So, this article from The Guardian cracked me up:
Writers’ Top Rules for Writing Fiction
They are diverse in style and content, everything from Richard Ford’s, “Marry someone who loves you who thinks you becoming a writer is a good idea” and “Don’t have children,” to Elmore Leonard’s “Using adverbs is mortal sin,” to Margaret Atwood’s “Take a pencil to write on airplanes.”
So, in lieu of me writing something new and provocative for my blog, I’m reposting stuff I’m working on for class. Hah! This is a piece in a very different vein than my last; I had a go at personal essay/memoir writing. I got both the letter and this piece workshopped last Tuesday, and I am pumped to revise. The letter needs to be shorter; it’s really a cover letter, and I’ll repost an updated version. This one, they said, needed to be longer…and possibly a suite of poems. Here it is for now!
***
Twelve Years of Saying Goodbye
Twelve: We’re in Alaska, and share a hotel room. I see the backs of my grandmother’s calves for the first time. They are veiny and look like they’ve been through several wars. “When you’re my age, your feet are blocks of wood,” she tells me.
Thirteen: I am in her living room that smells of camellia blossoms. She pulls her thick wool cardigan aside to show her pacemaker to me. It’s a round alien box, visible under her papery skin.
Fourteen: She is sitting on the grassy hillside on the Marin coast, gazing at cormorants and grebes through her spotting scope. The wind tousles her thick gray hair. “I want you to remember her like this,” my dad tells me. And I do.
Fifteen: She stops driving the year I start. She puts her foot on the gas, not the brake, and rams through her garden fence. She’s done after that.
Sixteen: She likes to go birding still, down by the marsh near her house. She’s starting to forget the names of the birds, though.
Seventeen: It’s the last of the yearly visits to her house. She gives me a hat she’s been knitting, wool, her last knitting project. It’s a little too advanced for me—cable knit. I take it anyway. Even if I never finish it, I figure, it’ll be something we both touched.
Eighteen: My father and brother move her out of her house, the house my father grew up in. I’m secretly glad to be busy with college, unable to help. We visit her in the home and she’s a scaled-down version of herself. Our conversations loop on each other.
Nineteen: I think about sending her some calming poetry on tape. Mary Oliver. I think about sending Dylan Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, but I don’t want to break her heart. Or mine. I send nothing. I’m afraid of calling her on the phone.
Twenty: We call her on Christmas. She has no idea it’s Christmas. She has good days and bad days, at this point. Christmas is a bad day.
Twenty-one: My mom calls her on her 91st birthday. “Is it my birthday?” she gasps, excited. “I must be one hundred years old today!”
Twenty-two: I think about sending her poetry again, but she can’t use the tape player any more. And she wouldn’t remember it. So I don’t.
Twenty-three: I realize that I haven’t seen her in years, and had better hurry up. My brother and I visit her. She’s moved from the apartment room to a glorified hospital bed. She is so frail; I do not recognize her at first. We talk. It’s a five-minute conversation but she’s lucid enough. “Don’t wait too long to come again,” she says, earnestly, as we’re leaving. Of course, I do.
Twenty-four: My dad calls to tell me the story: It’s an early morning. She wakes, goes into cardiac arrest, and realizes that she is dying. She welcomes death. I think to myself, it was a blessing that she woke up in order to die. I wished then that I knew how to grieve now that she was actually dead.
Turns out that this blog doesn’t just update itself. 
Here’s something I’m working on for my class, wherein we write everything except poetry or short stories….
***
To whom it may concern:
I write to you today, not to complain per se (because I know that actual complaint is a bit ridiculous in a place like this), but rather to make an amiable suggestion, as a client, since I am after all one of the multitudinous throng whom you serve so tirelessly. In recent years, here on Level Eight, I’ve felt a little—how shall I say it—bored, perhaps, or at least having a level of ennui that was never, I’m sure, intended by The Management. A certain type of boredom is expected in some Levels, for example the Swamp of the Wrathful and Sullen, but certainly not all the way down here. I would imagine that a sense of impending doom, awe, and of course pant-shitting terror would be more far appropriate to the milieu. My drift, Gentlemen, is this: I believe I could manage Level Eight in a far more modern and efficient way than the current staffing.
