Writing Rules To Be Learned & Only Then Broken At Will, part 5

Mark Twain:


1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.

2. The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help develop it.

3. The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

4. The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.

5. When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.

6. When the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.

7. When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a Negro minstrel at the end of it.

8. Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader by either the author or the people in the tale.

9. The personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausably set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.

10. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.

11. The characters in tale be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.

An author should—

12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.

13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.

14. Eschew surplusage.

15. Not omit necessary details.

16. Avoid slovenliness of form.

17. Use good grammar.

18. Employ a simple, straightforward style.




~•~

Writing Rules To Be Learned & Only Then Broken At Will, part 4

Ernest Hemingway:


1. Use short sentences.
2. Use short first paragraphs.
3. Use vigorous English.
4. Be positive, not negative.
5. Put the shit in the wastebasket.
6. Don’t drink until after you have finished the day’s writing.




~•~

Writing Rules To Be Learned & Only Then Broken At Will, part 3

George Orwell:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.




~•~

Writing Rules To Be Learned & Only Then Broken At Will, part 2

Kurt Vonnegut:

1.     Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2.     Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3.     Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4.     Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5.     Start as close to the end as possible.
6.     Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7.     Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8.     Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.




~•~

Writing Rules To Be Learned & Only Then Broken At Will, part 1

Elmore Leonard:


1. Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle.*
2. Never open a book with weather.
3. Avoid prologues.
4. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
5. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . .
6. Keep your exclamation points under control.
7. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
8. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
9. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
10. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
11. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
12. If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.




* = "Hooptedoodle" — From John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday:  "Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”



~•~

Talkin Shop: Lies & Fiction

I never lie about fiction.



~*~

Sinfest.

Sinfest May 13 2010

 

 · • ·

One of his smaller soap box rants...

 Of the several articles I read about this recent event, I'm struck immediately how the angle of viewpoint throughout the piece seems to focus on the economic disruption and not the direct societal impact that is shown to be possible in this.

But also, there's a few things in particular that I pondered more than a moment on:

 A federal official said it was not considered it a terrorist threat.

So it's the ideology and not the act that determines a terrorist threat?

Gabrielle Zecha and Taj Heniser, visiting from Seattle, had tickets to see “Next to Normal” at the Booth Theater on 45th Street but could not get into the 8 p.m. show because the area was blocked off. But they made the best of the spectacle. “It’s a whole different kind of show,” Ms. Heniser said, adding, “It’s almost the equivalent of a $150 show.”

For it to be worth the $150, there would, of course, have to be at least one dead body.

Onlookers crowded against the metal barricades encircling the area, taking pictures with cellphones and video cameras, although only a swarm of flashing fire trucks and police cars was visible.

If this were my story—I deal in fiction—I'd have the bad guy put a couple of other bombs at some distance from the first (which would, of course, be lamely designed so as to appear to be the work of a deranged lone wolf and not an organized criminal conspiracy) that would be more insidious, and messy.

But that's just the way I'd write it if it were a fictional story.


· • ·

Talkin Shop: First Lines (brief)

I used to attribute the following statement to a notable lyrical poet, but after consider searching for the attribution to that particular wordsmith—or an attribution of anything even resembling the quote—I guess I'll step up on my soapbox platform and take the blame for it.  If anyone wants to debate that... let's sit down for a cup of coffee and spend some time talkin shop.

If one isn't otherwise presenting itself to you, here's a guideline for your consideration:

The first line of a story should be a simple statement of fact.


· • ·

Talkin Shop: Unexpected Turns

So in the midst of this novel/novella, I-as-writer (as opposed to the I-as-narrator function) ask myself, where as this is going? Sometimes I know, but other times I'm writing my way towards something and don't know what. This is one of those sort of stories. And, as I-as-narrator answered that, I initially thought, how ludicrous. But then I realized that was exactly the way this Brett Easton Ellis-meets-Shirley Jackson tale goes. And the path there is quite wonderful. I hope sometime to find out if you think so as well.

Such unexpected turns are one of the tasty reasons I love what I do—the thrill of being in the midst of pure story as it manifests from the what-it-is-not. If it can surprise, challenge, convince, and thrill me, I suspect/think/hope/pray it may do similar things for others.


· • ·

Talkin Shop: The Pure Stream Flows

But turn from my tongue, o gods,
the madness of these men,
and from hallowed lips let a pure stream flow.

Empedocles

In my time of writing, I've completed more than 40 short stories and two novels (with a third novel that expanded to 260-280,000 words before I had to walk away from for mental and spiritual health), and several novellas in between that mix.

This past week I've knocked out the better part of another (almost 40k words since late Fri/Early Sat). Although it is very first draft sort of material, parts of it are among the best things I've ever written.

Which brings me to the reason of this post (the intent is less clear to me right now). I suspect this may be true with other writers but is certainly so with me: every time I write something that is shiver-worthy, I think, Where did this come from? and Thankfully, I'm the faucet for this, and How will I ever write something this phenomenal again?

Then, at some point, I write something else that is shiver-worthy and end up with the same trio of questions again, and for a few moments, am absolutely sure nothing I write will ever drip with such epiphanic dew again.

Until the next time it does.

It just amazes me that this has been a recurrence since 1991 when I wrote my first novel (the last couple of lines of which are still among the best things I've ever written) and my first really solid stand-on-its-own short story. I learned a lot from them and in the gulf of time between then and now.

In this novella/novel I've been recording these past six days, I've written some great material. And a few of them triggered those old, familiar questions.

Ah, the wondrous, fucked-up, glorious life of creativity.

There's a celestial reservoir of story-water in the universe. And sometimes, I'm fortunate enough to be a faucet through which that pure stream flows.

Thank you, O muse who sings^* to me. Thank you.

I look forward to as many more years of this as possible.



^* Ok. My muse doesn't so much sing to me as whispers sacred mysteries in the velvet hush of unknown tongues.

· • ·

Talkin Shop: Writing Superstitions

It's funny what sort of story ideas capture my imagination and what sort drive me to the page immediately.

In the midst of something like the latter. No story idea, just those characters/place/event. Playing reporter and following them around. Gets deep and twisted and complicated and so-very-human so quickly, doesn't it?

Going back to an old adage/superstition. Don't talk about the contents of the story until the first draft is done. A couple got away from me by talking about them.

But those are occupational hazards. • y a w n •

Now if you wanna talk shop . . . you know how to reach me.


· • ·

Meta-Maus

Like the Essay and Response paper for Writing About Film, this was an essay and response assignment on either Octavia Bulter's Kindred or Art Speilgelman's Maus. I wanted to write about Kindred, but that would have been a more difficult effort, and with the work load I had, I wasn't ashamed about taking the easy way out with Maus.

Like Speilgelman is light reading or something...

In assessing my own work, this is mediocre.


~•~
(very 1st draft! almost ashamedly so)


ENG 384
November 10, 2009
Essay & Response: Maus

Meta-Maus

Upon turning onto page 102 of (The Complete) Maus, a curious event occurs; along with the narrative, the style, artwork, and even genre suddenly changes. In effect, the storyteller has suddenly changed the rules in the reader's contract. We slip from one level of storytelling into something deeper. Not merely self-referential and self-aware (although Maus is certainly that), but cognitive of its own self-awareness. This is akin to the subtle difference between sentience and sapience; knowledge and wisdom. In being aware of itself, Maus almost becomes a recursive loop, becoming wise to its own graphic form, as connects to another scene on the palindromic page umber from our first, 201. Through these two scenes, Art Spiegelman tells us of the same personal tragedy twice, in two different methods, each seemingly aware of it other despite a decade separating their creation.

