Subtexts on life, etc.

Burning Page 1

2011-06-13T06:26:00.000-07:00

Pay attention to the apostrophe on the 8, the eight is the key to everything like being behind the eight ball which comes from pool and you don't want to go to the shallow end because that is where the empty ideas are to be found just like in American Christianity or is this now a riff on God and Jesus so that you wonder what at this very moment you believe as if you are always taking your spiritual temperature like a fever or wondering if one moment you believe and one moment you don't and then get caught between purgatory and the deep-blue sea; oh say, did you see the saw and as the nursery rhyme goes, the nursery is the way to nurse, nursing a nurse or the great teat of oblivion--a bad word that the gamers grabbed; the gamers took the good words and left us with a wordless language and the gamers have their own that few others understand, you could write a gamer novel but no one would read it because gamers don't read so it would have to be a game of some sort but then it wouldn't be a novel or literature but a different type of story altogether. I love that word--all to get her, is the word misogynist? altogether, all get her, like a gang rape? or a cluster f*ck like the meeting of a traffic jam on toast, the toasted highway of bread crumbs but you can't get back to Gretchen's house because the birds at the crumbs from the highway, but if you don't do it my way then whose way did I do it? If I did it all all, maybe I didn't do it so someone else did and you can't blame me anymore. You will have to blame someone else, someone else who is nearby or far away as long as it isn't me but you. Yes, you're to blame whoever you are not me not me not me. Repetition, repeat the sounding drum or the repeat, repeat, repeat the sounding joy to the world or wold--a wold is something else and who can joy the wold or the copse or the archaic words and worlds the old, the aged, like those past fifty, and it has been forty years since the U-turn from the path of life. The Tao. The Way, as St. Paul said it. Paul is the one to blame for the way the way went off or was it those who used his name in vain? Salvage this bit of wiring and writing? Wiring runs the house and writing is the electricity of the page.

Opening line

2010-07-20T06:58:00.001-07:00

'The R on Refills lost its legs."

SHHHHH!

2010-07-13T13:15:00.000-07:00

I bought one of those portable, flexible keyboards for the laptop to make it easier in transcribing the MS and most noticable is the lack of sound other than an odd rubberish type of sound. I am so far disconcerted over the lack of noise. It is too quiet and lacks the rhythm that the manual typewriters have. One advantage is that I can place it closer to the edge of the desk and ease the wrists. That being said, it lacks panache. It is black and fully utilitarian to the pont of being waterproof and, according to the leaflet of instructions, fogproof which would make it handy when the fog rolls into the study, or those languid days on the coast. Will it improve anything? More importantly, how will it affet what is written sinceI still spend far too much time looking at the screen and letting my spelling mistakes interupt the speed of the writing. Perhaps I remain a Luddite.

Surrealistic Dilemna

2010-07-13T06:49:00.000-07:00

The Muse apparently possessed the new typewriter because a story suddenly developed from it. This Muse put me into a state of confusion because this story turned out to be more fun than the serious literary novel. I found myself at this same place last summer at about the same time. The story is fanciful, about letters and words slipping their moorings and dripping out of pages, pulled by gravity and seeking their source at the center of the earth from where all words rise. The problem is that I am enjoying this story more than the novel and feeling guilty in that enjoyment (please don't use this opportunity to comment on underlying Lutheran guilt). I feel sort of naughty in writing silliness or surrealism. Then I look at the writers I've enjoyed reading and find the surreal ones are more to my liking. Vonnegut, Borges (my current read), Marquez, and the like. Part of the problem may be that the section of the novel that I'm working on is realistic and less surreal, primarily because the central character of this section is realistic where the other main character "hears voices." This reminds me too much last summer's novel in a month experiment which was surreal. Or the iguana story which was plainly surrealistic. Maybe the problem is less of a problem after all.

writing machine

2010-07-11T18:24:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I found another writing machine. This is a portable, pre-internet, nearly laptop that only runs out of energy when I do which writes in italics and the cost was less than a pack of cigarettes. Made in West Germany, the Olympic de Lux italic typerwriter has fired new sparks of creativity. Writing on it is a different experiences with a different dynamic. For example, when I write on the computer, as I am now doing, I stare at the screen and watch the letters form on the screen. These letters, however, have no tangible aspect to them. They are the result of electric sparks of some sort energizing tiny, nearly microscopic squares. As letters they do not fundamentally exist. When I type (or write with pen on paper) the letters exist in both form and physical reality. I could take the paper and cut out the individual letters with an exacto knife. Not so with the computer. As I write on the computer, as I said, I watch the letters form into words. On the typewriter I hunch over and stare at the center of the keyboard with the letters T, G, H, Y within direct view, but out of focus. By not looking at the paper I am not concerned about revisions. The errors are legion but I don't pay attention. Contrast this to the screen, where I am constantly aware of the errors, frequently backspacing to cure the problem, all of which interrupts the flow. Also on the typewrite is the click-clack of the keys, a far different sort of noise than the muted tick, tick of the keyboard. Add the ding of the bell and the call slide the carriage with the return arm and I've found a more satisfying way of writing. The only problem I have is that of transcribing from the typed page to the computer. I may try scanning the typed page into a computer file. Of course, this all may have to do with the novelty of having an italic typewriter.

