kissing) in Indian cinema? Fire was released in 1996, and it features two women who befriend each other and, ultimately, fall in love. It is pretty low-key but still homosexual/bisexual. I’m not sure why it doesn’t count. Maybe it doesn’t count as a Bollywood film.

In any case, Dunno Y…Na Jaane Kyun will be released this May, under the Bollywood banner, about 16 months after the Indian government abolished the archaic anti-gay law. This movie centers around a young Indian man who goes to Mumbai, seeking fame and fortune but instead finding love…with a man. It sounds pretty standard, almost clichéd on a very basic level, but I think the Indian angle will add a lot to it. I hope, anyway. I’d be interested to see how it compares to Fire, which I need to watch again; I haven’t seen it since about 2005.

In other news, we don’t have class today because of the snowstorm; I don’t know about tomorrow yet. They’re still cleaning off the streets and sidewalks. It’s supposed to snow again Tuesday and Wednesday, apparently 10 inches. I may not have class this week, which means I need to keep myself on task!

Pictures at Midtown and Bolton Hill

Look at the damage after the snowstorm the other day. It’s so pretty.

Baltimore Blizzard Bastard; Second Semester Starts; Sorry, So Sorry

*Sorry I haven’t been updating you. It’s been hectic. But maybe that’s not an excuse. Anyway, I wrote this as an e-mail to a family member and thought it was actually perfect for a blog entry. So here you go, blog reader(s)! A slight adaptation of a family e-mail. Pry away into my private life, gentle readers!

**No seriously, be gentle…

Hello,

I’ve been busy with school starting back up. Last week was my second week of class; this week will be the third—assuming we have class, that is. I love it, but there’s a lot going on.

I’m taking a screenwriting class this semester (along with a fiction workshop and a class on experimental writing, called Experimental Forms). It’s neat that part of my work for class is to watch movies and TV shows, and then analyze scripts! Exciting. In fact, I just finished reading the screenwriting textbook for that course a couple of hours ago. It’s really interesting to me, so I decided to just read it all. Besides, I thought it would be good to have read and annotated it already so I can just use it to refer back to while I’m working on my script ideas. That frees up larger blocks of time later on, even though it took longer than I expected to read the book initially! Now I can just refresh my memory real quick on those days where I’m supposed to have read a section (he assigned it in 4 large chunks, to be spaced out between early February and late March, after which time we are going to be writing our scripts), and then I can focus on my ideas and perfecting my writing craft and document styles.

This is the closest I’ve ever been to what I want to do with my life. It’s shaping up to be an exciting, productive, educational semester for me.

As for the Baltimore snow, yeah, we apparently got about 28 inches of snow Friday/Saturday. It’s pretty crazy here. I live close to campus, though. It’s just a couple of blocks away. We don’t have campus housing at UBalt. Baltimore’s not really equipped for that, I guess, or perhaps it’s just UBalt that has that issue. There’s barely enough room for the class buildings! Haha. We have partnerships with a few of the local apartment buildings, though; mine is one of them. It’s called Sutton Place. Actually, I can look out my kitchen window and see the Student Center—big glass building, can’t miss it.

Kari and I have a great view, here at our apartment. It looks especially pretty right now, with all the snow. I should take pictures if I can remember to.

Speaking of pictures, I need to save for a new camera, eventually; this one’s about had it. After being spoiled with expensive/nice video cameras and learning a lot about manual controls in my video production class at Wabash last spring, I now want a still camera that is more up-to-date and has more creative control than my ailing Nikon Coolpix 3200. Nikon’s D5000—the one on Amazon with 2 VR kit lenses, one at 18-55mm and the other at 55-200mm—looks pretty great for a first-timer, with manual controls and everything, but it’s expensive. Not even a priority right now. I need to read more about photography anyway so I know what I’m doing with it if/when I finally get one! And then there’s the worry that I won’t actually use it enough to warrant buying. I certainly don’t use my current camera that often (I use my iPhone camera more!), but maybe I would use a newer one more. Who knows?

Ah, I’m starting to babble. I supposed I should go to bed.

Stay warm, Baltimoreans et al.!

Best,

Roger

End of the Semester Highs and Woes

I can’t believe I haven’t blogged in almost a month. Apologies, if anyone was reading.

The semester is over now, my first semester of grad school. I feel pretty good about it; I think I did fairly well, and I certainly had a lot of fun. It’s nice being in a program in which I can have so much fun. I’m doing what I love, and I’m not fulfilling a bunch of distribution requirements—in classes that I don’t really want to take. I think I’m well-rounded enough at this point, after going to Wabash, so this sharper focus is a nice change of pace. Nevertheless, I struggled with my writing this semester. I know I still have quite a ways to go, things to learn about craft, but I’m willing to put in the work. This is what I want to do with my life, after all. Next semester should be great. I’m taking the second part of fiction workshop, a screenwriting class, and electronic publications. Sounds awesome!