Most obviously, the border on this page has changed from white to black. In the first frame, we are treated to a title header in the gregarious style only comix could have—Prisoner on the HELL Planet: A Case History—with a photograph next to it being clutched by a gnarly hand. From this frame—due perhaps to the overly dark nature of the entire page—the eye is suddenly drawn to the lower left corner, the outer edge, where a more simplistic hand holds a comic book that happens to be the very page we've just turned to in Maus. It isn't unlikely that our own hand rests eerily close to one or the other of the hands drawn on the page. This presents us with a self-awareness we find in meta-fiction; that is, a story in which the storytelling or story being told becomes a part of the shared narrative, most easily exampled by having the author appear as himself in the work. Which is obviously the point in Maus, the difference being this would then have become a meta-biographical memoir in the structural form of a graphic novel.

Here, Spiegelman appears as himself—as a human and not a mouse—dressed as a concentration camp prisoner, telling us how his mother committed suicide in 1968, when he was 20. His father found her when he came home from work. In the final long horizontal panel on the page, Spiegelman stands (dressed as a prisoner) at the periphery of a crowd outside an apartment building. "I'd just spent the weekend with my girlfriend, Isabella. (My parents didn't like her.) I was late getting home … I suppose that if I'd gotten home when expected, I would have found her body…" (Spiegelman 102).

The suicide of Spiegelman's mother is dealt with again in the second part of Maus. Again Spiegelman appears as a human, but in this instance he wears a mouse mask. In the first panel on the page, he sits at his drawing desk where two flies buzz around him. Above the line of the panel are the words "Time flies…" (201). In each of the first three panels on the page, Spiegelman makes two statements referring to two different timelines in each, and in doing so, brings the self-awareness of metafiction once again to be a central issue in considering the story he tells.

In the first panel Spiegelman refers to the death of his father Vladek in 1982, commenting that he and his wife stayed with his father in 1979. In the next panel Spiegelman states that his father started work as a "tinman" in Auschwitz in 1944, and that he himself began working on the current page of Maus in February 1987. It's in the third panel that this dichotomy of timelines draws to its most contrasting points: "In May 1987 François and I are expecting a baby… Between May 16, 1944, and May 24, 1944 over 100,000 Hungarian Jews were gassed in Auschwitz…" (201). In the fourth panel, Spiegelman turns to address the reader face-to-face (albeit, his is covered by the mouse mask). He speaks of Maus first being published. The presence of flies is increasing.

In the last panel on the page—one that takes up an equal amount of space as the four previous combined—Spiegelman slumps over his drawing table, a heap of bodies seeming to be on the floor of his studio while outside the window of the room is a barbed wire fence and prison guard tower. Spiegelman complains that he's had several offers to sell the rights to Maus so a movie could be made from the graphic memoir, but he laments that he just doesn't want to. He then mentions again the death of his mother, "In May 1968 my mother killed herself. (She left no note.) Lately, I've been feeling depressed." A voice sounds from outside the panel—somewhere off the page—and the words are meant as a double entendre: "Alright Mr. Spiegelman… We're ready to shoot!…" (201). Given the context, this could be as much a reference to a director shooting film as to soldiers shooting Jewish prisoners. The heap of bodies remains the focus of both.

Response to "Meta-Maus"

The two scenes discussed in "Meta-Maus" share the connections of metafictional self-awareness, feeling imprisoned, and the suicide of Spiegelman's mother. In the first, what are we to make of this abrupt change in story-telling method? We've gone from an Animal Farm-like tale involving Jewish mice, German dogs, and Polish pigs to the lurid-stylings of 1960s comix involving directly autobiographical human characters set in a recursive metafictional narrative.

Spiegelman wants us as readers to be aware that we are not part of his story, that we are pushed to be outsiders to what he reveals to us. But more than that, he himself is an outsider to his own story, evidenced by the fact that he places himself within the narrative as a human prisoner (from "Hell Planet") because what he tells us about himself is too painful for him to be directly included. This is why he imprisons himself in the scene, and via the title, literally places the event out-of-this-world (on the aforementioned "Hell Planet"). The recursion of illustrated hands holding the book we are reading further emphasizes the removal of direct reader-involvement as well as distances us and himself from the trauma-within-trauma he describes. Surviving a Nazi concentration camp requires one level of distance (which Spiegelman invokes with anthropomorphic characters of mice and dogs) but his mother committing suicide years after that forces Spiegelman to further distance himself from the very thing he wishes to share.

When he mentions his mother's suicide later in a scene titled "Time Flies…" it is with far simpler and less descriptive language (showing the small healing graces of passing time) and amidst a plethora of seeming inconsequential information. This information all suggests that Spiegelman conceals as much as he shows, even if that concealment is superficial.

When Spiegelman tells us that his father worked as a tinman in Auschwitz, it could easily be passed over as insignificant. But nothing in Maus can be taken as inconsequential. Being a tinman involved constructing roofs and walls that would ordinarily be used for protection and security (against the elements and to create a dwelling place), but in context, the skill was used to contain and conceal (minimal prisoner housing and to ensure any sense of "home" would be rife with death and uncertainty).

Spiegelman mentioning the birth of his child alongside detailing the numbers of Hungarian Jews killed in a specific period shows that he is still equating any life as being paid for by the death of others. There can be no small amount of guilt associated with this observation. And again, the recursive, self-aware meta-narrative comes to the fore when Spiegelman sits at his drawing table and his studio alters itself around him to show a pile of bodies that resemble the infamous Belsen heaps with the exterior world transforms into the confines of a concentration camp. Spiegelman still feels trapped by his family's past even forty years later.

Even as he is publicly dealing with his grief and confusion about the Holocaust, Spiegelman struggles with himself as to why and how he does so. It is this internal conflict which drives the themes and structure of Maus to be a story that simply cannot be told in a direct, unadorned manner. In Spiegelman's case, however, that adornment comes not in the form of stylish language and heroic plot, but in self-consciously anthropomorphized animals, animal-masks on humans, and altered identities to reveal the facts of some events. This is a story that could not exist without the structure of metafiction, self-aware narrative, and the deliberate distance imposed upon the reader.

We can never be a part of this story, but we as readers can take the opportunity Spiegelman offers us to take a peek behind his many masks and layers to understand not only the story he tells us, but how he has brought himself to do so and, perhaps most importantly, why he does so.

•

Bibliography

"Bergen-Belsen concentration camp."

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
Retrieved 00:39, November 7, 2009.

Green, Archie. Tin Men (Folklore and Society).

Champaign, IL:

University of Illinois, 2002. Print.

Rothberg, Michael. "'We Were Talking Jewish':

Art Spiegelman's Maus
as 'Holocaust' Production."
Contemporary Literature 35.4 (1994).
JSTOR. Web.

Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus.

New York: Pantheon, 1991. Print.

· • ·

Sense and Antisense

The first assignment from the Lyric Essay class was to define what a lyric essay is, something which has not been definitively done since the term was coined more than a few years ago by the Seneca Review.

