What I Assume

I couldn’t keep still on this one.

Yesterday Israel agreed to trade 5 imprisoned Lebanese terrorists for the corpses of two Israeli soldiers. The BBC reports on the lamentable deal, stating,

The release of Qantar is particularly controversial … because of his role in the deaths of three Israelis, among them a young girl.

His “role”? That sounds pretty innocuous. They can’t be referring to how Palestine Liberation Organization member Qantar shot the father at close range in the back, nor how he bashed the head of the man’s four-year-old daughter with a rock before crushing the child’s face with the butt of his rifle. I mean, he only played a “role”, right? He had nothing to do with the fact that the mother accidentally smothered her 2-year-old daughter trying to quiet her crying as they hid from Qantar’s inhuman rampage.

Baby-Killer and PLO Terrorist Samir Quntar–Lebanese Hero?

Well, at least the long-dead corpses of two Israeli soldiers will be returned to their homeland. I mean, that’s a fair trade, right?

Nearly a year ago, at a peak of mental anxiety, I decided to cease flitting around and finally write a complete novel, a goal I’ve had since I was 8 years old. Let me be completely candid and communicate the importance of this challenge: while my love of the art of good fiction contributed to my desire, the critical motivation to embark on this challenge was far more personal, centering on my 15-year high school reunion (which I won’t attend) and the fear of mortal obliteration.

I started with a strong idea born of a dream that could sustain itself across a 300pp book, and probably beyond, in the autumn of 2007. I’ve been working on it with good regularity in the mornings before work, trudging through outlines, character sketches, chapters, and half-chapters.

But as this summer rolled in I knew I was far behind my own expectations. I was revising chapter after chapter of the first third of the novel incessantly. I knew there was something wrong.

Being an English grad and a lover of literature, I have a comfortable knowledge of how to write, what a storyline looks like, and why character development happens. I’ve read and benefited from Adam Sexton’s Master Class in Fiction Writing. But pulling off the writing of a complete novel was more of a struggle than I had expected, and I began to wonder:

• Would this be a book that I as a reader would want to read?
• Could I keep the increasingly disparate events and characters cohesive for the second and third “acts”?
• Would this novel be a book I would want to have my name on, or if I would try to disassociate myself with a tricked-out nom de plume?

It was then that I stumbled upon Randy Ingermanson’s snowflake method , which oriented me to perceive my idea as if I were a reader picking the book up off the shelf. I began by writing a single-sentence synopsis. That went well; however, at step 2 I froze: I could not write a summary of my novel in 5 cohesive sentences. There was just too much going on, and it was all over the map.

I forced myself to step back and said, OK, you have your main character, you have your scenario, you know the climax of the novel. Now write a 5 sentence summary around that, and make it intriguing.

My end result was not perfect, and it left most of my work on the first third of the novel unusable. But it is something I would want to read, and I am finally confident that I have planted the right seeds. I can now see how my summary fits into the traditional 3-act storyline that Peder Hill elaborates on in this diagram:

Very exciting.

I mean this to be neither “stream of consciousness” nor surrealist. And so while I think a lot of the lines are right, the structure or order is subject to on-going revision. To illustrate this, the original has color-coded lines, which I would use if I thought it wouldn’t be distracting.