As for life in general, some of the MFAers in my program had a Christmas party (slash end-of-the-semester party). We played the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire DVD game, Taboo, and Apples to Apples. We’re getting to know each other and having a ball. For the first time since I was a very young kid, I feel like I have a few good friends, people I can really talk to. That’s a wonderful feeling. Lori and Justin are amazing; Kari is awesome to live with; Danielle is great fun; Mike and Vinny are really down-to-earth; and I’m going to miss Wendy a ton if she decides to leave us.

This is the happiest I’ve felt in a long time.

And yet there is still something nagging at me. I can’t help but feel pissed off at Alex for abandoning me. School is tough and important, and it’s keeping him very busy, as an undergrad freshman; and then there’s the boyfriend. I get that, all of it. I really do. But we haven’t spoken at all since October 15, and sometimes I feel like scum. I don’t know if I have the right to be upset that one of my (apparently former) best friends can’t or won’t talk to me because he’s too busy with school and his boyfriend, or maybe just making up excuses. Maybe I was never really a very important friend to him. *sigh* I feel used, and that makes me feel bad. Maybe he was telling the truth about being so busy, but the fact that I sometimes don’t believe that makes me feel awful. Do I just forget about him? Remove him from my phone and my messengers? I don’t feel like I can do that. What if he finds time for me in the future and we could become friends again, for real? Can I forgive him?

Right now, I’m sitting at home in Indiana, visiting during Christmas break for a couple of weeks. I know that Alex is also home for break, just an hour or two away. I want to go see him, and yet I don’t. He hasn’t called, texted, IMed, or e-mailed, even though he’s no longer busy. I guess I’m out of the picture, and when I go back to Baltimore, and he to D.C., I still probably won’t talk to him or see him. So much for the beneficial nearbyness of our respective schools! I’ve seen him once in three months, took the MARC train to visit him in D.C. We stopped talking a month and a half after that. And I just let it go because I know he’s busy and overwhelmed. But it’s December now, two months later; this is kind of ridiculous!

I’m going in circles now. I’ll stop.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I know it’s early, but I wanted to put up a Thanksgiving entry, because I probably won’t have access to a computer again until Friday. I’m going to Pennsylvania to spend Thanksgiving with Hélène and Arturo at Penn State, and I leave tomorrow morning/afternoon.

I’ll post something more substantial soon. I’ve already got a potential blog topic for next time: e-publishing!

Until then, Happy Thanksgiving! Don’t get trampled on Black Friday!

“Oblivion Cycle: A Spider’s Nightmare” Re-imagined

My writing exercise for this week was to take a completed story and rewrite it, intensifying the conflict, exaggerating the tension—even to the point of absurdity. Well, I chose a story that was already pretty exaggerated, but I managed to exaggerate it even more, and I cleaned up the prose a little in the process and made a slightly different setup (by adding specific sections to the story).

But first…

NOTE FOR THE READER (STILL APPLIES TO THIS REVISED VERSION): James Joyce ends his novel Finnegan’s Wake with a sentence that concludes only by going back to the very first page and re-reading the first line. When I first learned about this oddity, I found it to be an ingenious literary device and immediately tried to think of a story that could end/begin in this way. With “Oblivion Cycle: A Spider’s Nightmare,” I think I’ve captured, in miniature, the basic “never-ending” structure that Joyce used. I really like this story, overall. I like the cyclical nature of the story itself, as well as the disorientation and short memory span of the spider, living in its own mini hell—hence the word “oblivion” in the title. Following are my suggestions for reading this flash fiction, cyclical horror story. Start with whichever paragraph you like, even if it’s not the first one, and read the story from there; then read it again, starting at the next paragraph and reading from there; and then read it one final time, starting from the last remaining paragraph and reading from there. It may be necessary to wait a few minutes in between rereadings. I think it’s interesting to see how well the story holds up in each “version.” I like to read it from beginning to end, then from middle to beginning, so to speak, and finally from end to middle. Without further ado, the story, which I will now call

Oblivion Cycle: A Spider’s Nightmare Re-imagined

Part 1 then part 3 then part 2

So, with her ghastly device engaged, she tortured him, maimed him, brutalized him. The tiny, black, defenseless spider twisted and writhed on the tabletop, screaming in agony until he had used up all the air at his disposal. The drinking glass with which the girl had covered him made both breathing and escape impossible. His high-strung screams echoed off the walls of the glass, and his ears rang, and then bled. He stopped screaming and tried to draw in a breath but couldn’t.