After reading this, if I were me, I'd say, "So let's hear your lyric essay you little contrarian complainy pants." To which I reply, I'd share it with you, but not publicly at this point since it's under submission right now (having already garnered a personal rejection from SR; to which I wish I could reply to answer their question about the gist of the piece).

Anything else I could say about this paper would just be repeating what the paper itself says. And I'm just not that tautologically repetitive.


~•~
(Draft 1.5)


CRW 315 – Lyric Essay
March 2, 2009

Sense and Antisense

It is not a prose poem. It is not an informative article. It is not a memoir. It is not a dissertation. It is not an argumentative tract. It is not a recipe of exotic cuisine. It is not a soft doctrine nailed to the door of an empire and accompanied by a daring refrain that echoes through the centuries—Here stand I, I can do no other! It is not bureaucratic Endlösung meant to redact an ethnicity from the genetic collective.

It is not a story, with plot and conflict and resolution.

But it can be any of these things.

The it, in this case, is an ephemeral collection of words called a lyric essay.

Unlike a more formal writing, a lyric essay does not necessarily state clearly its subject, with introduction and thesis statement, then outline references and arguments that compare or contrast view points or facts, it instead might not even mention what its true subject really is, talking, as it were, around that point. In other words, it is based entirely on the subjective and not the objective.

If a metaphor for all writing is a river flowing along its course, then technical writing (such as scientific papers or an instruction manual) would be a fairly direct, smoothly flowing stream, in which one could reach at any time with being swept away by rapids (which might be adventure fiction), poetry could be seen as a babbling brook of pleasant cascades that shimmered over smooth rocks and glittered in dappled sunlight (haiku being droplets of water clinging to the leaves and flowers growing along the shoreline), and the lyric essay then would be an oxbow in a meandering river plain—a place where the stream once flowed regularly, but a variance in course left this bend in the stream separated from where it once ran. Like the subject in a lyric essay, to describe the oxbow, one could tell of what the river used to be, but is no longer.

•

―It is not a prose poem. It is not an informative article.

In his piece, "The Theory and Practice of Postmodernism: A Manifesto," David Antin tells a story about shopping with his wife for a new mattress because she has back troubles. On the page, his words appear much as a poem would, breaking like verses in modern, unrhymed, poetry. But, as the title suggests, this is a postmodern piece, and uses its form to call attention to itself, and, as a lyric essay, really isn't about shopping for a mattress at all:

"so i felt there was no reason to get rid of this
mattress that had been promised to us by a salesman who said
it would last the rest of our lives i figured we were going to live
long lives i didnt think we were anywhere close to dying so
neither was the mattress" (113)

Antin, then, is discussing holding onto things of the past, aging, and the vacuity of language, especially in regards to consumer sales and goods. At the end of the piece, he and his wife have purchased a new mattress and have been sleeping on it for a while. His wife still has her back troubles, but they are not as bad as they used to be. Antin concludes,
"if youre lost in a forest and you have no idea which way
to go go for it straight ahead because its not likely to be
any worse than anything else" (122)

On the surface of his context, what Antin probably intends here, is that having been overwhelmed by consumer choices for a mattress, one is likely to be about as good as any other, and that a mattress—or any thing—is not likely to impact your life to the point of irrevocably altering it in any significant manner. Whereas, if this excerpt was from a "formal" informational article, one could easily argue that walking lost in a forest, a given direct can most certainly be much worse than another.

•

―It is not a memoir. It is not a dissertation.

In Joan Didion's essay "The White Album," she weaves her own life in among those of many notable people in the late 1960s, but never quite elucidates exactly what it is she's attempting to reveal. "We tell each other stories in order to live," she says at the beginning, but then the story she relates becomes an exercise in pretzel logic in attempting to decipher it. At least part of this is touching upon the more familiar ground of memoir, as she reveals early in the piece psychiatric information which might be her way of offering the reader evidence that she is an unreliable narrator.

This, on one level, would lend an emotional gravity to the piece, but her narrative becomes convoluted to the point that it is not, indeed, memoir nor dissertation, nor even an argumentative tract about the era of the 60s, the personalities of the famous names she constantly mentions, nor even, really, herself. She offers almost random bits of information—like jig-saw pieces with which we are perhaps supposed to put together to figure out what it is she's telling us. With the promise at the beginning that we tell stories in order to live, it seems worthwhile to assemble these jig-saw pieces. With a more formal essay, such as that of a memoir, we might do so. But this is a lyric essay, and so the jig-saw pieces are randomly collected from a number of different puzzles, and a logical assembly is not possible. Didion implies that she knows this is the case, "writing has not yet helped me to see what it means," she tells us at the end of the piece. And that is, one could argue, the point: the era and its people did not make sense—neither at the time nor in hindsight when we try to understand what happened—and so her telling this story is not supposed to be pieced together and figured out with logic and reason, however Escherean the staircase we follow may be.

•

―It is not an argumentative tract. It is not a recipe of exotic cuisine.

Reason and logic are definitely inapplicable to the essay by Harry Mathews, "Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double)." Evidenced by the word-play in the title, this essay gives the appearance of a exotic recipe from the land of renowned cuisine. But the dish described in the piece would be infeasible to prepared—bordering on the physically impossible—thus being a farce, as well as the essay being an example of a story-within-a-story, creating an entendre because the essay, as well as the fictive dish he details, is double stuffed.

Not only does Mathews use the recipe of a meal to tell a story on one level, in the middle of the cooking instruction, he unravels a story about a song that should be sung at one point in the preparation.

"It tells the story of a blacksmith's son who sets out to find his long-lost mother. She is dead, but he cannot remember her death, nor can he accept it." (187) Mathews continues with his tale about this fictitious song that is sung in the middle of preparing an impossible dish traditional to a fictitious town in France (which, some may say, hardly exists in reality at all). The connection, we are told, between this song and the farce double being made, is "an analogy between the stars and the holes in the lid of the roasting pot." (90)

On the surface—ignoring the fictitious nature of the dish, the town, and the song—this essay is about cooking a rural French dish. On another level, it concerns the loss of tradition and the willful forgetting of the past. And it is done so with the humor of irony, and a lyricism that combines traits of folklore, ballads, and cookbooks.

•

―It is not a story, with plot and conflict and resolution.

Of all the lyric essays read from D'Agata's collection, few contain the elements that are usually considered integral to clear written communication. In many, there is no thread of causality, either in plot, narrative, or theme; that is, some connection between one idea and the next which, linked together in some manner lead the reader to a conclusion. There is little that could be designated as conflict in many of these essays. And conflict in any written work, be it article, poem, or story, is commonly thought of as being essential to drawing a reader through from beginning to end.

This is not to categorically state that anything described as a lyric essay doesn't have causal relationship or conflict, as we have seen in Mathews' piece, some of them display these characteristics. But without some sense of what it is, the lyric essay rests at a dangerous point in the spectrum of the written word.

At its best, a lyric essay—like poetry (to steal a line from William Rose Benét)—suckles honeyed words from the poisoned lips of life. It can be use form and content to share information or impart emotion where a more linear, traditional form of the written word cannot. At its worse, it becomes muddled self-indulgent nonsense.

Without a more clearly defined realm for the lyric essay, the dangerous is present for an unintelligible written work to be declared a lyric essay and suddenly take on meaning where no existed before.

