I'm so tired. I'm sOoOoOo tired. I wonder should i get up, and get myself a drink...i'm so tired-

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onion mouth

Good sandwiches have onions, but good kisses don't. This creates a problem for dinner daters. Why do we only get one?

In other news, i'm going to try and make homemade pizza tonight.

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6.3.2009

Something I’ve noticed- the birds behind my building are vampires. What trendsetters. This happened when I was conducting hammock experiment number one, which consists of me spending the night in my hammock on my porch. It was only after wondering casually but thoroughly which fat spiders were going to lay eggs under my tongue, and after being woken up to meet my neighbor for the first time and discuss upholstery, that I fell asleep. Right after this, the birds started chirping most giddily. Obviously, my education has been lacking. I was under the impression that the chirping started around the rise of the sun. After more thorough consideration, I decided that one of two things were happening. One: it’s mating season, and they just cant keep it in their pants long enough to sleep. Two: these particular lyricists got bit by a rabid owl, and now sleep in the nest version of a coffin during the day, and then sing the moon into rising while they hunt for blood prey.

Imagine fangs on bluejays. The logistics there seemed a little akward, but nevertheless, I decided to gather up my hammock and save my experiment until the little beasties had been caught and staked

Last night, today was turned by midnight into another today. Today, I saw people pass out without telling me, and then come back and decide not to bring their old selves back with them. I am wary of the new them because they weren’t here while they were out. But it’s okay, because today I passed out and didn’t tell them. Today, I will congratulate them for their unconsciousness, and say goodbye for the last time. Today, I will forget today, and welcome them back, because they have been out for so long.

After dinner, we played catch, and then watched Sir Scott’s Gladiator, but only the arena scenes. Try this: Lord of the Rings without Frodo. Just skip the scenes he’s in. It’s gratifying.

6.6.2009

Melancholy is setting in again, like that neighbor you keep inviting over, even though he always makes you feel …less. Had a Cooper’s Brewery Extra Stout tonight at The Globe with the guys. It was like eating a very wet pumpernickel soaked in coffee. Pretty good, for an Australian (says the American). Was also reminded that break-ups aren’t really break-ups unless you actually stop hooking up. Haha.

Kings of Leon tickets go on sale tomorrow morning–gonna have to jump that. This post sounds more like a to-do list than anything else. I guess I’m just uneasy with what I’m actually supposed to write.

I had a dream last night where we were below the floorboards of a church we were restoring. She did something that pissed me off. Second-guessed me, or just laughed me off. I got angry, and pushed a ladder that fell on her. I heard one of those cracks where you know before you see it that something sick happened. When I walked around the pylon, her skull was shattered all over the floor. The back of her head still had hair on it, and was resting flat against the wood like it had been there all along. What makes a person dream something like this? Guilt? Fear? It bothers me that someone I’ve known since grade school got under my skin to the point where it’s uncomfortable to be at home.

theory on friends: we idealize our friends, ignore their faults, have complete loyalty to them. get a little older, and we discover hormones. Then we betray our friends, but do it with gusto and passion. Get a little older, and then our friends turn into people. We start to see their faults, dislike their faults. Here’s the point where we all realize that there isn’t a single person out there who we think we really, really are friends with, in the hollywood sense of the word. Later, they’ll still piss you off, but you’ll understand why they piss you off. ipso facto, e pluribus unum, and the other way round as well.

The levees broke, and my brain flooded. It overwhelmed my foundations. Swirling muddy eddies stained the sofas in the waiting room of my mind, and when the water level got too high, I had to take refuge in my hair follicles. After it was all over, I had to wade through soggy memories and try to salvage the one’s whose blood red ink had not run.

God, what a pity party. But take it like this. I’m trying to log all the things that I need to hash out, not the good things in my life. The danger here is that by talking about it, I rile myself up, and encourage a self-involved, one-sided hyphen party.

But now for something delightful. I had my first Sour Apple Martini last night. Delicious. Thank you, Buddha (the bartender), and thank you, Coleman (who bought it). You might have converted a militant extra-stout drinker into a sometimes-something-fruity-isn’t-a-sin drinker. Because drinks that taste like lollipops and have cherries at the bottom don’t magically turn me into a ripe damsel in distress.

