Exercise 3, part two: Write a half-page to a page of narrative, up to 350 words, which is all one sentence.

I cheated again. I couldn’t keep the sentences going, just like in the Marquez one, so I made up for it by having two different stories. First I did this:

–

He looked over the checklist — the helicopter, the bowling balls, the torrential flood — and it occurred to him that this list was like the surrealist poetry he and his friends had constructed in their college years, and he wondered where his scrapbook of those times had gone to; he was making a mental checklist of places to look for that scrapbook — in the drawer of the desk in the study, in the credenza behind the office desk, in the storage room — and it occurred to him that he was making another list that might possibly be another surrealist poem if only he could remove them from their obvious connection such that they were as strangely connected as the first list.

–

WEAK. Then I continued the story from before:

–

Standing frozen I couldn’t move a muscle except for my heart pounding, my lungs beginning to grate against the inside of my chest in desperation, for I was still holding my breath and could feel the explosion beginning with the red feeling in my belly; my lungs and the red feeling became one with each other as I stood there frozen looking at the very thing I wanted most, my heart pounding, flopping like a fish out of water, a salty, briney feeling between my chest and my ears somehow, around my neck like a brace, a cast, a tight corset, and I felt myself inhale, and I heard the scream begin.

It was outside me, a wail, something far off, something someone else was doing, as if through cotton or through a brick wall, and there was a slow realization that the wail was coming from inside the red, salty feeling, inside me, through me and filling the room with a piercing howl of force that surprised me even more; the howl grew louder in surprise, and I heard no gap in it when I paused to breathe – it reverberated, flowed through the room like a torrent, a tornado, a hurricane and she woke and stood in the eye of the storm, her eyes fixed on me in horror, and I could see it clearly, as if it were noontime and the harsh sun were pouring through the window with such force as to break the panes of glass.

–

Yes, I’ve had panic attacks.

One of the things I love about ‘Steering the Craft’ is how clever Ursula K. Le Guin is. Here are the instructions for part one of exercise three:

Short and Long

Part One: Write a paragraph of narrative, 100-150 words, in sentences of seven or fewer words. No sentence fragments! Each must have a subject and a verb.

Hah! No sentence fragments!

Anyway. She suggests describing someone entering a room where someone is sleeping. Here’s what I wrote:

–

I could barely see it. A slit of light bounced off its corner. But she stirred in bed. This was going to be difficult.

Holding my breath, I opened the door. A moment of silence passed. She didn’t stir. I resented her. I hated her just then. I could barely contain this feeling. Her smug sleeping wasn’t my target. Smugness is all I can call it. No, I had something else in mind. I had to keep it together.

The darkness was swallowing everything. One single shaft of light beat down. It pointed the way, casting sharp relief. Shoeless, my feet explored the floor. No obstacles marred my path. I was almost ignoring my eyes. I felt the cool wooden floor. She slept. Oh, I hated her.

I froze. I couldn’t move. It was within reach. I couldn’t move. Why couldn’t I move? She stirred. Hatred welled up. A red feeling grew in my belly. I felt my eyes widen. Why couldn’t I move? It was there on the nightstand…

–

It’s hard to be descriptive of what this person is after. I really had nothing in mind, just that it was on the nightstand, and that a corner of it was lit from the window. Lots of plagiarism from ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ too. ‘The disease had sharpened my senses, not dulled, not destroyed them’ has too many words, however.

Ok, Smoke_Whore asks me to approach ‘Crossing Over’ with an open mind, because Edwards guesses people’s names the first time.

Here’s what I suggest:

First, check out this How-To on cold readings. Here’s another one, that uses John Edwards as an example.

Here’s a drinking game: Every time John Edwards guesses a name and has to be told by the audience member what their relationship is to that name, drink a shot. You’ll be very, very drunk at the end.

And think about it: If you were in a room with 100 people, and announced that someone in that room had a father who’d had a heart attack, wouldn’t it be very likely that you were right? And if you weren’t, wouldn’t it be easy to say that in one quarter of the room (still 25 people), there was someone whose father was having chest pains? And if you were wrong, wouldn’t it be easy to find, in 25 people, a person who is worried that their father is in ill health?

That’s what John Edwards does for a living.

You think you’re tough jumping out of airplanes on ‘Fear Factor?’ Eating bugs on ‘Survivor?’

You know NOTHING about hardship until you’ve lived under the strict rules of Edwardian England, as in ‘Manor House,’ which I just can’t stop watching.

My local channel has been running them two in a row in the middle of the night, so I sit there in rapt amazement as they work out their heirarchical troubles. This is quality stuff.

The moment when I knew this show really meant it was when the house threw a garden party, and the local Clarion Bicycle Club chapter showed up uninvited and started telling the staff about socialism. The look of disapproval on the face of the lord, the furtive grins on the faces of the staff as they sheepishly sing along with unionist hymns…

The show also spends a lot of time exploring how completely awful it was to live at the top of that heirarchy. The only one who seems to like it is the head of the house, and why shouldn’t he?

The participants frequently compare their lives within the project to their 21st century lives, and this to me is the best part. They agonize about how constrained they are, and how rigidly structured their every waking moment is. This is at every level of the heirarchy.

I think that Marxism is an antiquated view, and that we’re at a place in time where it’s hard to call for solutions from the 1900s. But if it took Marxism to get us through this Edwardian crap, and the similar social systems throughout Europe, then right on, comrade!

I’m sitting here at the computer reading the web and listening to music. I’m in a sleep-deprived state, and I really need to eat something.

My days and nights are still backwards, though they’re migrating towards normal human being waking hours (as opposed to the vampire hours I keep now).