Cocktails

2010-07-06T18:23:00.000-07:00

Blame this on my previous experience as a bartender. Why blame needs to be placed is well beyond me but writers looking for an excuse out of a given behavior look for blame and try to place it on some event, person, object, out of body experience, they may have had. Of course, they may only have desired to have the experience so that they can claim blame. I am placing my blame firmly in the lap of Greg Matt, my bartender mentor. I am applying this blame to the recent upsurge in popularity of sophisticated cocktails to which I can give a hearty "thank heavens." I know this is true because the new Old Crown Coffee place has a bona fide bartender who knows his way around the spirits. He also makes an excellent Manhattan. The Manhattan, not the bartender is the real subject of this essay. He was only a sideline and he can now be ignored. The Manhattan is a delightful blend of rye whiskey, sweet (French to the cogniscenti) vermouth, a dash of bitters garnished with marichino cherries. On July 4, the day we celebrated the end of British tyranny, I introduced a friend to the Manhattan. He was caught in its allure. Even the name conjures up images of an old New York seen only in old movies like the Thin Man series (Nick and Nora, where are you when cocktail hour comes?). Now he knows what to order when the cocktail waitress comes around and asking for beer is de classe. He can look at her and say with authority, "I'll have a Manhattan, please." If he would specify rye whiskey instead of bourbon, she would realize he was a man not to be trifled with. Where the story would go from here only you can imagine and we pray his wife doesn't find out.
Cocktails are back! What next? Will pipe smoking gain social acceptance? One can hope.

Books for writers, my suggestions

2010-07-03T06:43:00.001-07:00

On with the list.

The first one I recommend getting when money is available (at more than $40 new, sad to say) is the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus. This book has done more than any other to pull my ass out of difficulties in the revision stage. While I may not use the suggested synonym, it sparks an idea or a thought or a word that improves the piece at hand. It is an investment better than a dictionary. As far as other dictionaries go, I have little advice. If you want the king, then a Webster's Unabridged makes a great doorstop, bookend, and has words you'll not find elsewhere. Another one I find handy (out of print as far as I know) is the Follett Vest-Pocket 50,000 Words. This one has no meanings but gives the proper spellings. It's a great pre-computer resource for editors that has saved this poor speller from embarrassment. I know the computer can do much, but as I teach my students—spell-checker will betray you.

For the mechanics of writing I'll give you two: Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss and The Elements of Style by Stunk and White. The first is a lot of fun, but be aware that she writes from a British English point of view and the punctuation is a bit different. The second is the standard by which the other grammars are judged. The illustrated edition has wonderful, sophisticated illustrations.

Writers need inspiration. A couple of my favorites you already have, If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. Ueland is the one I frequently reread when I need a boost. Despite being a bit dated (after all she wrote it before WWII) she speaks to me as a dear friend would. Two more I strongly recommend are Why I Write from George Orwell and The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo. Orwell gives great lessons on clarity. His six rules are worth the price of the book. (You'll have to find them in the book yourself.) Hugo looks like it is written for poets but his use of places for inspiration and subject matter apply to all writers. Three other similar books are The Writing Life by Annie Dillard, Negotiating with the Dead by Margret Atwood, and The Faith of a Writer by Joyce Carol Oats. These three take very different approaches to writing and approach it in different styles but are worth listening to.

Annie Dillard shows up again in Living by Fiction. I'm mentioning her in offering books on writing fiction. My favorite on fiction writing is John Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist which I've marked, tagged, highlighted and glossed in the margins countless times. To these I would add the classic Aspects of the Novel by E. M Forster. I should tell you that these don't provide recipes for good fiction. They open doors to your method of writing fiction. For sheer fun (or an absurd challenge) consider No Plot? No Problem by Chris Baty who shows the way to write a novel in 30 days. Yes, it can be done because I've got a rough draft of a novel written in that time. For a couple of recipe type books The Writers Journey from Christopher Volger gives the mythic outline that undergirds the vast majority of plot lines of books and movies. His diagram on p. 8 could easily be used for an outline. I've thought of using it for a quickly written novella of about 30-40,000 words. Writing the Novel by Lawrence Block is another one that works through the writing process one step at a time. In the end, however, each writer finds his or her own way.

