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?

RIP, Shayne Dube <3

At 12:32 p.m., earlier “today” (technically yesterday, by now), I received an email from my class agents from Wabash College, just an update on what’s going on since we graduated. It contained some distressing and unexpected news: the guy I roomed with for the first semester of freshman year died last month, September 18th.

I can’t believe I’m just finding out about it. I guess that goes to show we kind of lost touch after a while. He moved into a single, in a quieter building, in the second semester. The next school year, I moved into a single as well, in the same building. He was just a few doors down, and it was nice to talk to him every once in a while. He was a great guy. Gentle and kind, almost to a fault, if there is such a thing. I remember he had a pet bearded dragon. I forget the name, but now I wonder if it’s still alive and who is taking care of it. I think he had other animals at home.

I wish I had kept in contact more, after he moved to another building to become an R.A. for our junior and senior years. We sorted of lost touch after that, and now, more than ever, I feel terrible about that. Shayne was the first student I ever had contact with at Wabash. I remember getting that first email from him, introducing himself. It was a reply to a message I sent out to him and my other roommate, Jon.

Here is his reply:

wassup man? not a whole let here. i just got you email right now czu i
haven’t logged on to my webmail for a while, so i hope you don’t feel like
i didn’t want to send you a reply or anything like that.

anyways, my name is shayne dube (as you already know) and i graduated from
ben davis high shchool in indianapolis. i’m originally from zimbabwe,
which is in southern africa, and i only just moved here a little less than
5 years ago. i haven’t been up to much this summer; i worked a little bit
and spent as much time as possible hanging out with friends. i’ve actually
been out of school since i graduated in may last year (2004).

i’m not much for emails because i usually prefer talking on the phone so
the best way to find out more about me would be to talk on the phone. so
if you’re interested you can call me on my cell phone [and here he gave his cell number]. i
have it with me at all times so anytime you call i’ll most likely be able
to answer it.

right now i’m about to go swimming with my friends

lata

shayne

I can’t believe that was more than 4 years ago now. And more than that, I can’t believe he’s gone.

Rest in peace, Shayne. You did some really good things at school and in the community, and I miss you already.

Lata.

Bennett’s Curse

I went to Bennett’s Curse last night with some friends from my M.F.A. program. The haunted house itself was kind of cool but not scary; maybe I was in a bad spot (in the middle of a bunch of people), but nothing managed to surprise/scare me. It was more of a bonding experience than anything else. The girls wanted to make a human chain, in case they were scared, so I locked arms with my roommate, Kari, for some of it. The second part of the haunted house was a waste. It was mostly just a maze, and there was a guy with a chainsaw at the end, but he didn’t come out until after I had exited. This definitely was not worth $20, but we didn’t mind. It was a fun thing to do together.

Afterwards, we went to a bar/brewery in Hanover and talked, drank (some of us more than others…), and (some of us) ate. It was a good time, just like standing in line for over an hour for Bennett’s Curse. Good conversation.

After Bennett's Curse (taken with my iPhone)

We Like Boys

Wow. My writing exercise for this week was to do a structural repetition, in which something a character or narrator says or does is repeated or echoed, perhaps in a different context, by different people, or on a different scale. Mine started out boring, but it transformed as I was writing it, from a story about two sexually-charged daughters and their mother into a story about a mother who was raped when she was younger and a son (hers) who is coming out of the closet. Still not very original, but I like it so much better than what I started with. I call it

We Like Boys

In 1984, Suzy Salinger had been a rambunctious 16-year-old, but not really one to get herself into trouble. Nevertheless, she had gotten into trouble on that particular November afternoon when she had finally stood up to her mom about dating.

“What can I say, mother?” she had said. “Boys just like me!” And then she had smirked and received a slap across the face and instructions to go to her room. Furious, she had sneaked out her bedroom window that night, for the first time ever, to meet up with an older boy who had said he liked her. And that night, he had raped her.

Twice.

Thinking back on this night, Suzy now began a dialogue with her 15-year-old son, Chad, about respecting women and dating. If things went well, she might even bring up sex. And things did go well because Chad swore he had the utmost respect for women and didn’t think he was ready to date anyone yet, male or female.

“Excuse me?” Suzy said, and picked at her ear. “What did you say?”

“Mom…I like boys. Maybe even…just boys.” Chad looked at his feet, and Suzy saw his face turn crimson.

Shocked as she was, she knew this was 2009, when being gay was almost okay. She worried that rejecting his sexuality now would make her lose him forever, and besides, she was a pretty cool mom, wasn’t she? She could handle this. Nevertheless, she couldn’t help but cry a little; she had to grieve the loss of that heterosexual life she had subconsciously envisioned for him all these years. A beautiful wife. Two-point-five naturally conceived children. Low chances of contracting HIV. An aversion to that shitty pop music—Beyoncé, she remembered—and to the color pink, which even she, a woman, a straight woman, hated with a passion.

