What I’ve been up toApril 18, 2008

I can’t say I’ve been idle lately. I’ve been working feverishly on my novel, which I’ve considered posting here but haven’t had the guts to do. It’s nowhere near polished.

But I’ve been up to other things as well, I just finished editing the first annual MFA Anthology of Creative Writing for the program at SDSU. The compilation is an effort of the Writers Collective, (a student organization of which I’m the head cheese). Here’s a link to the finished product, which is available at lulu.com…

http://www.lulu.com/content/2388038

It’s my first effort as an editor, and I’m rather proud of how it turned out.

I don’t know whether it’s the burgeoning San Diego spring or what, but some force is compelling me to take on more tasks than I probably should. Another thing I’ve been doing a lot of is bookbinding. Perhaps all the business with editing and publishing made me rediscover the great mystique of books, physical books, I mean. I recently bought materials to build my own book press: a couple of boards and screws and wingnuts. There’s something about binding your own book, it’s irresistible. I bound and pressed a hard-bound book of blank paper for myself recently, and I’m using it now as a dream journal. Graham Greene, the author, published a dream journal, it was his last work to be published during his lifetime. I’m convinced that dreams can be correlated with literature. Not sure how, but I guess that’s what my novel tackles. More to come soon.

Another not fiction postMarch 6, 2008

It’s been quite a busy semester for me, one fraught with peril, suspense, danger, and the occasional compulsory laundry duty. The bulk of my sweat and tears have been going into starting up an organization on campus called The Writers Collective at SDSU, (check out our wiki website). But somehow I managed to recently get a story into an online magazine (forthcoming) called Theives Jargon (click here) , the story should appear around the end of March or mid April. It seems like many things are going my way, but are getting harder at the same time, so maybe that’s a good sign. I will post some actual fiction soon.

Virgil was still the frog boy…December 18, 2007

This story isn’t exactly a story, it’s an exercise that I completed for a class this semester. The stipulation of the exercise was this: somewhere in the story, you have to say “Virgil was still the frog boy.” We got together during finals week and everyone read their story. Some were about kissing frogs, one incorporated the frog suit from Super Mario Brothers 3, which I thought was rather clever. Anyway, here was my addition to the pot:

Because common arithmetic failed to explain the situation, Dr. Sound developed an entirely new set of mathematics. The problem was this: in past two months, the earth’s rotation had slowed to a halt. Physicists across the world were reacting to the situation in unexpected ways. A physicist in Holland, after sixty plus hours of mulling over formulas in a small lab without sleep or sunlight, continued to pluck at her head in frustration even though all her hair had been plucked out. In New York, only days after the crisis was announced, another physicist released into Central Park his German Shepard, his toucan, and his beloved ant farm before driving his car and himself into the East River. Every representative of the department of physics at the Sarbonne in Paris absconded to a bomb shelter in order to wait out the crisis.

Dr. Sound dropped a mirror into the fishbowl on his worktable as he was accustomed to do every other day in order to exercise his Beta-fish, Virgil. The black, tasseled fish jerked back and forth in zig-zag lines from one side of the mirror to the other. Beta-fish are easily confused and they will eagerly attack other Beta-fish, especially if the enemy moves and looks exactly like they do.

“We’ll be alright, Virgil,” said the old man into the mouth of the fishbowl. “We’ll be fine ‘cause we’re not scared.  Are we?” Dr. Sound’s new mathematics would soon provide the formula to explain why the Earth had stopped. He worked for hours in the low light of the kerosene lantern, feverishly penning the final lines of the formula. Sigma equals a triangle with a squiggly line through it which yields three dots in a row, is less than or equal to a little smiling frog-boy drawing, divided by gravity, times the cubed root of Hamlet, equals a sketch of an upside-down umbrella. With a remainder of plus or minus two elephants.

“Eureka!” blurted Dr. Sound. The completed formula spanned over thirty three pages of graph paper, but the gist was easily summarized into this statement: on an infinite linear timeline, the predictability of all observable events falls to zero.

            Dr. Sound turned on the radio. White noise on one station. Emergency broadcast system on the next. None of the stations came through except one: a rational, aluminum voice was reading from the book of Genesis. Dr. Sound knew that soon the Earth would halt completely and gravity would loosen its grip and all things not fastened to the Earth would float away forever, including oxygen.  The air was already thin and his breaths were shallow.

He flicked a lighter and held it to the hand-rolled Cuban cigar in his mouth.  The flame was small, but it did the job.  And through a ring of smoke he noticed that the fish had stopped fluttering around the fishbowl.  He leaned closer and saw that the mirror was cracked. A thin trail of translucent blood hung weightless in the water. Above it a slick black lump barely penetrated the surface. Virgil was still.