I do not wish to overstep my bounds as a client; I simply feel the need to share feedback from my customer service experience. When I was assigned to Level Eight, I had the highest hopes that I would be plunged into an eternity of soul-wrenching pain, and indeed when I first experienced the skin-blistering heat of the lakes of burning pitch, I was impressed. My enthusiasm for Level Eight began to wane when it was over six earthly days from my arrival before I got personal attention from the staffing. Even then, the staff member in question merely prodded by buttocks and spleen with a pitchfork that was only slightly rusty, causing me little lasting damage and only a brief moment of fear. This level of service correlates poorly with the heinousness of my earthly crimes. I am personally responsible for the bankruptcy of hundreds, the starving of children, the disbanding of at least a dozen families. I took people who trusted me implicitly and turned them onto their cold, broke asses. Should I not be punished accordingly? Is a slight poke on the bum what The Management thinks is fitting punishment for someone who is responsible for the suicide of three people and the alcoholism of fifteen? Sirs, to be blunt: I was saddened by the current state of the Organization, and I wish desperately for changes to be made.
Firstly, and most importantly, the current scenery needs a major update. To be frank, burning lakes of fire and demons with whips are tacky, totally stuck in the 14th century. Considering the seven centuries of technological advances since then, it’s a wonder no use of modern technology has been made: no napalm, no nuclear radiation, no fiendish ways with hairspray. Perhaps in the era of Dante an effective contra-passo punishment for political corruption might have been being prodded by demons in a burning lake of fire, but in the 21st century? Please. Some kind of literal shitstorm, or possibly a sort of re-living of the most desperate moments of those whom the clients harmed would be more appropriate, don’t you think?
Aside from the actual landscape of the Organization, I’m quite sure that the current staff is being used in a fiendishly inefficient way, if you’ll excuse the pun. From my extensive Human Resources and campaign management experience, I would be able to downsize the staffing needs of the entire Organization by 25%, freeing up essential personnel for client intake services. We could be serving million more every day, if only we could allocate the staffing resources properly. (I suppose “Human Resources” isn’t an entirely accurate term.)
Finally, I feel that the Eighth Level in particular should be restructured to incorporate all of the varieties of fraud relevant in today’s world. Street pimps are in the same ditch as the Henry VIII and Charles Ponzi. Dot-coms and corporate fraud are a whole different kettle of fish than simony and sorcery. This level of disorganization is simply unacceptable, given the long-standing reputation of the Organization. I understand that chaos is an important value to the Organization, but let us make it controlled a chaos, a streamlined chaos, all-in-all a chaotic pit of terror that best serves its ever-widening client base while meeting the Management’s mission and vision. Please consider my offer of restructuring and assistance, as I am wholly your man.
Yours sincerely,
A Concerned Soul
Dear Concerned Soul:
Consider yourself hired.
-MGMT
Ever since I was fifteen years old and stumbled across Sluggy Freelance, I’ve been secretly in love with webomics. In high school, webcomics and I went at it like rabbits. I’d read ten or fifteen daily, mostly on sites like Keenspot. I mellowed out in college a bit, mostly because I picked up the habit of paper comics instead. In fact, I became somewhat of a comics lit-geek. Now it’s kind of surreal to think that many of the comics I used to read have been around for TEN YEARS. When did that even happen?
These days I read only a few regularly: xkcd, Questionable Content, all of the creations of Drew Toothpaste and Natalie Dee, and sometimes Dinosaur Comics or Wondermark. There are others that I enjoy, a list far too long to mention. Except one. Recently I sat down and read in about three sittings the entirety of Anders Loves Maria, a Swedish comic by Renee Engstrom that just recently ended. My god. I cannot believe literature/entertainment of this quality is available on the internet for free. Seriously! The comic is a love story, spanning about four years of work which I devoured in just a few hours. It’s beautifully drawn, and has a masterful story structure.