Hot Frog Nights

Too much time got cut out of this blog – if it were representative, it would show you Athens. Hot sticky frog nights and cicadas downtown, Clayton Street’s Christmas lit avenue; our Champs-Elysées. Thunderstorms that kidnapped our power in the middle of Shutter Island’s own monsoon, just so we could push open your screen door, stand on the porch next to the mildewing lazy boy and watch the real world splendor for us, tell us it still had miracles to give and wonders to show. It would tell you about Kelly of the Tucker and Ben, my Ben no longer mine, and how I love but am never in love, the literal swell and push and rawness (not the good kind) of my sex, and also the orgasm I dug for. About late nights hanging out of my loft and leaky ceilings, how me and Kelly used to hear the dancers out back of Toppers fight with their boyfriends and three o clock frat boys through our third story window, and when the air conditioner never worked, we didn’t sleep, but eeked, the night. Midnight showings and mid day shifts at Chico’s spent dressing the upper middle mothers, grandmothers, and trivia on Wednesdays. Doctor Who with Mark and Jessie. About graduating, about hot tea and my guru Brett, about podcasts, bikes, Vision Video, and housekeeping for the Hilton. About beer pong at Waddell, and the naked sprint. About Chad who left to find himself, and a bug-eyed cat named Oliver Macaroni Tucker. About sweet tea hangovers, and a million hours at Borders writing a manuscript I’ve only just figured out the point off.

But it’s not. And now I’m in Tampa, swinging in my hammock on my porch that backs into Lettuce Lake Park, burning incense towards midnight, and listening to 88.5 Radio Active; the late night soul jam. Bobby Rush, don’t you wish you had a girl like me. Eating baked apple oatmeal with too much syrup in it, and getting into being a grad student. Three years coming, you just watch, I may have an MFA. I’ve thrown out the TV, and tried to kick in the internet, but missed by a hair. I am weak. Hopefully I managed to bruise Hulu, but I won’t see her for a couple of days, so I’ll have to get back to you on that one.

Loose Me

Lord take my stomach, and my heart if you wish it- just take the jitterbug, too. My gut is wilting, one short brick wall of unsettled dust in the sponge of my body. If I had a sedative, or knew where to get one-no, I wouldn’t. But still, it’s been days. Let me loose, foul affliction. Let me glide throught the brush, hear a breeze whistle through them grass lakes and relax. Loose me, looose me.

Wine and Cheese

Many happy returns to my knees, who went on a furious vacation and forgot to tell me. They’ve come back exhausted and itchy.

Question: once your secret identity is revealed, do you have to create another one out of boredom, or do you get one step closer to nirvana?And another: how many times in one wine and cheese party can I stick my foot in my mouth? I’m wondering if I said the single thing that would alienate me from my new kith. Also, I am uninterested in the way budding friendships are awkward. I’d like to relax, and i’d like for Florida to stop laying soft pollen in my epidermis. Ah, newness. It’s destructive.

Fresh produce may be the answer.

Voice and Style in Sandra Cisnero’s "One Holy Night" and John Updike’s "The Other"

After reading Cisnero’s One Holy Night, I had a difficult time accessing Updike’s The Other. To lift a term from David Michael Kaplan’s “Revising Your Prose for Power and Punch”, One Holy Night has punch. Cisnero’s sentences swing between essential communications like “He bought a mango on a stick the first time”(117) without devolving into simplicity because they’re paired with series of connected and interdependent realizations that, with each turn, create lyricism and develop our understanding of the character. “My mother took the crooked walk too, I’m told, and I’m sure my Abuelita has her own story, but it’s not my place to ask” (116), or “What I like to hear him say is how he is Chaq, Chaq of the people of the sun, Chaq of the temples, and what he says sounds sometimes like broken clay, and other times like hollow sticks, or like the swish of old feathers crumbling into dust” (117). The repetition of Chaq in the latter sentence might be discouraged by Kaplan for its repetitiveness, but gives the impression that [Ixchel] is praying to Chaq, thereby inflating his mystique.

There’s a sense of mystery to this particular type of sentence construction; it’s straightforward but lyrical nature tends to show and not tell, forcing us to make assumptions about events not described in detail, and allowing Cisnero to focus less on exposition and more on style and structure. When the narrator remembers her first time with Chaq, there is no explicit mention of the event, only “[t]hen something inside bit me, and I gave out a cry as if the other, the one I wouldn’t be any more, leapt out” (118). What’s more important than exposition here is the narrator’s separation of virgin and non-virgin into two states of being. Cisnero’s abstraction only gives us a clearer impression of the moment, where a more generic turn of phrase would become too abstract and boring.