On the other hand, one might argue, that, like the Tao, any definition of the lyric essay confines and constrains it, and it no longer has an ambiguous quality that the lyric essay now possesses in a non-possessive way.

•

―It is not a soft doctrine . . . It is not bureaucratic Endlösung . . .

In postmodern literature—which is certainly a phylum the lyric essay is taxonomically related to—a great deal of emphasis is placed on what the author of a piece intends or considers the work to be. If the author's sensibilities are such to declare a work art, then it is art.

But a reader's sensibilities are just as important to a work as is the writer's. Once it is written and sent off into the world, it no longer belongs to them. The writer is not available to every reader to explain what was meant or intended—nor should they be—and the author of a written work is probably the last person who should be given quarter to explain what their work signifies or what should be inferred by it. They wrote the thing, therefore, have had their chance to explain, define, instruct, cajole, solicit, impart, sway, compel, or share their joys and sorrows, miracles and tears. At that point, a work must stand on its own to be whatever a reader of it chooses or decides are its merits and/or flaws.

The author and poet Charles Bukowski (whom I do not much care for) wrote, "An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way." By this definition, I think a number of the authors of the lyric essays John D'Agata has collected are not artists, they're intellectuals.


· • ·

"Bad writers borrow from other writers; Good writers steal."

Here's a paper I wrote for Books & Publishing class about plagiarism. I framed it around the controversary of Dr. Brad Vice's Flannery O'Connor Award, but included a few other public cases.

In a comment on a semi-public forum, Vice commented about the passing of the author and his mentor, Barry Hannah.

I'm proud to say that you can find my name and a little blurb on the paperback copies of Yonder Stands Your Orphan. Later it was used to make me look like some sort of criminal when my book controversy hit. It really made me depressed. I can't even find the review on-line now as there are more so ... many articles about the review that the review is lost. You could find it on the SFC page if you were interested. I even told my editor when he gave me the book--Look, I've read everything by BH, and I love it all --so if you give me this book, I'm likely to write a good review. He said, "You sound like your qualified for the job." Anyway, it made me so angry that they tried to smear Barry through me. I still can't get over the Lucifarian villain who looks like Conway Twitty--too concerned about his hair to play high school football.

I have no reason to believe he's actually referring to Robert Clark Young being a prissy pansy and disrespectable no-account lying jealous sack of excrement or anything of that nature. No reason at all to associate that person with those traits.

If I ever rewrite this—or write again on the subject—I think I shall bring into the conversation the legal criminology term of "larceny," that is, theft by stealth, and equate it to the Twain attribution. Steal it quietly, make it your own, and wear your influences as evidence of the literary stream which has washed down from those who came before you. Or something poetic like that.



~•~



CRW 321 - 001
February 24, 2009
Wild Card Essay


"Bad writers borrow from other writers; Good writers steal."


This quote is often attributed to Mark Twain, T. S. Eliot, or Oscar Wilde. It's witty and deeper than it seems at first, and completely apropos to our discussion. Without absolute veracity of such an attribution, for the sake of this argument, we'll leave the source of that quote with Mr. Twain.

Does this comment mean that Twain encouraged and condoned plagiarism? Although it may not be immediately apparent in this statement, we can be fairly certain that, indeed, Twain (nor Eliot, nor Wilde) was not encouraging anyone to plagiarize another's work. But let us take a closer look at what defines plagiarism before picking apart what Twain might, or might not, have meant by that.

In examining this subject of borrowing and stealing other people's work—focussing exclusively on the written word and not on intellectual theft in the other arts—we will discuss ideas and intellectual property rights, touch briefly on copyright law, and take a look at three cases involving the accusation of plagiarism, and find evidence that in the world of literature, stealing is not as readily evident from borrowing as one might expect. Following that, we will return to Mark Twain's (attributed) quote and have another look at what it might really mean.

Before we get into our three specific cases, let us take a moment to define some things. Intellectual Property, to put it simply for our use in this discussion, is considered to be—as stated by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)—"Intellectual property refers to creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce." The term is used to denote the legal rights of a work and not the work itself. Under intellectual property laws, the creator, or rightful owner of a work, are granted certain exclusive rights to their work in any medium. Copyright, trademarks, trade secrets, and patents are just a few examples of intellectual property rights. For the purposes of this discussion, however, we will limit our commentary to copyrights, and not touch upon any of the other defined forms of intellectual property.

So what is involved with copyright law?

A comprehensive answer to that would involve a firm of lawyers and more pages of explanation than a small room could hold—this is why there are specialized attorneys to deal with the complexities of copyright law—but we will try to offer a very brief description of what it covers in relation to our purpose.

The intent of copyright in the United States is based on Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 in the U.S. Constitution, which states: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This is intended to give the creator of a substantive and discrete idea—that is, an idea that is seen to fruition in an extended written work, and not merely the idea itself, nor titles, situations, or characters without their placement in a substantive, discrete work—certain exclusive rights (as we said about intellectual property) to publish, distribute, or adapt their work for a reasonable amount of time. That reasonable amount of time is currently given to be 50-100 years following the death of the creator of the work. This complexity is further muddled by "fair use."

The fair use doctrine does not specifically define "fair use" but rather gives a four point rubric to discern if use of copyrighted material is able to be used fairly by another party. The factors given to consider this are: the purpose and character of the use; the nature of the copyrighted work; the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. Thus there is a legitimate right to use excerpts or quotes from a copyrighted work "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching […], scholarship, or research," (U.S. Code) which means book reviews can use portions of a work for purposes of illustrating an opinion; schools can use copyrighted work so long as they are not charging a fee for its use in an educational manner; and very brief quotes can be used as epigrams by others in their own work.
Confused by that? You begin to see how quickly complicated this matter can become; especially when copyright/intellectual property right laws differ from country to country. The entire matter is about as clear as a lecture on theological nuclear physics recited by Carl Sagan, backwards, in Pig Latin.

My sarcastic analogy is silly, but is meant to illustrate the complexity of this point. We are three pages into a discussion of plagiarism and we have only now reached the examples.

Our first look will be at the case involving the accusation that in The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown plagiarized the work of Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (although Lincoln's name did not appear on court records in this accusation) in their non-fiction work, Holy Blood, Holy Grail. This is a case of fiction appropriating material from non-fiction, which is not as common as fiction appropriating from other fiction, as well as the fact that the accusation hinged upon the direct use of ideas and framework of the earlier material. As author Richard Leigh stated, Dan Brown "lifted the whole architecture—the whole jigsaw puzzle—and hung it on to the peg of a fictional thriller." (Day)

So the accusation of Brown's plagiarism did not involve direct use of phrases and word choice, but on the framework, background, and general idea of Baigent's and Leigh's intellectual property.

To many in the literary world, the case Baigent and Leigh brought against Brown looked to be a clear case of copyright infringement; plagiarism. Myriad ideas put forth in Holy Blood, Holy Grail (HBHG) were present in nearly identical form in The Da Vinci Code, including a character who physically resembled the third author of HBHG, Henry Lincoln, and whose name, Leigh Teabing, is lifted directly from authors Leigh and Baigent (anagram of Teabing). The Justice who heard the case in UK Court disagreed with the accusers, and the verdict dictated that the ideas depicted in non-fiction work could not be plagiarized.