Seriously, log off of Warcraft, sign out of gmail, and read this comic. Start at the beginning. It’s totally worth your time. And I don’t say that lightly about comics.
<resist> urge to go through and rank every comic I’ve ever read </resist>
Anyway, more later about my classes with David Wagoner, absurdist plays, and all of the other things that are bouncing around in my pea brain.
Badass is a fascinating and problematic concept to me. Even the word itself makes no sense: someone who is badass is neither bad, nor an ass, nor so they have a substandard bottom. Exactly what other qualities they possess is up for significant debate.
The dictionary (American Heritage) says badass is vulgar slang for “a mean-tempered or belligerent person.” Dictionary.com expands on this definition, stating that a badass is someone “distinctively tough or powerful; so exceptional as to be intimidating.” As far as I can tell, the word seems to have spawned out of the blaxploitation films of the 60s and 70s, or in any case it is a new word, only about 50 years old.
The internet (by which I mean the stew of popular culture in which we all squat) seems to define badass as follows:
1. Violence
Anyone badass, says Culture, is going to need to kick some serious ass. The asses kicked are sometimes of the deserving, sometimes not. Badass does not come with a particular moral code: there are badass good guys and badass bad guys. Either way, badass people are not to be messed with, or they will hurt you. Like, real bad.
2. Appearance
To be able to inflict the appropriate amount of violence, a badass person must have the appropriate body type. You must be muscular, in-shape, and able to flip out and kick stuff in the face at any moment. In addition, many badasses have adopted an appearance and attitude to signify this readiness of flipping out and kicking stuff. Signifiers traditionally include sunlgasses, leather, spikes, and/or wacky costumery. The mere presence of these signifiers DO NOT, however, necesarily mean that the person in question is a badass. The form of badass without the content is called posing, and the Intarwubs looks on posers with extreme disdain.
3. Lack of emotion
Badass people show no emotion on the outside. On the inside, though, they are often a powder keg of repressed feelings: whether avenging a family member’s death or settling a personal vendetta, there is usually a rationale behind their actions. That being said, the point is that badass people do not freak out in circumstances when regular people would be gibbering and/or dead. Instead, they sometimes have a witty catchphrase to say, or even better, no reaction at all.
Andy Samberg of Saturday Night Live (with “Neil Diamond” and JJ Abrams) says it best:
You may have noticed that this definition of Badass is overwhelmingly male. In fact, most of the urbandictionary.com definitions of badass specifically revolve around men. So what about women? If women are to be Badass, says the Intarwebs, they need to act like badass men.
Violence is the same. Badass appearance for women usually plays up their sexuality. Lack of emotion is key, but since we all know women are hysterical*, emotional creatures, we secretly know that their underlying current of Feelings could reach up and incapacitate them at any moment. I mean, emotions are the secret of badass men, too, but there’s no way that their feelings would cripple them at key points in the final battle, right?
My goodness. What a can of worms I am opening. Look at them go. For a fun time, google How to Become a Badass, or images of Badass.
Let me be clear: I don’t see anything wrong with that definition of badass, I just think it’s a bit limiting. I’m looking for a broader definition of badass, one less focused on ripping the crap out of stuff. Some crap-ripping, well, that’s okay. But that’s not the be-all and end-all of badass.
For example, my roommates and I last year wrote a list of badass attributes that we posted on our fridge. It reads as follows:
I imagine a more all-encompassing definition of badass, one in which the end result is not violence, but rather a sort of ultimate authenticity. I know a three year old girl who is so totally herself without letting anyone else control who she is or will be…she’s pretty badass. Badass, to me, is a combination of self-sufficient, fierce, purposeful, authentic, multitalented, and passionate. And as much as I love me some Reservoir Dogs, I love fierce authenticity more.
And thus it is so.