For the last few days, I’d go to sleep at about 9am and wake up at about 4 or 5pm. This is tremendously inconvenient if you’re me, because it takes you another two hours to actually wake up, even if you drink coffee and eat food.

And speaking of food, if you’re me, you don’t have a lot in the kitchen, and if it’s 7pm by the time you wake up enough to get out of the house, where will you go for breakfast? And if you somehow manage not to go to the grocery store before 9, and you don’t want to drive across town to the place that stays open 24/7, what do you do? Yes, that’s right, you wait until 7:30am which is when the grocery opens.

You go in and you’re bleary-eyed, and everyone’s perky, because it’s morning! Yay! Perky morning people! And how are YOU this morning!? You want to say, ‘Fuck off. Sell me groceries. Why can’t you be open all night?’

The other thing is that I need to get some tires put on my car. They’re bald like Telly Savalas. Who loves you, baby? Anyway, how can I get work done on my car if I’m asleep? I don’t want to leave it there, because I’m obsessive that way.

Thankfully, the sleep schedule is migrating slowly towards what you earth people call ‘normal.’

So for the first time in history, I watched a full episode of ‘Crossing Over,’ the show that demonstrates just how gullible people can be.

It’s called a ‘cold reading.’ Anyone with any wit and creativity about them can do it. Especially if they have a self-selecting roomfull of people who all want to ‘make contact.’ It’s really emotional judo, with people stepping up to be flipped by the master.

I think it would be instructive for people to watch that show and learn how it works. It’s the kind of sneakiness that you see all over the place, in advertising, in politics, in any situation where the crafty want control over the fuzzy-headed. It’s not that hard to understand.

First you make a selection statement. You just throw out something like, “I see a red rose and the letter S.” In a roomful of a hundred or so people, all desperately wanting to make the connection, it’s pretty likely you’re going to find someone who has a story about a rose and the letter S.

Then, after that, using the leverage of authority you get from your connection to the ‘spirit world,’ you make educated guesses about your target. If she’s a young woman, you talk about the dead grandmother. If he’s a crying middle-aged man, you talk about the dead mother or wife. If she’s a grandmother, you talk about the husband.

On and on like that. The target will fill in all the details for you when they verify that your shot-in-the-dark guess was actually a very specific message to them from someone who is dead. You only have to get them started and they’ll practically do the reading for you.

The medium gets props for putting on a good show, with his balance of ‘I’m a woo-woo psychic’ and ‘I’m just a guy who wouldn’t bullshit you.’ But he is a guy who would bullshit you.

Watch this show and think subversive thoughts. Please.

Yesterday I got a new CD, Duke Ellington’s ‘Soul Call.’ It was recorded at a live performance, about 8 months before I was born.

In honor of it’s proximity to the date of my birth, I give to you: ‘Madness In Great Ones.’

Click to listen.

Update:

Is anyone actually listening to the musique du jour? Because if you’re not, I don’t really have a need to go to the trouble.

Not a chastisement or anything. Just a warning that I’m probably going to quit if there’s no interest. It wasn’t a big deal when I had a cable modem, but now I’m on a dialup.

Steering the Craft, Exercise 2: ‘You are Gabriel Garcia Marquez.’ Write without break or punctuation.

I broke the rules and made it into three paragraphs. It was hard to keep going, so I shifted perspectives. The stated purpose of the exercise is to get you to appreciate punctuation by tossing it out, and to show how one sentence should serve the next. What I got out of it was that without the structure of the sentence, there’s nothing on which to build narrative. You lose track of where you’ve been and where you’re going, both as writer and reader.

Here it is:


The worlds revolving around him and he can see each one as if he could pluck it out of the air simply outstretch his hands and cup them in the stream like catching minnows or pollywogs about to change transform to frog to grow up into adult and wisdom and crone he looks at the worlds in his hands cupped like water he could drink and taste the sweet and metallic and sour and bilious and sweet sweet worlds

They all saw him with their tiny eyes on their tiny worlds tracing whorling orbits they called singing paths tracing out music and joy and sadness into the space between they saw him and they saw the hands the fingers the cupped hands the creases the folds cupping the singing path and catching them in an eddy the creases the folds the tiniest ridges of fingerprint the motion into the mouth the gaping blackness the warmth the metabolism the joy and sadness

It was over in an instant.

I started working my way through a book called ‘Steering The Craft,’ by Ursula K. LeGuin. It’s the book form of a workshop she gives, on the craft of writing.

It’s a series of exercises. I think I’m going to ‘blog my exercise work, unless it’s just too embarassing.

Exercise 1 is to write something to be read aloud, to emphasise gorgeousness. Here’s what I came up with in the short time I gave to it (presented without any real editing or critique, because that’s how it should be):


The Letter O

Over and over
with nothing beautiful insight
The O not the zero and troubadour meanderings. Took its own tail and auroraborealous shone in the sky. Circling the sun and halo the moon. Bothered to come back where it started in a single simple loop.

She said, “Oooooooooooo,” out of need for narrative.

She sang, “Doo, do-dooo, do-dooo,” by way of prayer.

God answered, thusly when he spoke: “Take a walk on the wild side.” He went on to say, “Don’t expect me to make sense. O is the middle of my name, take it for a spin and walk the dog.”

Staring at an eddy in a meander in a river in a meadow. Oxbow. Oxen in a rice paddy, orientalism extreme. Shoot shakes shot with a beefheart thing. The captain. The mothership, the mothership never was too happy with us for plagiarism.

O, O how I love you. Jackie on the phone from Greece in that tight dress with the sunglasses.

O tannenbaum can you see. By the leaves unchanging light.

What’s your favorite Constitutional Amendment?

The Fourth?