Before I get to my final suggestions I need to comment on the reading suggestions made by all these writers. I take them very much to heart and have struggled to read many of them. The suggestions given have become my curriculum and I have found their recommendations as solid as any other reading list. When the same author is mentioned more than once, like Melville or Greene, I pay attention. I haunt the local used bookstores for copies of their suggested authors. Learning to read like a writer has been a chore for me. I went through Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose in the hope of instant insight. She helped some and gave directions to more books to read. I only wish I had more time to read.

Some final suggestions. The first has nothing to do with writing but everything to do with communication: Conversation by Theodore Zeldin. I was so struck by Zeldin when I heard him on the radio that I pulled over and wrote the information. He discusses the need for bona fide communication. It's a short book, hard to find, but worth the effort. The second suggestion concerns where a writer writes, hence the title: A Writer's Space. Eric Maisel considers the need for writing space, a located place where writing takes place. Too often there is the assumption that writing can take place anywhere. This is not true. Maisel points you to the importance of the place from which good writing comes. I'm leery to make the third suggestion because it doesn't quite fit with the rest of the books on the list. This is Break Every Rule by Carole Maso. I was introduced to this through a class I took last year and am rereading now. Maso causes me to rethink the process and product of writing. She raised a critical question for me, one that I have as yet to answer: What is my creative and artistic goal? Her book is about as far from a how to as you could find. In rereading it, I am drawn more and more into her questions.

I hope this helps.
I offer these writers because they have helped me. One remarkable aspect about writing: those distant and those dead can continue to talk to me . I only hope that I can add to the conversation.

The Art Museum

2010-06-24T10:27:00.000-07:00

Today I played hooky from morning writing and went to the refurbished art museum. I needed art, and Thursday is a free day.
Contemplating a work by T.C. Steele brought me to the question of why? Why work so hard and so long to produce a relatively small piece seen by a few who make a point to view it. Or in my case, stumble upon it since I wasn't searching for Steele's work. From the practical side, what function does it serve? It can't be eaten, can't provide shelter, can't provide jobs, can't aid in reproduction. It has no purpose and still the city of FW and many contributors recently spent a large amount to give the work a home with excellent lighting, proper climate control, and opportunities to be seen by a few. Why? And why did Steele (and by extension all the other artists) work so hard at producing art? Then the question got pointed around to me. Why have I been spending the summer writing a novel? I could have received a full adjunct teaching load at IVY Tech and receive the immediate monetary reward. I could have made many repairs to the house, repainted the living room, developed a better garden. I could have built another boat (wait, the boat isn't practical). Instead I opted to add more to the novel in progress. Why? Because the characters in the novel need me. They need me to tell their story and tell it truthfully and bravely. And I need them. I need them as an expression of creativity. Why create? Because we are in the image of God.

The poem that remains unpubished

2010-04-26T18:43:00.001-07:00

Poem number 25

Now the end and my mind
has emptied itself. frankincense (Sinatra songs no more will
the end) is near and so I face the venal curtain. reverberate through the random pathways of the skull be neat skill, beneath the blood between the cortex cerebellum. it might be called not that I care I want to be done.
Referee, get on with the nothingness; I cherish the word that is (used).
more pop songs learned in eighths grade. never guava when I try to make them go away all they do is hove back like dragnonflied blue birds.

I will die of broken midnight

2010-04-24T13:30:00.000-07:00

I will die of broken midnight
For Cesar Vallejo

I will die of broken midnight
when a sallow moon pulls the neap tide of light
from my telluric side.

I will die ready for breakage,
a cracked cup or mug or teapot
cracked with stains of words.

I will die of pulpit and conflictions
the swelling of convictions
compounded with an overactive doubt.

They will bury me under words
spoken by strangers
bearing putrid dichotomies.

Pilgrimage to Metronome

2010-04-13T08:41:00.000-07:00

We meet to climb the wooden pyramid
Seal the trunk looks on
We lay packs to backs
Balance on twin legs
Libra holds her balance out
Blinding yes to shutter the storm
Of charlatan ghosts
Ticking, clicking the meter’s heart
Weighed in the balance
Lacking psychic paths of metronome
Scale the unlit see
Dark yardsticks the light
Winding the salty taste of blood
Upon the fishmonger tunes.