But wait. Now she was being unfair and buying into stereotypes. Chad was still Chad, and this wasn’t going to change his personality and tastes. At least, she didn’t think so. She stepped closer to him and put both hands on his head, one on each side. She tilted his face up toward hers and kissed his forehead.

“I was going to talk about sex after all that, but you caught me off-guard,” she said, and smiled. She looked into his eyes, and he smiled back. “I liked boys too when I was your age, of course, and I need to tell you where that got me one night because you need to know what boys can do. And why you don’t have a dad.” She swallowed hard, and then continued: “First of all, you need to remember that you have the right to say no, and it always, absolutely means no. Okay?”

Then Suzy and her gay son sat down to have a serious talk about sex. And boys. And to her great surprise, it was the best conversation they’d ever had.

Where the Wild Things Are

Okay, so there’s probably not much point in blogging about Where the Wild Things Are now, two days after seeing it, but I still want to say a few things. First of all, I really liked it; it’s probably one of my favorite movies, in fact. Visually, it is stunning. While the shaky cam can get a little hard to deal with if you are in the front row like I was, I’m sure that, under normal circumstances, it is mostly effective and only slightly offputing. The most problematic part, meaning the worst of the shaky cam, is the first few minutes.

But what the shaky cam does is try to capture the excitement, spontaneity, and liveliness of being young. The cuts, tracking shots, and shaky cam in the opening scenes combine to give the viewer a sense of what it’s like to be Max—leaping about in a wolf costume, chasing after animals, having a snowball fight, and burrowing into a homemade igloo. I find myself shocked when the older kid jumps on top of the igloo with Max inside it. That scene is unexpected, and it is partially because of the camera movements and cuts that it is effective. The speed of everything is quick until the kid jumps on the igloo, and then everything stops. Cuts get fewer, the camera gets less shaky, and we focus in on Max, crying and furious. I could say more about this, and I’m sure I haven’t done an adequate job with what I did say, but I need to move on because I’ve got lots to do today!

So next, the writing, the imagination. I am incredibly pleased with what goes into this film. There is actually very little in terms of text in the original story, so the writers have to fill in the blank spots to make the movie. They have to add backstory and relationships for the wild things, complexities that one doesn’t find in the book. They also have an interesting reason for why Max is in trouble, one that is very relatable and real. And in a familiar twist, it’s not just one thing that lands him in trouble. It’s a build-up. He trashes his sister’s room after her friends destroy his igloo (and jump on him, in the process), but his mom doesn’t blow up yet; she’s disappointed, of course, and angry, but she doesn’t really blow up until Max acts out just before dinner, jumping on the kitchen counter in his wolf costume, saying, “I’ll eat you up,” and then biting her when she tries to admonish him.

As for the island of wild things, I realize right away that Max arrives there in a different way in the movie: Instead of being sent to his room and turning his bedroom into an island of wild things, he runs out of the house after his mom yells at him, runs through the woods, stumbles on a boat in a river/lake, and rides it to the island. He somehow manages to turn the river/lake into an ocean, and his mind transforms the woods he is running around in into an island full of wild monsters. Once “there,” Max meets the wild things and sees their complex relationships and problems. For the first time, we get some actual insight into the wild things of this wonderful children’s story, and I find myself completely fascinated with what the writers come up with. I see that the problems they have are a combination of the problems a child would run into and the (grownup) problems he/she would encounter in life (i.e., he sees his mom’s relationships and projects them onto the monsters that he imagines, he sees the discord of his own childhood fights and inserts them into his made-up world, and so on). I even notice that, at the end, his mom’s face bears a striking resemblance to the wild things, KW in particular. The fort that Max and the wild things build reminds me of the scene in which Max is laying in his bed, upset, and the camera shows a huge rubber band ball in the foreground. In other words, Max seems to drag the tiniest things from his ordinary life into his imagination when he creates his fantastic island of wild things. The fort also resembles his igloo from the opening scenes of the movie. Forts are Max’s specialty, it seems, and he builds them all in similar fashion.

As for dialogue, that aspect is closely related to the writing, but I will say that the dialogue feels very childlike. And that is a very good thing. Even as I try to get myself into a child’s mindset for this movie, I find myself laughing at the ridiculousness of some of Max’s words and plans (e.g., that the fort will somehow debrain anyone that enters without being welcome). Max has a quick wit, and everything he says in the movie is believable as something a child would say. Children think so differently than grownups and even teenagers; whatever they dream up can be a reality, even if only in their heads. This is one of the most inspiring aspects of the movie, the idea of childlike creativity, the kind we forget about when we grow up. I struggle now, even as a writer, to be as creative as I was when I was a kid, to be as creative as Max.

This movie helps me remember my place in the world, as a grownup (my, that’s weird to say), but it also helps me hold onto that childlike mentality. It helps me tap into my creativity, and for that, I am in love with this movie.

And I’ll definitely be buying it.