“The frog-boy symbol,” he muttered. The cigar fell from his mouth and smoldered a black hole into the wooden desk. Dr. Sound was looking at his math. The smiling frog-boy hovered just inches from his nose, burning like a coal. It was an error. He ran his finger up the lines and labyrinths of symbols and meanings, trying to find the source of his mistake. He made a correction, then another, and the further back he went the more mistakes he found. His worn, yellow pencil scratched out rows of false symbols and it scribbled in new symbols, tearing paper, cracking graphite, until it slipped from the sweaty hand that held it and spiraled slowly, quietly, toward the ceiling.

The Cake Man

(This is a revamped version of the story by the same name that I posted a few months ago. Feel free to leave comments and feedback.)

 

I pull the wrinkled paper from my back pocket and unfold it.  Alvis writes like a chicken.  Two weeks ago, when I received the letter, I had to decode each word.  Now, I re-read it for the hundredth time and hope that somewhere in it I’ll find a clue, something telling.  He wrote, How’s the acting business?  Don’t give up on finding work.  Dry today, maybe, but when it rains it pours. Alvis is reliable as the mail when it comes to delivering motivational platitudes.  Still planning to be in the neighborhood for Christmas?  Hope we can get together and talk, I could use your expert advice.  And here his handwriting got smaller, more concentrated: Hate to ask, but would you mind stopping by the place to make sure everything is ok?  Jim-Jim and Girl Spider Man are still in the back somewhere.  Find them a good home.  Signed, Fondly, Alvis Borgchild.  And underneath that, in careful print: Alvis Borgchild.

A trickle of sweat rolls down my crack as I lean on the flank of my truck in the empty parking lot.  Have I come to the wrong place?  Is this a joke?  No cameras are visible—if this is a reality show it’s not a very good one.  Taken in panorama, the familiar landscape is more lonesome than I remember: grassy land rolls out flat in every direction to a grey, tree-topped horizon.  The bakery I stand before is condemned.  The broad windows have all been shattered, shards jut up from the frames like broken teeth.  Bold white words have been spray-painted on the blackened, red-brick walls.  I inspect the graffiti closely, particularly the first “a,” and feel as if I am misreading the words:

“CäK Man BurnN HeLL!!!” 

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READ THE REST OF “THE CAKE MAN”

Big Bang DaisyDecember 15, 2007

 

 

 

 

 

There is a region on the Atlantic coast of France where salt water daily sweeps in and back out again with the tidal pull. A small castle sits atop the hazy hill in the distance. There are two or three other hills on the horizon, but they are occupied by nothing more than grass and sheep. Everything in between these hills is sand. If the tide is low we may continue on the secret path of solid earth, which is invisible among the wasteland of quicksand that waits still and silent like a spider’s web. We follow the path carefully, but quickly, for the tide will soon return and the tall hill before us will become an island. We walk up rocky slopes on a narrow path that winds us around to the back side of the hill to the ancient fortress that is called D’Ahania, which was built before the dark ages of France.

It is no longer a fortress of warfare. It is a scientific laboratory and scriptorium for the once famous, now forgotten, Casey Dooley. The entrance to the exterior courtyard is modest, no drawbridge or heavy doors, but a single iron gate that has no lock.

The courtyard is a lush, Babylonian garden. In all directions sprawling green things explode their various colors. A bent and grey old man sits on a tree stump in a thick patch of blossoming sunflowers, stargazer lilies, moonflowers, passionflowers, and many of them come up to his chin. His bony face registers no emotion but his body language suggests that he is relaxed: hands flat on his knees, head bowed as if in prayer. This is Casey Dooley. His story is long and wrought with heartache, but we don’t wish to know his heartache just yet. We are interested in what Casey is doing now: he is intent upon the effect of the breeze on an oddly shaped flower.

Today is his one hundred and first birthday. It is his ritual every Saturday to come into the garden and trim down the flowers in order to arrange them into bouquets to place in parlor of the chateau. He knew each flower by its scent, and he knew the ideal firmness of the blossoms that were the ripest for pruning. These were necessary skills because Casey, in his old age, had grown almost completely blind.