As a work of historical research, HBHG was often criticized as being faulty and venturing into the realms of fiction. So, ironically, if Baigent's and Leigh's work had been fiction, they would have likely won their plagiarism case against Brown. As it was, copyright precedent had been set for works of fiction to be able to use non-fiction ideas without infringement.

Our next example involves a case of fiction borrowing from other fiction, coming from a first time author and young student at Harvard University named Kaavya Viswanathan. At the age of 19, she had her first novel published to notable acclaim. How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got A Life garnered Viswanathan a large advance along with a two-book deal, praise from the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Boston Globe, and many others. An film deal with Steven Spielberg's company DreamWorks SKG had been signed. Her academic and literary future seemed bright (Bailey; McGonigle; Memmott).

Then The Harvard Crimson ran an article claiming Viswanathan had plagiarized 12 passages in her book from two novels by Megan McCafferty. The passages were more than merely similar, they were virtually identical (Zhou). Both the author and her publisher denied the accusations, but things got worse quickly. By mid-May of that year, the New York Times had covered the story with several articles, and the evidence of plagiarism expanded. From 12 passages to 29 passages to more than 40 passages of almost identical phrases had been used by Viswanathan, taken from the two novels by McCafferty, as well as novels by Sophie Kinsella, Meg Cabot, and Salman Rushdie. As it turned out, more passages from Viswanathan's debut novel were copied from previous works than were not (Zeller; Smith and Moto).

Soon the publishers, Little, Brown and Company pulled the book from stores—at first to republish it with the offending passages removed—but as the scandal grew, they cancelled republication and Viswanathan's book deal (Crimson).

When the initial accusations were reported, Viswanathan appeared on The Today Show with Katie Couric, were that she commented that she must have "internalized" the details of McCafferty's books without realizing it. Following the expansion of the accusations, neither Viswanathan, nor her publisher, offered further comment directly concerning the issue. Viswanathan has since left Harvard and is currently attending Georgetown University (Atwan).
Our third example is perhaps the most difficult to deduce facts from accusation since it involves the overlap of academia, professional publication, and the sometimes uncomfortable meeting between fiction and non-fiction narratives.

In 2005, Brad Vice was an assistant professor at Mississippi State University when he was awarded the 2004 Flannery O'Connor Award for his short story collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train. Not long after this announcement, a library advisor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa (where Vice received his B.A. and where the story of contention is set) contacted the publisher of the award alleging plagiarism in one of the collected stories. Based on this single allegation, and without questioning the author, the University of Georgia Press rescinded the award to Vice, and ordered copies of his book to be pulled from distribution and pulped (Media Bistro).

Following this, Robert Clark Young published an article in the New York Press attacking not only Vice's short story collection, but extending the plagiarism claims to other short stories and articles Vice had written, but also calling into question Vice's Ph.D dissertation at the University of Cincinnati. Young's allegations went beyond Vice's work, but to his academic career, both as a teacher and a student, and made inflammatory comments about a number of another writers—all of whom were graduates of the Sewanee Writers' Conference—including Barry Hannah (Young; Sanford).

"Tuscaloosa Knights" was the story at the center of these allegations. It contained two sentences that were very similar to those appearing in a non-fiction book by Carl Carmer called Stars Fell On Alabama (It would be another year before a British court would offer an opinion as to the validity of fictional work using non-fiction source material, so a case of fiction "plagiarizes" non-fiction had not yet had a ruling in court). Carmer's work is quite famous around Tuscaloosa, as the author had been a professor at the university for a number of years in the 1930s, during which time he wrote his book (York). Vice stated that his use of Carmer's words and setting was an example of intertextual postmodernism, and an homage to Carmer's work. Indeed, previous version of the manuscript, including that of his Ph.D dissertation, contain epigrams to Carmer (Vice).

Critics, particularly Young, argued that it was deliberate plagiarism. Vice's supporters—who included other authors, editors of magazines where Vice's work had previously appeared, and Vice's former professors and advisors—leveled their own claims against Young, stating the latter man was bitter at Vice, Hannah, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference because Young's work was widely panned at the conference, and in his article accusing Vice of plagiarism, there are numerous factual errors concerning the Sewanee Conference and unfounded allegations against its sponsors and organizers.

The context in which Vice used a few sentences of Carl Carmer's work places the appropriated phrases in a very similar setting—that of a nighttime Ku Klux Klan rally in Tuscaloosa—but with different characters and a different outcome. Carmer's "Flaming Cross" chapter of Stars Fell On Alabama, was a description of an actual event (Carmer; Cobb). Vice's story is fictional, although keeps the setting of several people discussing, and then attempting to attend out of curiosity, the Klan rally (Vice).

The result of these allegations against Brad Vice resulted in his loss of the Flannery O'Connor Award (although another publisher picked up the book and made a few minor editorial changes) and eventually his dismissal from his position at Mississippi State University. He now teaches at the University of West Bohemia in the Czech Republic (ZČU).

These tales of caution bring us back to the quote we've attributed to Mark Twain, "Bad writers borrow from other writers; good writers steal," and our question at the beginning as to what such a volatile statement as that could possibly mean.

Twain is almost certainly not condoning nor encouraging plagiarism. What this quote is taken to mean is that if an idea or phrase or concept appeals to a writer, they shouldn't borrow it, as in merely using the words of another to make their own piece seem stronger or more literary or more legitimate, instead stealing an idea, concept, or phrase, means to take it and use it in a manner unique to the voice of the "thieving" writer; to re-engineer, deconstruct, improve, fold, spindle, and alter it into a manner fitting the voice and setting and framework of a new piece.
If all literary theft was plagiarism, Byron could sue Poe, Petrarch could sue Shakespeare, and Shakespeare could sue almost everyone else. T. S. Eliot called such appropriations "verbal kleptomania," and practiced such himself.

In other words, if you are going to liberate material from another writer—from another source—don't just rent it and make a copy; turn it into something of your own.

The moral of this story may well be: Be aware of where the words and ideas you use have been before they showed up on your page, but when they do—and here I steal a comment from Martin Luther—"sin bravely."

•


Works Cited

Atwan, Greg. "Kaavya Emptor."

02138 Dec. & Jan. 2008-2009, Vol. 3, No. 1.

Bailey, Marilyn. "HOWMTF:

How 'Opal' will make teen famous."

The Boston Globe 17 Apr. 2006.

Cobb, Mark Hughes.

"Book's passages raise questions of plagiarism."

TuscaloosaNews.com.
21 Oct. 2005. 22 Feb. 2009 .

The Crimson Staff.

"'Opal Mehta' Gone for Good; Contract Cancelled."

The Harvard Crimson [Cambridge]
2 May 2006.

Day, Elizabeth. "Two Academic Writers

Assert 'Da Vinci Code' Is Plagiarism."
Sunday Telegraph [London] 3 Oct. 2004.

"Department of English."

Západočeská Univerzita v Plzni,
ZČU. Apr. 2008. Web.

McGonigle, Thomas.

"The Saturday Read;
Oh c'mon, getting into Harvard isn't that easy:

How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild,
and Got a Life: A Novel."
Los Angeles Times 8 Apr. 2006.

Memmott, Carol.

"Charming 'Opal' shows smart can be funny."

USA Today 29 Mar. 2006.

Sanford, Jason.

"The literary lynching of Brad Vice."