Part 2 then part 1 then part 3

The spider was suffocating, mouth cracked and dry. How long had she been at this? He couldn’t remember; he couldn’t tell. How long before she just killed him? Would she? Or would he have to live in complete agony for the rest of time, constantly pushed to the very brink of death only to be cruelly revived a moment later? While he pondered this, a distinct feeling of déjà vu overwhelmed his mind; it was as though he had had these thoughts a thousand times before, never arriving at a coherent conclusion. Suddenly, the drinking glass that was his prison rose high into the air, and he gasped, his lungs ablaze with a fire that grew more intense with each new breath.

Part 3 then part 2 then part 1

As soon as the spider had reclaimed his breath and his bearings, he charged off, away from the drinking glass and the girl, trying to escape certain death; but he was no match for her, in all her gargantuan, human glory. As quickly and easily as if she had done it a thousand times, she put the glass over him. His millions of legs darted toward the glass, again and again, as he tried desperately to run right through it, to no avail—and the air quickly evaporated into oblivion.

“Knot-Tangle” Re-imagined

Almost two years ago, I wrote a short short story called “Knot-Tangle,” and at the time, I felt like it was flash/micro fiction. A writing exercise just proved me wrong. The exercise asked me to cut half of the words in a previously written story. I chose to revisit “Knot-Tangle” and was pleasantly surprised by the resulting piece of real flash/micro fiction. The original (second) draft of the story, the one I published in the Writer’s Block at Wabash College, was 734 words, and this new version is exactly half that: 367 words. So, without further ado,

Knot-Tangle Re-imagined

It glowed in the hazy moonlight: a knot, a beautiful tangle of brunette hair, wrapped around the headboard of my bed. Through overly moist eyes, I worked to untie it. The mass was thick, but I worked incessantly because she deserved her freedom.

“What’s her name?” Naomi said.

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.”

“Ja—her name is Julie.”

Silence, and then: “Oh, Julie! Don’t stop!” She arched her perfect back as best she could with her hair trapped, a prisoner of vigorous lovemaking. Her skin was smooth, damp with twinkly sweat.

“Stop it!” A tear fell from my chin and soaked her hair.

“Don’t tell me to stop. You should have stopped. What happened to love?”

Something died. Darkness poured in through a funnel, and I wanted her to hurt me. Somehow. Just hit me, I thought. “I do love you. I just—missed you, while I was away.”

“When you miss someone, you call them,” she said. “You don’t go out and fuck the first thing you see.”

I frowned. “I’m…sorry.”

Her face was empty, eyes gray and wet. “You cheated!” Tears leaked onto her pillow in two spots, forming a broken heart.

I couldn’t tell her what had really happened, that there was more to it than a bit of hot sex. That, paradoxically, my spontaneous encounter meant more to me than any lovemaking with Naomi ever did. It was something I’d always craved but never had the guts to try—because I loved Naomi.

“For Pete’s sake, cut it!”

Hesitantly, I reached into the end table drawer and pulled out a pair of scissors. “Are you sure?” I said, looking at her beautiful hair.

“Cut the damn thing off!”

At that, I sobbed uncontrollably, and my tears connected with hers on the pillow. Just a blob. It mocked us, me. I held the scissors up, and the brunette strands flowed into the metallic grip of the scissors. I hesitated again.

“I can’t do it.”

She grabbed the scissors and started cutting. The knot—the tangle—turned into a million dark hairs, in slow motion, and fell between bed and wall. She dressed, and then left. My tears kept coming, exploding, like supernovas in deep space.

NOTE FOR THE READER: In this story, I was intentionally mysterious and vague/ambiguous about a few things (not to a fault, though, I hope). This wasn’t the initial plan, but I had an epiphany soon after starting the story: I could make it sexually ambiguous, which would be very interesting, at least to me. As you read the story the first time, you likely read it as Naomi and her cheating boyfriend. I invite you to read it again but more deeply: Try to see it as Naomi and her cheating girlfriend, then again, perhaps most interestingly/shockingly, as Naomi and her closeted bi/gay boyfriend. I think all of those scenarios work well, but maybe that is my writer’s bias talking. In any case, this was a difficult story to write because of the logistics, the purposeful ambiguity. It’s actually quite a challenge to be unclear or vague on purpose!

Blackbirds, Stones, and Spring Courses

Last night in my Creativity class, I came back from break to a changed classroom, with bandanas and sheets of paper in front of every seat. Kendra had set up the room for our next activity while we were on break. The lights were low to set the mood. She asked us to fold the bandana into a blindfold and put it on, and then say nothing. Just wait for her next instructions. Then she placed an object in front of us, and we had to feel around with one hand to find it, and then feel it. Then switch hands. Explore it. Get to know it. Guess what it was. Ask questions of it. Describe it. And so on. We wrote all this out on the paper, without looking, of course, since we were blindfolded. We even had to lick the object. And did I mention the object was a stone? Yeah. I had to lick a stone/rock last night in class. It didn’t really have a taste; I guess that’s a good thing. This week in our journals, she wants us to respond to our stones. She had us take them home so we could live with them for a week and see what we learn from them.