How Bad You Want It

someday you might have time to learn to paint
it may be Spring when your son is embarrassed sick of you
air travel and it’s thundering take-offs
fast is how it will grow boring
know by heart
her bare feet pressed the glove box
it was you who loosed each embrace
a winter morning too cold to buckle a seatbelt
acrid strings of spittle cling
alone in a public restroom and reading anything
will you call me she asked
young man
waited to shave, want now to stop
the surgeon tugs another bright-eyed insect light overhead
speak up
stay or go, just make up your mind
some in-flight turbulence, and it was a bumpy landing
thousands of unread titles have been written
you didn’t build wings let alone melt them
as always, the librarian is turning off lights
there will be time
you can’t always be the last to leave
the tv on all day
white noise helps you avoid hearing
music of an untranslated song still makes sense
change from a ten, two ones, two dimes, one penny
fibs chalk-mark the walls
perspirant halos from her perfect ten toes
is sleep black or beige
you have no idea
if the universe has a definite size and shape
blistered and rainbow-swirled
blow more bubbles
uncontrollable
variations within the species
where have you been
where were you when she wore that black dress
the living will never outnumber
a surprise of snowflakes
some February night or morning the newly dead dog froze stiff
know by touch
turning off the alarm that you yourself set
will you please shut the door
weep in the closet
nobody sees
it was the monkey who killed
with two open hands smacking temples
you didn’t see it coming
look at this, look at this, dad, look at this
you’ll appreciate sunshine and the smell of cut grass when you’re feeling better
now it’s too late
social behavior within packs condemns the weak and injured
so shut your mouth
despite the language barrier
I saw Darwin on the savanna chased by baboons and hyenas
don’t let sleep take you
in bed her back turned against you
the space between stars
the scars will be small
another tattoo that didn’t turn out right
no obvious branding of six-sixty-six
stitches will disintegrate
counting from one to ten, you fail at five
and now mother owl won’t wake the sun
o, omnipotent
all-ending anesthetic
du kannst fliegen
we’ll be there when you wake up
will you be
dreamless like the dead
perchance
one in a million typing monkeys
try your luck and roll the dice
if you can’t say something nice
call it dark matter

I had nearly a full day open following the MoodleMoot SFo, and with @kenwoodward claiming the rental car, I decided to visit one of my favorite museum’s at The Palace of the Legion of Honor.

I arrived just before the museum opened, giving me time to stroll the grounds and observe a number of bouncing, velveteen birds amongst the lawns and flowers. After 9:30 I hobbled down to the cafe, where I spun out a couple sudoku puzzles under a hot mug of tea and apple strudel. Then it was on to the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiquities before heading upstairs to the main galleries.

On the main floor, the first piece that I took notice of was one I’d been curious about before, but never contemplated beyond it’s surface: Gaspere Traversi’s The Fortune Teller, ca. 1760. I’ve not had any training in art history, but offer a short critique with an amateur’s interest:

mharrsch through Creative Commons licensing

Traversi’s The Fortune Teller shows a mirror of two women, one old, the other ostensibly young, but with subtle signs of oncoming age. Though the subjects are distinctly client and reader, wealthy and poor, the women are reflections of each other. One tells what the other wants to hear, and like many psychics, through simple tricks of confidence, they are of one mind; they wear the same greedy smile; and, as we see just below the palm, they posess a common purse.

Traversi has portrayed them in inverted postures, like two sides of the same coin: their heads leaning in together, touching near the crown present a near identical physical arrangement. And though one is rich and the other poor, their clothing shares similar visual connections: the fortune teller’s blue head scarf matches her client’s blue hair ribbons; as the younger woman’s white sleeves press out from beneath her dress, so do the sleeves of the fortune teller, though with less pomp and whiteness, recalling age and use. Similarly, the gray hair of the old woman can find it’s roots in the graying roots of the younger. Finally, curiously, both women wear pearl earrings.

The reflective quality of these women is not so much dichotomous to me as it is foreboding; like a still-life, these women of singular mind incarnate aging and superficiality, and through this I feel a moral warning. Perhaps it is through irony, for as the young woman looks to the future, she looks only to fantasy; whereas the reality of her future is apparent not in her own palm, but in the face, hair, dress, and posture of her counterpart

The old man peering over the fortune teller’s shoulder is something of a mystery, clutching the eerily-eyed bird-head of his cane, but I think this to tells something of the narrative: we might assume he is the fortune teller’s husband, and at the risk of being corrected by other details I’ve overlooked, we might infer that the younger woman is unmarried, and seeking counsel on her prospects for taking a husband. His presence is a conspicuous disparity to what otherwise stands as a strongly symmetrical composition, and so an absence of a “reflection” on the younger woman’s side of the canvas is notable.

Though presumed to be of separate lineage, the women in The Fortune Teller are connected intergenerationally. I see a similar pattern in Traversi’s The Merry Company, where the old, somewhat disheveled man in the foreground grins his gums and lifts his hat, while in the background a younger verdion of the man grins with a younger set of teeth, but the same cheery and hopeful eyes.