StorySouth. 18 Dec. 2005. 22 Feb. 2009 .

Smith, Dinitia, and Moto Rich.

"A Second Ripple in Plagiarism Scandal."
New York Times 2 May 2006.

The Today Show. NBC. New York, NY. 26 Apr. 2006.
"U. of GA Press Recalls Stories, Revokes Prize."

Media Bistro. 27 Oct. 2005. 22 Feb. 2009 .

17 U.S.C. § 1-107 (2007).
U.S. Constitution. Art. I, § 8, cl. 8
Vice, Brad. The Bear Bryant Funeral Train.

1st ed. Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005.

Vice, William Bradley.

The Bear Bryant Funeral Train.
Dissertation. University of Cincinnati, 2001.

York, Jake Adam.

"Fell In Alabama: Brad Vice's Tuscaloosa Night."

StorySouth. 13 Nov. 2005. 22 Feb. 2009 .

Young, Robert Clark. "A Charming Plagiarist."

New York Press 7 Dec. 2005.

Zeller, Jr., Tom.

"In Internet Age, Writers Face Frontier Justice."

New York Times 1 May 2006.

Zhou, David.

"Student's Novel Faces Plagiarism Controversy."

The Harvard Crimson [Cambridge] 23 Apr. 2006.

· • ·

"How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?"

In Books and Publishing class we had to write a bio paper on a living author. Since most of my favorite authors are dead (Hjortsberg, Shiner, and Crews a few among the living), I picked ol' Harry Crews, which I would. The complete first draft of this had about four more pages of his actual biography, but that made it far too long to be turned in. A quite chop-chop job and it was left to this.


~•~
(1st Draft)


CRW 321 - 001
January 27, 2009
Author Case History


"How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?"


Harry Crews is an unusual author who is linked in an essential manner to the particular place of his youth. This is immediately evident in the title of his published memoir, Childhood: The Biography of a Place. Harry was born in Bacon County, Georgia, a place where men would shoot each other over disagreements about fence lines and coon hounds. At a time when the rest of the country was just beginning to suffer the effects of the Great Depression, folks in Bacon County had been living that way for more than a few generations. Prospects looked bleak, and, if the crops failed, families were destitute.

At the age of 5, Harry suffered from a debilitating illness, one that would influence the rest of his life, and deeply reflect in his fiction. He contracted a fever accompanied by severe muscle contractions which would leave the county doctor to declare that Harry would never walk again. This declaration brought family and friends to his bedside, all staring at him in a disturbing way that would give Harry a unique perspective on how society viewed its peripheral elements, the people mainstream society called "freaks." The characters in Harry's fiction almost always displayed some deformity or grotesque trait (Crews, Childhood).

Harry described his father--a man who turned out to actually be his step-father--as a good man but a brutal drunk (Crews, Childhood). His mother eventually grew tired of his drunken tirades and packed up her family one night and made her way to Jacksonville, Florida, where Harry lived until he graduated high school.

He enlisted in the Marines, later commenting:

"Being good, southern, ignorant country boys, we did the good, southern, ignorant country thing: we volunteered as quickly as possible, anxious as we were to go and spill our blood in the good, southern, ignorant country way. (Introduction, Classic Crews 12)

It was during his three years in the Marines that he began to read everything he could.
Following his discharge he attended the University of Florida, where he first began writing fiction. He took a creative writing course with Andrew Lytle--formerly the teacher of Flannery O'Connor. Looking at one of Harry's early stories, Andrew Lytle told him he should burn the manuscript, saying, "Fire is a great refiner." (Goss, Pop Culture Florida 16)

A number of years later, after Harry had his first published novel, The Gospel Singer, he returned to the University of Florida as a teacher in the English department, where he taught for the next 29 years. During those three decades he published a total of 17 novels, a collection of fiction, an autobiography, and 4 collections of nonfiction. He was known by students and faculty alike as a hard-drinking, cantankerous man, who taught with the same fire and passion with which he wrote and displayed in his work. His life was always on the verge of overshadowing his fictional creations. He embodies the term Flannery O'Connor used to describe her own Southern characters, "a large and startling figure." (O'Connor)

The novels of Harry Crews could perhaps best be described as a sub-genre of the Southern Gothic. "Grit-Lit," as some critics have termed the work of Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, and early Cormac McCarthy. Works that mix great amounts of violence, dark humor, salacious subject matter, and grotesque characters. Although not all of Harry's novels have these elements, they certainly all have at least two or three of them.

Having a life that seemed to be straight out of his own novels caused Harry no small amount of conflict with the academic hierarchy, as well as more than a few publishers, editors, and agents. His first five novels were all published by William Morrow, the next thirteen would be published by a total of seven different publishers. Only three of those seven were major houses; Alfred A. Knopf, Harper & Row, and Simon & Schuster. The main factors of his conflicts with publishers and editors could be seen in his refusal to cut particularly violence scenes or graphic subject matter such as rape, castration, and brutal dog fighting ("A Writer's Face", Georgia Review).

With his nonfiction work, Harry fared no better with publishers. In 1976, while on assignment to write an article for Playboy, Harry began one of his infamous drinking binges. When he woke up a few days later, he found a tattoo on a hinge in the the fold of his arm. He included the tattoo in his expenses billed to the magazine, much to the dismay and anger of the editor (Dennis Miller Show).

It has been almost three years since Harry Crews's last book. An American Family: The Baby with the Curious Markings was published in 2006 by Blood & Guts Press, a tiny publisher in Los Angeles. It was printed in three editions: 26 lettered and signed copies hand-bound in goatskin; 300 numbered and signed copies in quarter leather with handmade paper boards, and then 2,000 copies in trade hardcover (Sauve).

This small number of his latest book belies the cult following Harry Crews has generated over his career. He has been sought out by such Hollywood luminaries as Sean Penn (who Harry dedicated Scar Lover to), when he was married to Madonna. Punk legends Kim Gordon and Lydia Lunch named a short-lived side-band after Harry, using his novels as titles for most of their songs. Harry Crews was also featured in the 2004 documentary, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, in which he relates three stories from his youth in archetypal Crews-style; that is, grim and gruff and full of unsettling humor.

Even if American Family is to be the final published work in his lifetime, the impact Harry Crews has made on modern American literature will be felt far beyond the range of those who have actually read, or even heard of him.

Another of his tattoos features a quote from the poet e. e. cummings, capturing perfectly Harry's bold attitude and brash outlook on what remains of his life: Beneath a grinning skull are the words, How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?

When it comes time to meet him, I don't know if Mr. Death will really want to find out.


•


A Selected Bibliography

Novels
An American Family: The Baby With the Curious Markings (2006)
Celebration (1998)
The Mulching of America (1995)
Classic Crews (1993)
Scar Lover (1992)
Body (1990)
The Knockout Artist (1988)
A Feast of Snakes (1976)
The Gypsy's Curse (1974)
The Hawk is Dying (1973)
Car (1972)
Karate is a Thing of the Spirit (1971)
This Thing Don't Lead To Heaven (1970)
Naked in Garden Hills (1969)
The Gospel Singer (1968)

Non-Fiction
A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978)
Blood and Grits (1979)
Florida Frenzy (1982)
Madonna at Ringside (1991)

•

Works Cited

"'A Writer's Face': The Letters of Harry Crews."