Before class, I met with Kendra to talk about next semester’s classes. I was curious about the screenwriting class, because I wanted to take screenwriting but thought I had seen that it was only offered every 2 years, so I wanted to make sure I took it at the right time. I ended up with part 2 of the fiction workshop, Electronic Publishing, and the screenwriting class (an elective). Today, I mapped out what the rest of my time here at UBalt will look like. Next fall, I’ll probably be taking Literary Publications, Typographic Form and Function, and Seminar in Literature and Writing. Next spring, I’ll probably take Experimental Forms, Magazine Writing if it’s offered (an elective), and Editorial Style (an elective). The last fall (2011) is a little harder to figure out. I know I’ll be taking the advanced workshop in creative writing, but I’m no sure about my final two electives. Then the last spring (2012), my third one, I’ll be taking my Seminar in Creative Writing and Publishing (a full 6 credits), in which I’ll be finalizing my thesis stories and building 12 copies of a book out of them—basically, 12 copies of my thesis stories in book form, with everything (cover, font, etc.) designed entirely by me. Then I have to do a public reading of my work. This is such a great program!

Finally, when I did my last section of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” for last week’s journal assignment, I came up with something kind of interesting, so I thought I’d post it here. This is an extension (in different points of view) of a slightly varied form of

Section VI

“Icicles filled the long window with barbaric glass. The shadow of the blackbird crossed [the window], to and fro. The mood traced in the shadow an indecipherable cause.”

Icicles filled me, top to bottom, with their barbaric glassiness. The blackbird crossed me, to and fro. And its shadow lent an air of suspicion. What was the bird about to do? What were her plans? “Careful, bird,” I said. “For I am littered with barbaric glass!” The bird crossed again, as if she couldn’t hear a thing.

As the blackbird crossed the window, to and fro, she pondered on the cold, barbaric glass shield that protected it. A moment’s pain and coldness, and she could be safe inside, to enjoy the warmth of the house. But what if the glass did not break? Would she survive? She shivered. Would she survive if she didn’t try? That was the indecipherable question. She paced again, to and fro, and when a cold blast of air took her breath away and pushed her away from the window, she raised her wings and flew straight into the glass.

Blackbird V

It’s been a little while since I last posted, so I thought I’d make a new entry. I’ve actually been meaning to for a few days now, but I keep forgetting. It’s been a little crazy, but things are calming down a little bit, since I finished the Creativity project I was working on and turned in my story, which will be workshopped this Thursday. All the stress aside, I’m actually really enjoying the program so far.

Today, I made an entry in my Creativity journal. It was a response to section V (five) of Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” I’m not a big poetry person, but I made do. I actually kind of like the result! It was fun. I tried to give it the form of an essay, while also offering the kind of creative angle and experimentation that my program generally requires of me. Here it is (and yes, the last line is supposed to say, “What do you think?”):

Journal Response to Section V of “…Blackbird”

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

In this section of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” the narrator seems to be commenting on two specific, very enjoyable things, with the intention of picking a clear winner. The first option is the beautiful inflection that is the blackbird’s whistle/song. The second option is what happens at the end of the blackbird’s song; by that I mean the process of reflecting back on the song, the beautiful, provocative thoughts and “innuendoes” that the song elicits.

In general terms, we can articulate the two options as (1) a particular event and (2) the moment(s) immediately following it. Indeed, the narrator is caught in between said event and its end, appreciating both immensely, as if he/she is in the center of an event horizon, where time and space play tricks, blending the narrator’s two options together until they are nearly inseparable and indistinguishable. At that point, the narrator cannot possibly decide which option is better.

Thus, the narrator’s indecisiveness about which to prefer—the song itself or the thought and innuendo that follow—dangerously takes the reader him/herself toward that event horizon. In such a case, the reader must be careful not to fall victim to the power of the event horizon, must steer clear of its center. The reader is invited to ponder on the song and the innuendo and decide which one is better (whatever “better” means, in this case). The reader must do all this without getting sucked into the event horizon, where the narrator is, where the reader would see everything the same way, at the same speed, losing the details that make one option stand out over the other.

If this were to happen, the reader would indeed be in the same boat as the narrator, and the process would begin again and again, for all of time, until a new reader could succeed where others had failed. Would the process ever stop? Or is the poem simply too interesting and powerful to be solved? At which point it would fade into the center of the event horizon of literature, where everything is the same and nothing is different. What do you think?