When I turned to Updike’s The Other, I was immediately struck by the stylistic opposition between that text and Cisnero’s. Not to say that one is better than the other, but that Updike wanted and succeeded in shaping a tone that reflected the subtle and ritual-driven arc of his characters’ lives, something that Cisnero also achieved (tone reflecting plot and character), but since her narrator was younger, and her story in the first person, she was able to use the voice I’ve already described. Updike, on the other hand, adopts a somewhat confusing structure that begins at the ending and ends at the beginning of a thought: “How blissfully little did seem to matter in the fifties!” (493). He’s already begun to situate his tone in a nostalgic vernacular native to the scene he sets; a romance built by fascination with the absent (Priscilla’s twin, Susan). Updike, like Cisnero, never states explicitly what his tone implies, at least not until the short’s close, and when he does, he lets the revelation occur not from the narrator’s point of view, but straight from the character’s mouth, “I’ve always liked you. Loved, should I say? Or would that be too much?” (506). Here’s a nugget of Sylvia Watanabe’s advice in “A Mystified Notion: Some Notes on Voice” in action; let your characters make judgments, not your narrator. It smacks of authenticity, if not necessarily truth.

Updike and Cisnero impress me. He does a great job of writing that “other” into his tone, and she does with repetition and delicious detail what I’d like to do with my own text. One Holy Night is driven by setting and character development, without relying on exposition (my problem). All her exposition is built into the action. When she says “[w]hen I woke up, the cucumber pushcart was dust and Abuelita was sprinkling holy water on my head” she’s simultaneously pushing the plot forward and building Abuelita’s character. This multitasking also pushes me as a reader to attach importance to characterization, since Abuelita’s character is so intertwined with her actions. Hopefully, remembering and creating this interdependence between exposition and action will allow me to introduce some badly needed context into my manuscript, instead of avoiding exposition all together, which is what I’ve been doing recently.

Sam Lipsyte's "The Ask" and Kurt Vonnegut

Lord there’s something important about Vonnegut’s writing. I’ll have to expand on this further, but apparently what I really want to say is that Sam Lipstyle’s The Ask has put me in an unproductive and slightly vindictive mood. I finished it around three, and meant to get right to business writing a response, but didn’t. Instead, I watched TV for… five hours. As far as wasting time goes, TV does a fine job, and what it did this afternoon was allow me to not think about The Ask and Milo Burke’s hateful person. I disliked Milo intensely, and while it’s likely this was Lipstyle’s intent, it did not make The Ask a pleasurable read. Everything about him, from his art school background and resulting self importance (shit that’s me) to his terrible job, his narrow, egotistical but witty commentary on everything that always loops back to himself, and his not quite self-deprecating but seemingly effacing dialog with his own member made my hackles rise. Save me from another daydream about your penis between some woman’s breasts. It wasn’t even hot. Save me from having to read about your existential crisis, because I hate the way you sound, and because you sound like me. And what about Milo’s wife? The only character I wanted to know more about was left frustratingly underdeveloped. Writing this response is making me angry, and I don’t want to be angry. Because Lipstyle has a gift for dialog, for witticisms and for noticing the parts of people that are uncertain, shameful, and human. Maybe I disliked it because I want my heroes to be models for my life, not to be my life. Really. Escapism, you say? Not even a little. I know who I am, most of the time. You can write about all these things (uncertainty, shame, and being human) and still be inspiring. Beautiful.

Tom Robbins "Villa Incognito"

Let’s call this a catalog of memoirs/memories/mnemonic device. Object one on the list, Tom Robbins, and Villa Incognito, just finished. I remember waxing poetics, and jaunts into didactic tones, but his is an aesthete’s pedantry, one countered by enough storytelling and respect for character I am alive from it of it. ”Long live Mars Albert Stubblefield.” I am loathe to deprive the sentence of its fellows, but my scratch-n-sniff elucidation overpowers better judgement.

Something smacks of indulgence in Villa Incognito, in all of his work, but maybe that’s the style he proffers in, and what if style births character, in a back-handed fashion? I am besotted, but a little worried. Can I separate Jace from myself enough to make him his own, yet retain enough to flesh him? Know his mind? And Stella. Is she too much me? What nags is the epiphany that she needed to be me, had been me all along. Time ought to comment.

But wait. On further reflection; am I annoyed by his character’s passions/quirks/revelry in sex because of my own problems, or because every single one of his characters are the same; that is, an extension of Robbins? And if so, can I fault him for it?