Vallejo inspired, I suppose

2010-04-09T10:27:00.000-07:00

The Stupor that Dulls
after Vallejo

The stupor that dulls the edge of hope,
that grinds to pulp the stillborn word,
that stultifies the worker’s hands
to motionless stumps;

The stupor that slowly drains the pus of youth
and leaves dried blister skin,
that refuses to kill but keeps alive
futility like the unwed bride;

The stupor that steals love from love
and leaves a hollow vowel to echo
against the chains of its own heart;

The stupor that leaves the dead undead
to continue lives of muted discontent
so muted it sloths to bed night
after dreamless, restless night;

The stupor that envies the stiff-eyed man
who stares out over the park, over the drive,
over the promised lies of satisfaction
absorbing nothing;

The stupor that sits in the open garage door
in stained undershirt, in aluminum lawnchair,
smoking cigars and drinking whiskey highballs
as leaves blow unnoticed around the feet.

Searching for the Duende

2010-03-24T19:25:00.000-07:00

I continue to try, and here's another attempt.

We’re not unique
although we try
with ink, piercings, clothes,
some try hats,
wanting to be like Jesus
genus idiomaticum
an event unto itself
special in the world.
The random clutch
of father’s sperm and mother’s egg
never happened before
or so we think.
Don’t look at cockroaches,
they breed the same.

Wither the Words?

2010-03-18T06:41:00.000-07:00

It began as a dot on my earlobe. I thought it was a drop of dried blood, or a black fleck of dust and didn’t think anything about it. The next time I looked in the mirror I saw more flecks making a line out of the ear canal and down the lob, like ants following a line. The flecks were larger and more distinct. I wiped them off and looked closely and discovered the flecks were tiny letters, serif letters, smaller than agate print, but still letters, independent of page or print, and very real. I swabbed out the ear canal and tried not to think anymore about it.
As I ate breakfast I could feel them. My wife asked, “What’s that coming out of your ear?”
“Nothing,” I said, wiping the ear with my napkin. I glanced at the napkin and realized the letters had grown larger, with sans serif mixed with the serif.
Since I couldn’t go to work with letters coming out of my ear, I stuffed cotton in my ear, hoping that would soak them up.
That only worked for an hour. The tickling inside the ear drove me to distraction. I wanted to (to be continued).

Another attempt at poetry

2010-03-11T18:47:00.001-08:00

The bear and Christ seek the same
shredding of the ego.
The bear is Christ under a different name.
(Neither has a name, Christ
means anointed, a title, Jesus
an afterterm. He should go by son to track
an unnamed father ghosted in holiness.)
To whom shall I pray for poetic help
a nameless bear, an unnamed God
when both desire the same—
to shred the ego.
I can’t cast down my own idol,
a fearing deadful sacrifice.
Death comes on Christ bear’s pawprints
hallowed claws of blooded fur and flesh.

Into the jaws of bear

2010-03-10T10:39:00.000-08:00

Here's my latest attempt at modern poetry. Am I getting closer?

I.
On the other side of ego the bear lives.
On the other side of ego—off the cliff
that takes the step of faith to leave.
One foot presses out to egoless space,
the other foot remains, anchored and groan
into the rock, the foot and rock are one.
Ego tendrils grow up around the leg
over the arm and clutch the hand,
holding hands in strangling grip.
To get to the bear the leg must break
off the foot and chop the hand.
No step
to the bear is easy.
The hopefull bear looks up.

II.
If I break off my leg,
the lifeless, granite one,
will it grow back?
When I step to the bear
will he restore the ripped off limbs?
Or teach me to dance
a one-footed hop to the sound of one hand clapping?
Or will I bleed out minerals from the stump
proving my heart of stone pumps
dry grit of boulders
through veins and arteries of rock?
Dead volcanoes.

III.
Purple chips the rock-foot, granite ankle,
cracks the flesh, the bone, the mineral
veins running through the mountain.
Shuddering quake. Purple dissolves the rock.
Water into crevices freezes, flakes the stone
to harmless Indian artifacts, elf-bolts,
imagined battles. Fissures grow
as my cock crows the day’s betrayal.
Jesus knows no more.

IV.
Soren, Soren, take my remaining hand. Together
we step off and soar to bear’s mouth,
into the teeth, around the tongue,
blessed holy tongue of grace and truth,
a beacon light of uvula
(vulva’s phonemic sister).