The flowers have not been clipped today. For the first time in a decade, he sees, not with his mind’s eye, or with his hands, or his nose. He sees with his eyes. This morning, he mistook the flower for a yellow dandelion, but upon further inspection he saw that there was a red-brown-ish center to the flower—at which point he assumed it was some sort of daisy. There are long, translucent, thread-like things that stretch out in every direction and curl in a smooth arcs that extend to form a watermelon-shaped sphere around the starburst. It has a peculiar smell, a must and pinewood odor that is salty and sweet and altogether unfamiliar.
“What are you looking for?”
“Detail,” says Casey. Then he looks up, turns his head. Everything is the same shade of darkness. “Who said that?”
“Don’t be afraid,” whispers the vibrant, orange flower….

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READ THE REST OF “BIG BANG DAISY”

 

The miracle of toxic wasteDecember 1, 2007

Writing a NovelAugust 5, 2007

Walter Percy says that a novel, for all its length, is just an extremely long name for a complex, evolving emotion that has no name but that.

Flannery O’Connor says, “A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.”

Even Jesus told stories.

As the dust settles from my move to San Diego and I’m managing a somewhat regular daily routine of writing and otherwise fighting off boredom, it occurs to me that I have not posted a story up for a while. Part of that has to do with the fact that without school I have no deadlines to complete stories; but I have been busy working on a novel.

Beginning to tackle something as big as a 200-300 page novel is like waking up one morning and deciding to be a whaler or a fighter pilot. The problem is not so much whether or not you can do it (the task is so astronomical that any fear of failure is masked by the great possibility that it will never happen anyway–it is only the possible that I fear), the real problem is figuring out how other people do it, and more pressingly what steps one should take today to begin down that road.

So I’ve taken advice from Robert Olen Butler (see Recent Books on right) and for the past three weeks have been using this system:

1) you start with a stack of note cards, 2 or 3 hundred.

2) A general sense of your characters (their desires, etc) and the milieu (where, when); these are, of course, subject to change.

3) Meditate, dream and meander through the world of your characters. Take special note of how characters react to the world and each other through their senses. (Avoid at all costs writing down abstractions on the note cards; eg. So-and-so saw the dragon destroy the house. Write notes about the heat of the fire, the sound of the wreckage, the character’s legs turning in to tapioca pudding…)

4)Over the course of days and weeks you will fill the note cards with sensory impressions, character yearnings, conflicts, and imagery, but not abstract plot elements. (Plotting a story before its written is dangerous, especially if your characters are organic and want to steer the story in a direction that would be impossible to go if you, the writer, stuck rigidly to your plot outline. If you must plot, be flexible.)

5) Organize the 2 or 3 hundred cards in the order that you want to tell the story. This is not a science. You can organize them together by scenes, chronology, characters, whatever the story, or your unconscious, dictates. Think of it as a tarot deck rather than cue cards. Intuitively place the scenes at the beginning, middle or end.

6) Write the book.

As for myself, I have completed all but step 6.

These steps can work for short stories as well, however far fewer note cards are needed because short stories are often only a few scenes long.

Creative Non Fiction Essay Concerning AIR GUITARMay 16, 2007

Creative Non-fiction is a tough genre to pin down. I mean, the name indicates that it’s defined by what it is not: fiction. So here’s my valiant attempt at a creative piece of “not” fiction. Although, I must admit, that the things that I mention in this essay (my experiences in the realm of air guitar and the madness thereof) happened more than two years ago. So inevitably I’ve forgotten many crucial details. And as a result I fill in the gaps by simply making things up. If you were hoping for a detailed and factual account of my air guitar endeavors, then you will be disappointed. Sorry.

 

The Invisible Art

 

 

A Rare Device: PoetryApril 14, 2007

Often I equate poetry with fine paintings. Both seem to represent some ineffable part of our humanity, and both are, for me, completely unintelligible. I like the way a Picasso looks, the colors are often pleasing, the painting is usually hanging straight, Picasso’s are just great. But I feel exactly the same way about certain graffiti I see under bridges, or colorful labels on bottles of wine. My capacity for discrimination between good art and bad art is next to none. I have similar trouble distinguishing good poetry from bad poetry. I have a book of poems by Robert Frost, and when I read them I feel confused. When I hear poetry being read by my fellow MFA’ers at readings, I feel confused, but I like the way the words sound. And that’s something.

So here’s my approach to poetry: Don’t think too much when you write poems, then tell your reader not to think too much when they read your poetry. So don’t think too much when you read my poetry. Just enjoy the way they sound in your head. And please remember that I do not, and probably never will, call myself a poet.

 

 

I.

Even Death Is Exhausted

Death, of course, was dressed up in black

His breath the scent of acid

He let me feel the wood of the scythe

I remarked that it looked well crafted

Death sat on my couch

Death drank all my beer

Death snores when he sleeps on his back

Death was trashed

I went for my bat

And struck at his bones

I whacked and they cracked

Which caused me a near-fatal heart attack

II.