*Note for my readers who didn’t get the same flavor of liberal arts education as me: Hysteria. I think it’s a hilarious word. Hysteria comes from the Greek word for uterus. The basic theory of the Greeks, our noble and wise cultural predecessors, was that all the ladies were crazy because of their babymakers. The whole menses-babies-lack of penis thing confused the hell out of our classical anscestors, to the point where they came up with wacky theories about menstrual blood being the least pure of all the humours and fluids (sperm being the purest), thus justifying on a biological level thousands of years of misogyny. Whew. In other news, in the 1800s certain doctors discovered that since feminine hysteria obviously came from the uterus, the answer to curing it was clearly to stimulate the clitoris, thus calming the uterus and making the woman posessing said organs more sane. I suspect it was a popular treatment. That’s right, ladies. Orgasms make you less crazy.
I picked up a book at the library the other day: A Season In Hell, by Arthur Rimbaud. I know little if nothing about Rimbaud. To be perfectly honest, I picked it up because of a line from a Gregory Corso poem (Marriage):
What a husband I’d make! Yes, I should get married!
So much to do! Like sneaking into Mr Jones’ house late at night
and cover his golf clubs with 1920 Norwegian books
Like hanging a picture of Rimbaud on the lawnmower
like pasting Tannu Tuva postage stamps all over the picket fence
like when Mrs Kindhead comes to collect for the Community Chest
grab her and tell her There are unfavorable omens in the sky!
It’s a fabulous poem, and I recommend you go read the whole thing. Anyway, Rimbaud. I knew very little about him, and from the introduction I learned that he wrote A Season in Hell in 1873 at age 18, after going on a drug-fueled homosexual love journey that ended in violence, alcoholism, heartbreak and apparently, this essay. I’m not quite sure what to call it—essay, poem, rant, generalized adolescent freakout put onto paper. It’s really what so many people feel in their raging, hormonal hearts.
The remarkable things to me about this work are twofold: One, the raw passion of the work for the time. The 1870s in France were a time of political turmoil—the Franco-Prussian War, reflections of Eastern European communism. Somehow the inner turmoil in the work is even fierier than the world at the time. Secondly, the age at which it was written. I know I couldn’t turn out prose of that quality at age 18. It feels like Salinger of the 1800s.
What I can’t decide is a) if I like it or not, and b) if it’s “good.” By “good,” I mean effective to its aims. I think it actually is decently effective at being a part of the throes of adolescent “passion as suffering.” I guess I’m just not sure whether or not the suffering stirs me much. Part of me is impressed, feels cathartic fierceness in his words. The pragmatic woman who’s passed through the gauntlet of the teenage years and the first bit of the 20s wants to say, “Hey. Arthur. Get over it, you silly man.” I’m not sure what to think.
Here’s the overture*, so that you can come to your own damn conclusions (which I would be keen on hearing):
“Once, if I remember right, my life was a celebration where all hearts were open and all wines flowed.
One night I saw Beauty in my lap. And I found she was bitter, and I called her names.
I found weapons to use against justice.
I ran away. Poverty, hate, you witches, my treasure was left in your care.
I managed to wither all human hope inside me. I attacked like a wild animal, and strangled every joy.
I called for executioners, I wanted to die chewing on their gum butts. I called for diseases, so I could suffocate in sand, in blood. Unhappiness was my god. I lay down in the mud, and dried off in the crime-infested air. I played the fool until I was really crazy.
And by spring I had the scary laugh of an idiot.
Now, a while ago, when I saw about to go Argh! for the last time, I thought I’d try to find the key to that lost celebration where—maybe—I could recover my appetite.
That key is Selfless Love. (—which goes tot show you I was dreaming.)
“You stay a hyena, etc….” shouts the demon who once crowned me with pretty poppies. “Go find death—use all your appetites, your egotism, and all the Seven Deadly Sins.”
Oh, I did too much of that. But Satan, please, don’t look so upset! And while we’re waiting for a few last-minute cowardices, here. You like writers with no talent at all for description or instruction, so take these pages. They’re for you I tore them out of my notebook of a lost soul.”
…mon carnet de damné…
What do you think? Deep? Pointless? Any good? Option D: Other?
*This being from the version translated by Robert Maplethorpe and published in 1986 by Bullfinch Press.