Other works of notable impact on this visit:

• Chihuly’s Sea Blue and Green Tower
• Rodin’s The Sculptor and His Muse
• Magical Stele (Egyptian)
• Dandre-Bardon’s Diana and Endymion
• Gerard’s La Comtesse del Morel-Vinde and Her Daughter
• Lear’s Masada on the Dead Sea
• Bazzani’s Temple of Saturn
• Redin’s illustrations for Flaubert’s La tentation de Sainte-Antoine
• Picasso’s illustration (not the etching) Peintre et modèle tricotant
• van Noordt’s Susanna and the Elders
• And, as always, any portrait by Raeburn

Though my visit was cut a bit short by the arrival of my colleague, it was one of my most satisfying visits to this museum, and on several instances I found myself whispering that I’d gladly live another and another lifetime wrapped in the alternating mixture of discipline, reverence, and decadence as a painter.

I’m reading Nabokov’s “Ada” for the second time, and am struck by how authentically the author seems to love his characters, regardless of their flaws. To love a “round” character is to engage in an unconditional love, much like we often project upon God–a claim which, I understand, does nothing to reduce melodramatic conceptions of the author as god-like.

I’m working on a long work of fiction myself this year, and it is a frustrating and overwhelming experience. Nine days out of ten I sit down to write and must combat myself. I do not want to return to the story, do not want to smooth out the wrinkles as I go, untangle the knots that I’ve tied, or twist new rope and tie new knots for links. Part of the problem, I’m realizing, is that I may not love my characters as much as other authors do. I know them, I try to distinguish between them, I think I understand them, many of them I respect and admire, many of them I have just contempt for, and some I do feel a paternal love for, but do I love them all?

It may be that as I am only 1/3 of the way through the writing, and I am dealing with 6 protagonists and just as many antagonists, the characters have not developed enough on the pages yet to allow for a recognition of them as authentic, independent beings. And how can one love a thing of mere fiction; one can only love fictional things that represent and mean real things.

Hmm, hmm.

A Summer Foot

Five toes, uncannily fat and even,
   wide her foot
   span of a sandal.
She stretches
showing dark brown impressions beneath,
sweet cushions from toe prints.
Her big toe, unstirred by my glance,
points it’s convex nail up
   a devil’s horn.

She has rye bread eyes, strawberry yogurt lips,
hair like hong cha, too;
but I can not bear to catch that beauty–
safer to stare towards the floor,
dissembling digits that end her limb.

She stands, and I foresee how she
     steps sandled through sudden summer rain,
    dips in to test the tub,
   extends from the water when shaving,
  drips to the rug when leaving, and
 slides slightly cold and alone
toes-first inside the sheets.

I dug this out of a moleskine I’d used on the ferry from Plymouth to Santander in 2007. I revised it as I typed it.

How the rainy years do vaporize!
Each day more translucent than the others!
We ache across the fog of gaping love
like estranged brothers,
throwing breadcrumbs to the midnight skies.

April has been declared National Poetry Month by poets.org, and a week into the month Chris Lott described how he planned to write a poem each day in line with NaPoWriMo. The name NaPoWriMo is lamely appropriated from NaNoWriMo, the generally obnoxious National Novel Writing Month wherein artistic conflates attempt to burn through writing a novel in 30 days. While the energy of NaNoWriMo inspires me in the same way the discipline and fervor of Ray Bradbury’s practice does, the idea of an organized, collectively proceeding writing effort frustrated and annoyed me, particularly since it clearly valued quantity over quality. It certainly favored people who had no jobs (a surprisingly large crowd, by the way). Add to that the vocal dominance of NaNoWriMo participants who are either self-aggrandizing or self-degrading, and I knew this was not an activitiy to me.

But Chris Lott’s engagement in NaPoWriMo intriguiged me; a poem-per-day struck me as do-able, and Chris’s very practical list of self-imposed “rules” demonstrated that he, at least, wasn’t afraid to do his own thing, independently. The idea of joining him in this effort also provoked some vague feelings of comeradery, so I chose to do the same, though I rejected the name NaPoWriMo and simply called my efforts “poem-per-day”. My hope was that I would stick to the schedule and thus forcibly return myself to writing poetry, a pasttime that I’ve sorely neglected in the last 6 years. The goal of writing one poem per day would be rigorous, but not so difficult as to negate the quality of the poems I was working on. I soon realized that quality could be a priority, but in the confines of whatever hour or two I had each day to put a poem together, it was impossible to make each poem “good”.