Stupefying Symphonic Fireflies of Central Texas

On the bank of the river I curse my flashlight

Then I see the twinkling Christmas light bug show

One fizzles into my ear

One zips up the bridge of my nose, bumps my forehead

Creatures born with wings

But without the knack to steer

Because I am enlightened, I search for meaning in these creatures

They exude an iridescent meaninglessness, and I find that attractive

Strange little beetle things

With glowing asses

A planet of buzzing insects shades moonlit tips of the waves in the river

Then I see the message

Written in the air, in orange letters, all caps

The word:

ELEPHANT

Then nothing but the flies

And the sound of hundreds of microscopic chainsaws

Then another hallucinated word:

UMBRELLA

I blink and it’s gone

Visual silence

And then:

KETCHUP

And then:

TOMMOROW

This is how Moses must have felt

A recipient of a secret message

Heed my holy prophecy:

Elephant, Umbrella, Ketchup, Tomorrow

Jesus would be jealous

III.

Be No Windflower No

Be Jesus and his clone

And wear tuxedos, and wave at the crowd

And drink Shirley Temples from bendy straws

Be the colonial musician who plays the sad ukulele

To cheer the homeless rocks and flowers

The orphaned atoms of oxygen who float in the air without meaning

Be the portable toilet that sings hit love songs

And understands without understanding

Zen crap

Be the Galapagos turtle who treats months like hours

Time to a cow is measured in salt licks and chews of the cud

Fruit flies are born, then grow to lead a satisfactory life, and die — in one day

There is no such thing as a Galapagos human

Cud tastes like punishment

A haiku:

Wind sows its seeds in

the invisible morning.

Works just like poison.

A seed sits on the watery earth

Seconds later little twigs sprouts from its flat belly

And its roots like tangling toes scurry and burrow into the moist

Toward the top of the planet

The windflower is born under the tree

On top of the tallest hill

In the shadow of the walls of the valley

Of the mountain that floats on top of the clouds

 

 

 

Passers-by (a short story)March 22, 2007

I’d received my acceptance letter in the mail, it was from my college of choice. That evening I decided to take a walk out on the beach. The beach is close no matter where you live in San Diego, but so is the military base. The draft numbers had been issued today.

In order to celebrate properly I bought a fifth of Bushmills. The man behind the counter asked me when I was shipping out. I couldn’t help myself, I grinned. I said I’m not going to fight, that’s what this whisky is for. The man’s face was grim, and he said he’d seen a lot of other guys my age come in today and buy bigger bottles of whisky, but for a different reason. I paid for my fifth and asked the man if he knew anyone who’s been drafted. He said, yes, my brother’s son.

I’d finished half the bottle by the time I got to the beach, now I wished I’d gotten the bigger bottle. I took a sip and watched the black ocean waves come and go. I heard a patter of feet slapping wet sand, then I saw a couple of guys running along the waterline, directly at me. One was right on the heels of the other. Maybe the first guy had stolen something from his pursuer. Or maybe the pursuer was homicidal and sought out a perfect stranger for sport. Or maybe they were both chasing a third guy. Or maybe they are separately running for exercise on the beach at night in the full moonlight. My lack of understanding made the situation exciting.

I stepped back and the men ran by. I caught a whiff of bourbon. Then both of them began to laugh and they slowed, then stopped, then dropped to the ground in exhaustion. They were chuckling, kind of half-way laughing to themselves. After a few moments one of them pushed himself from out of the sand and sat indian-style with his head hanging. The other sat up and sat likewise. They sat in silence, they no longer chuckled. In the moonlight I saw the lines in their foreheads, even from a distance.

Then one of them looked at me. Hey man, he cried, waving an arm. Got any more of whatever’s in that bottle? Both of them eyed my whisky as I walked toward them. I took a pull and handed it to the one who’d spoken to me. He had kind of a round, tall forehead that made him look like he had a big brain. He took a long pull. He gave it to his friend, an emaciated guy, who took a sip and handed it to me without making eye contact. I screwed the cap on. The brain guy told me to sit down. I did, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. We all three watched the waves.

When do you go out? asked the brain guy.

I don’t, I said. I just got into school. The skinny guy looked at me for the first time, so did the brain guy. Their mouths were open.

What about you guys? I asked.

We got our numbers today, said the brain guy.

Which numbers did you get? I asked.

Both of them spoke at the same time: One. I shook my head. They shook their heads. I handed the bottle to the skinny guy.

He unscrewed the cap.