The Georgia Review Winter 2007.
Crews, Harry. Classic Crews.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

---. A Childhood: Biography of a Place.

Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995.

Goss, James P. Pop Culture Florida.

Sarasota, FL: Pineapple Press Inc, 2000.

Cummings, E. E. "Buffalo Bill's/ defunct."

The Dial Jan. 1920. Print.

O'Connor, Flannery.

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose.

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.

Sauve, Damon. "Fiction: Novels."

A Large & Startling Figure:
The Harry Crews Online Bibliography.
Jan. 27, 2009.

Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus.

Dir. Andrew Douglas. 2003.

DVD. Anonymous Content, 2005.

The Dennis Miller Show. Fox Network. 4 Feb. 1992.
The Rough South of Harry Crews.

Dir. Gary Hawkins. 1991.

Videocassette.
North Carolina Public Television.

· • ·

Books

For the class Books & Publishing, we started off with an essay about our relationship with books.

Kinda cool class. I think once that teacher has done it for a while longer, she could actually become a pretty good teacher.


~•~
(1st Draft)


CRW 321 - 001
January 13, 2009
Assignment #1
Personal Essay

The only time I've ever not liked books is when I'm lifting the 27^th milk crate full of hardbacks up three flights of stairs after having loaded 30 crates of them into the back of a U-Haul truck a few days before--and then it's only while I'm carrying them. By some perspectives, I could even suffer from that dreaded disease known as bibliophilia (eek! gasp!). But don't worry. It's not contagious. Unless, of course, you've already been exposed to it and have a predilection for such linguistic ailments. I think I contracted this disease as an early child--I would read whatever books I could reach on the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves my parents had lining three rooms of the house, at age 5, this only included the lower two shelves; and many of those books were the over-sized art books that were far too heavy for me then. Except the dictionary. I could pick up the big American Heritage with small black letter tabs and wonder what letter Mc was. Whenever any of us three kids would use profanity, all three of us had to sit down with the dictionary and write out a list of at least ten other words which meant the same thing as the profanity someone had uttered. This gave me a certain attitude about language and writing (as well as movies where the screenwriter has seemingly never heard of a thesaurus), and a familiarity with dictionaries. I've never fallen out of love with books, and, since I've never become fully fluent in another language, I have a deep--and perhaps overly-protective--love of the English language, and will staunchly defend its abuse.

If nothing else is available, I will read whatever is present--glossy magazine, owner's manuals, cereal box ingredient list--but I prefer fiction or non-fiction of any of the numerous subjects in which I have a lasting or passing interest. As for genres, I tend to not read much of any single one, and try to avoid the past decade's trend of best-selling books containing narcissistic ranting of funny, yet irrelevant literati; some of which have taken some rather notable awards. I usually name my favorite fiction writers as Philip K. Dick, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, Harry Crews and Larry Brown. The most perfect work of fiction I could cite is Nabokov's Lolita. But there are far more individual titles I enjoy more than an entire catalog from one author; Falling Angel, Deserted Cities of the Heart, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Egil's Saga; non-fiction like Sarajevo: A War Journal, The Oracle, The Hot Zone, and virtually anything involving eschatology.

It was reading A Clockwork Orange at the age of 12 that lead me to consciously say, "I want to create a world like this." At about the same time, PKD's Valis showed me that a novel could be so much more than a story. I had already been interested in writing, and had scrawled out an idea or three, but I didn't begin devoting any significant time to fictional prose until high school. And for years, I didn't make any attempt at all to publish what I had written, even after writing a novel when I was 21; a story which is still once of the clearest and most direct story ideas I've yet had. Most of my work is self-described as weird fiction, but since there's not a placard in bookstore for such, my stories could shift easily between Literature and Horror, being that most of them are about unsettling reality that usually comment on something more than being scared. The irony in this is that my published work is far more mainstream than any of that--a semi-autobiographical pastiche of Kerouac, and a short-short story that takes place during the Siege of Sarajevo (which took an award from Writer's Digest).

All of this lead me, of course, to find employment in bookstores. I've worked in the two biggest corporate giants, and three or four independents. I've been a buyer and seller of books for the past 15 years. If I had to relate only one thing I've learned from that, it would be that authors make very little money from the sale of books. The authors who have made a living from writing either: a) write a LOT (usually, but not always, of somewhat compromised literary quality); or, b) sell their books to Hollywood (usually, but not always, of somewhat compromised moral quality). I hope to be at a point to edgewalk either of those positions.

I am in a wonderful position right now to begin fulfilling my initial dreams as a professional writer. I have written more than a few dozen short stories--of which, a dozen-some are currently being shopped around--and three novels--having to come to the painful terms with one ever-expanding story, finally admitting it had become untenable to complete and must be abandoned. The third novel has been honed to the point where I have begun to shop it around to publishers and agents. This step of writing is a task involving far more effort than can be conceived by those who have yet to do so. As an artist, it is excruciating to do such; as a working writer, it is a necessary step in the process.

What I expect/hope to learn from this class is the processes involved in publishing a book once it is written. I have long been interested in book binding and the aesthetics of paper and fonts and typefaces (uneven, rough-cut pages on a trade paperback are exquisite, and my affect for vellum borders on the absurd). And, coming at this from being a writer, I think it will be a lot of fun to create a cover for my own work (which no author I know of has much say in) and have to present it as a package to the class. After wading for several semesters through the muck and brine of other classes, I feel with this one, I am closer to where I want to be with my academic education.


· • ·

The Tourist

Mosaic of leftovers.


~•~
(4th draft)


CRW 315 - Lyric Essay
January 21, 2009


The Mythic Tourist
Holiday Inn, Sarajevo, June 1993


—Sarajevo is a city in the mythic land of Jugoslavia.

—No one thinks much about Sarajevo

until some damn fool steps out from a café and shoots an archduke.

—Sarajevo is culturally and religiously progressive:

Muslim men drink in the same pub as women.

—Sarajevo is in the unfortunate younger child,

stuck between two bickering siblings.

—Karl Marx wrote that Sarajevo is littered with ethnic trash.

—In Sarajevo, the question,

where are you from?

holds dire consequence.

—Neighbors ask it from the other side of a fence.

—A century after Marx, General Mladić hopes to cleanse that trash.

—In Sarajevo, there is a game called Bosnian Roulette.

It involves dodging sniper bullets to reach a water spigot.

Some days, the spigot even works.

—Winners receive a drink of water.

—Everyone who plays Bosnian Roulette is undefeated.

—The only flight service to Sarajevo is Maybe Airlines;

maybe it will fly in today;
maybe it will be on time;
maybe it will be shot down.

Maybe you'll get back out again.

—Sarajevo produces more history than it can consume. ^{[Winston Churchill]}

—History not being very nutritious,

Sarajevans grow hungry for for bread and water.

—Sarajevan is damn silly; just ask Otto and the Hapsburgs.

—Sarajevo is protected by UNPROFOR—

—a magical alliance of disinterested warriors.

—The UNPROFOR guards look like Smurfs,

wearing powder blue helmets and driving shiny white trucks.

—The little Smurfs eat lunches of potted shrimp and foie gras,

with a desert of fresh-baked sweetbreads.

Hungry Sarajevans decline invitations to eat the leftovers;

it is summertime, and they need to watch their figures

in case they have a chance to go to the beach.