Though I can’t speak to the quality of my output during April, I did hit quite close to the mark in terms of quantity: from April 6th through April 30th I wrote 26 poems, and posted these on my web site, What I Assume. I wrote nearly every morning before work, and spent a few evenings catching up. On several days what I wrote were more poetic exercises than full-fledged poems. A couple of the poems I thought were good at the time of writing, and I know most of the poems had at least one good line, but I think only in retrospect, some months later, will I be able to look back with any sort of objectivity.

Another interesting phenomenon had to do with my choice of subjects. I began with a string of fairly gloomy, stereotypical subjects for a poetaster, but soon found myself terribly bored and in fact embarrassed with the uniformity. So I urged myself to change subjects, mash-up exclusive ideas, and write on things I really wasn’t comfortable writing on.

To add to the excitement of writing a poem-per-day, in the first week I also threw down the gauntlet and challenged Chris to write a villanelle sometime during the weekend. We both did, then he reciprocated my challenge with the torturous ghazal. I returned the final weekend with the deceptively simple-looking bref double. These excursions into poetic forms was both frustrating and delighting; I’ve always loved poetic forms, and in college fancied myself apt at writing formal poetry. But either I oversupposed my abilities back then, or I’ve lost quite a bit of of ability since then. What fascinated me in writing these forms is despite their apparent artificiality, their formal elements help, or rather, force the author to carry through certain themes, ideas, images, or resonances. And while I’ve often thought that formal meter and rhythm risked neglecting meaning or intent, I found the limitations–particularly in length of lines and stanzas–directed me to focus on my meaning and intention more precisely, and with less waste.

At least that was my perception during the writing; what the final outcome is, I’m too timid to suppose right now. But this very strong and impactful month is an experience that I intend to repeat–not next year, probably not the year after, but not too far in the future. It is a precious, exhausting experience that was worth every ounce of extra effort, but that I do not want to normalize by making it an annual tradition. But some year, some day, I will sit down again and decide, “Poem-per-day, for the next thirty days.”

April 30th

Snow runs straight across the road parallel and pale gray,
plankton on the unseen currents.
Normally Summer upstages Spring here,
but this time April ends with this howl,
having inhaled numberless seasons of mockery.

A magician, before diving in the tank
to break his breath against death,
first fills his blood with euphoria,
and stores it.

Everything is backwards.
I’ve wakened from the walking sleep of day
ending the warmest April in this freezing Spring fool’s night;
The heater in my car feels cold like a vacuum;
Classical plays on the punk rock radio station;
Twenty minutes ago my head rested on my wife’s warm ribs,
who scratched my hair-thick head.
My nose whistled, a mewing puppy,
comfortably quiet despite echoes of laughter
from the universal joke whispered every day.
I’ve never caught the punchline, but I’ve heard enough;
even though they get the details wrong,
the details don’t matter.

The universe, they say, will contract like an elastic band,
and with itself bury itself,
or it will expand until the elastic breaks.
And if it contracts, it will expand.
either way it must have somewhere to go;
oblivion or persistence—involuntary either way.

And now the snow has stopped, on the road:
remnants of a light Spring rain.
And the car has warmed.
And the green light grins, Go.
Go to a place you never go
for a hot drink and a cinnamon roll.
The light licks it’s green lips,
Go,
and,
There’s nothing you’ve forgotten,
nothing left at home,
except the funny passing moments
you call love.

Eventually the puppy will begin
to dig holes for his bones;
not out of practicality, but because they are so precious
he knows not what else to do.
He’ll plan to come back,
but never will,
having forgotten the holes and the bones, and any
way, having
somewhere better else to go.

Anthropomorphizing Spring

Laid lazy across the horizon two mountain ranges form feuding families,
a mix of soft curves and angles, both are draped with snow white stoals
two jutting peaks, warrior guardians to the rift between them,
a canyon tomb of their clans.

Beneath an unbending, single-minded cloud, who spread's it's eagle wings and shades
grow gray rows of outcast trees, starved branches eerily ashamed of their budding greens
and the baptism their roots shared with the grass in the winter run-off.

While the trees meditate in the cold spring wind the grass just bristles;
as it's million precocious leaves wait to begin cheerleading for the tulips
youth misled by perennial beauty, by the winter run-off,
rushing towards the dry, interminable summer,
or, of their own accord, misleading.