—Facing Mecca,

Muslim men and women raise their glasses together
while the snipers in the hills

prepare another round.

—Thank you for choosing Maybe Airlines.

—His desk out of range, Papa Smurf has little interest in Sarajevo.

—Advertisement Slogans for Sarajevean Tourism:

Come to Sunny Sarajevo! See our Public Gallows Museum!

Visit Our No-Vacancy Graveyards & 24-hour Atrocity Exhibit!

—Rose bouquets explode across concrete sidewalks.

Thorny bodies get bunched by the dozen.

—In the empty bread market,

Sarajevans smile at the UNPROFOR and think,

How lucky we are to be guarded by Smurfs.

· • ·

Desert Island Christmas Dinner

I considered, pondered, and debated myself for a while on whether or not I should post viable fiction on here. At length I decided that I would toss up a story or three that I might otherwise shop around. Sharing the weirdness is worth something.

As it turned out, this was my last assignment at Columbia College.


~•~
(2nd Draft)


FICTION II
5/4/08

Desert Island Christmas Dinner


Day 10:

I'm an American, damnit! That God-damn tour ship! This isn't supposed to happened to me! Damn Southern Hemisphere--Spring in November!--fucked up weather, ass-backward-seasons, and lame-ass tour boats that capsize in small storms. Now we're stranded on this desert island!? How much stupider can this get? Tropical desert island! If we were gonna be trapped in a --what's that word--klee-shay--why couldn't it at least have been the one where we get shipwrecked with the Swedish Bikini Team or something? But no...we had to be stuck in the klee-shay of having our companions on this remote-forsaken island to be a bunch of people who don't even speak English. Some Orientals who chatter on and on in their high speed way and look at us as if we're the funny ones. They creep me out. We keep wondering if they're talking about us, but none of us--y'know, the Americans--can make out a word of what they're saying. So we don't really know, but it sure seems like they are. We keep an eye on them, suspicious 'cuz we know they're talking about us.

Day 13:

The others seem to be in two groups. Maybe three. One group is these three guys, I guess they're Chinese or Koreans or some other slantys... Then there's the three French people. I hate French people. Think they're better than the rest of us. But they're French, so what do they know? Then there's this other guy. He's a slanty-eye dude, too, but he doesn't speak to the rest of them--sits apart from 'em and doesn't talk to them when they try to bring him into their chattering talks. He looks at everyone like he's about to kill us. Vicious, but he's a little guy. Then there's us--a couple of Aussies or Kiwis or whatever the fuck they are down here, and this Scottish "bloke" and then me and the three other Americans. We've been talking about what to do. Almost two weeks here. At first we were all out on the beach every night with a big-ass fire. But after five nights of that, the food that washed up with us on the beach was gone and everyone was getting hungry. That's when we started pulling away from each other. Forming these little groups. Not too close to each other, but not too far away neither. Them Orientals didn't seem to have much trouble finding local food. Fruits and roots and leaves, they ate it all. Dumb fuckers. Going out all day and finding food and leaving us sitting here hungry...
We watched 'em eat the next few nights and then, well, they offered us food a couple of times, but of course we aren't going to eat tree bark or whatever. Fuck them and that.

Day 18:

Finally got the French guys to say something in English. I knew they could talk to us but just wouldn't. Too good for speaking English like they should. They came over when we had food and just as clear as English can be, asked us for some. I wanted to tell them "no"--just 'cause they're French--but, well...okay it wasn't our food...if it was, I wouldn't have given them any, but it wasn't mine to keep. It's that one guy's food. That single Oriental dude. Nice guy, though, for being a little vicious foreigner. He killed a boar somehow and dragged it back to the beach where he skinned and quartered it. Even brought some of the meat over to us to share! Cooked it up all tasty and we all had some. Eating with us, he cleared up some things we didn't know. In real good English, too. No accent even. The other Orientals are Chinese, not Korean. He's Cambodian. Like that means anything to us. Says his name's Pray-Cha-Cha, or somethin', but we call him Bruce-Lee. Bruce Lee was cool. The Frenchmen aren't French, they're Belgian. Like there's a difference? Maybe if they had beer with 'em, or something. Belgium has good beer, I guess, for not being American. The Scotsman told us that French fries really came from Belgium, not France. Like we wanna hear about french fries out here on this island where we're starving? Okay, so we haven't starved 'cause this gook-dude--Bruce-Lee-Cha-cha--gave us some pig to eat.

Day 27:

A few nights ago, last week, maybe, when we were eating the last of Bruce-Lee's pig, he made the comment that wild boar was a lot like human flesh. Fuckin' cannibal! is what we all thought right away. But then we got to thinking about it. We've got no food here but there's plenty of people. So we've been talking about this. Seriously. There's some considerations to be made. Like that soccer team in South America back in the 70s or whenever. Gotta do what we can to survive. But none of us are sick or dead. Yet. Are we going to wait forever, or maybe take matters into our own hands? Skinny people are out, they don't have enough meat on 'em. No one here is really fat, so that doesn't matter. We decided that eating more healthy food would probably make someone taste better. No fast food junk in their bodies, and chemicals or whatever. Too bad there's no vegetarians here. Or those other ones...the really annoying hippy freaks. Oh, yeah, vegans.
I bet vegans would be good meat.

Day 32:

Well, it wasn't that bad if ya didn't think about. It does taste a lot like that boar we had a coupla weeks ago. And things are a lot quieter around here. Less chatter. Those French-Belgian fuckers sure aren't talkin' much now, but when they do, they always speak English. They know who's in charge. Bruce-Lee sure can cook anything, just like he said. We'll keep him around to keep makin' meals for us. He speaks English pretty good and tells some funny jokes and can find all the trimmings to make the meat really tasty.
Last night he had Christmas dinner.
We ate Chinese.

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Broken Little Lies

Pen to the Page and Write.


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In the beginning was the Word. The Word became flesh. Words to memorize and words hypnotize. Words make my mouth exercise. Words assemble, words be quick... Cast letters to spell words, and become sentenced by what is said; by what is written. Judged by it. Writing is magick, of course. And we should be bound by our words. The sentencing of our thought made word. A promise; an oath. Sending forth an affirmation; a troth of binding.

We should not promise something easily, nor lightly. And, once given, an oath should be kept except in extreme circumstances. Breaking one's word is a crime, a sin, against oneself. And should perhaps be viewed as a defeat in the ongoing struggle of attaining a life of compassion and brightness.

Of course, some persons derive pleasure from creating falsehoods, and inflicting them upon others. Place no faith with such people, yet they are not to be despised, merely avoided upon discovery of their false intentions.

Anything new or strange should be cautiously welcomed.

Once I dreamed I stood in the wreckage and debris of my own broken promises. They lay littered about my feet. I gathered the scattered pieces and threw them up into the sky where they stuck across the ceiling of the cosmos. And then I saw that they were not alone up there, for among them were the billions of glittering fragments of so many other broken promises.

The brighter the light shone, the darker the shadows cast.

When Love and Hate cease, there is but indifference. And that is truly far worse than either of the strong emotions. For in feeling angry or feeling concern, at least there is feeling. Without feeling, there is no care; no compassion. And then the Vacuity has overcome the Swell.

There is Truth. And there is Lie. In truth, is always faith. Faith is what you know to be true, even if you don't believe it. Lies, are the broken promises to yourself.


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