V.
Light ursine entrails calls.
Blindly through the past and ever green,
the evergreen pure and lively
against the shallow brown.
Jaws of life, a road 500 long, they’re dead.
Don’t look glowering at corpses. Hang them
in heaven’s vault within the stomach lining.

VI.
Naked thighed, wetly within the bear;
Soren’s stayed in waistcoat and pantaloons behind.
Costumes of ego dissolved in sunset digestion.
Let my naked prayers be heard,
digest me, please. Skin worn off
by cilia’s work, then muscle, fat, and bone.
The bear remains.

2010-03-06T14:57:00.001-08:00

Last night's reading at the Coop went fantastic! Susan and I had a great crowd. George was as gracious as always. I wish I hadn't been so nervous during the whole event. The next time will be easier. Thanks to everyone who attended and gave their support.
Which brings the next and completely disconnected topic. Spring break is here and I'm postponing the stack of papers to grade. I'm going to devote the time to write my own papers. Real poety. The weather is cooperating and the shed will be warm enough. I'm thankful for the time and look forward to what can be produced. All will be informed as it's delivered.

ENGL 024

2010-02-18T09:49:00.000-08:00

My fantastic 024 class needed to be introduced to a blog. I'm showing them how to set it up. Say hi, class. Be sure to comment on this blog to get extra points.

Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main...

2010-02-09T04:14:00.000-08:00

After a long wait, Duckworks, an online magazine for boat builders published "Down to the Sea in Ships". Check it out at www.duckworksmagazine.com. I've been waiting for months to see it online. It seems so long ago since I wrote it. I started to re-read it but I began seeing flaws, better ways to say it, etc., This is what it means to let it go, I suppose. Good-bye little story! Have a great life on the internet! Be well, be read, be enjoyed! The magazine has a very dedicated readership of back-yard boat builders. Now I need to figure out how to place it in the CV. This also gives new drive to get other stories out.

A tad ticked

2010-01-31T17:50:00.001-08:00

Ticked at the FW paper that lists subsidy press publications along with legitimate press publication. For those who try to write and get published through regular channels have a rough time of it as is. Then they ran a release for "new authors" which should have been an add instead of an announcement. Pity the writers who show up and find they have to pay to get in print. And yes, I've heard of Thoreau and Grisham and all the other "successful" self-publishers, but that doesn't make it any less than a scam. Warn writers of these places before they end up in POD hell.

Accepted-I hope

2010-01-21T12:24:00.000-08:00

Grace? Dame Fortune? God?
My first novel, a YA fantasy has been accepted by a small press--Blue Pomegranate Press. They're a start-up with a focus on Lutheran fiction, so my book is a perfect fit. No advance, but 20% royalties. Limited press run (OK the editor and his wife make the books by hand.) He has a marketing plan and has tapped into enough interested folks to buy.
This is in the early stages. More later as it develops.

From prose to poetry

2010-01-18T15:13:00.000-08:00

A statement of the obvious: Prose and poetry are different. This mind-shattering verity hit me while I've been trying to compose a poem for an upcoming class. In prose, I could catch the wave of the story line ride the crest from one part to the next. The narrative would become alive as the characters gave it life. Composing this poem has involved more wrestling with the words. Through poetry the importance of a give word takes on a new importance. Each word bears many facets to the work, like the sound and shape, the history of use, the denotation and connotation, its ethnic and cultural heritage. Anglo Saxon or Latinized Old French? Concrete or abstract? Rich or poor? A recent migrant word or an ancient word with rooted meaning? A native or alien word? Hand-cuffs, manacles, shackles, restraints all do the same thing but use the word and see the difference. No neutrality exists.
For the poem I'm working on I have a beginning and an end. First line: St. Joe bleeds his martyrdom... Last line: Fort Wayne drinks up, unknowing. The middle has yet to be written, and that is what I'm wrestling with.
It will be written on time, to be reworked.
This poetry experience should be a good one.

Busyness

2010-01-02T23:56:00.000-08:00

I've almost finished a basement renovation project: doing the room from top to bottom with new ceiling tiles, fresh wall paint, and laminate flooring to mask the error of asbestos tile. The task has held my focus through Christmas break and nothing else got done. It was a way of keeping distracted in activity. I have a habit of distraction. One of my favorite websites is Duckworks, an online magazine for amateur boat builders. I keep checking it because they are going to be running one of my stories. At least that is the reason I delude myself with. The truth is, I spend far too much time looking over boat building projects in the fantastical hope that I'll build one. I went so far as to buy a set of plans. Why the obsession? Perhaps a childhood dream of having a boat, the romance that comes with a boat. A boat symbolizes freedom, regardless of size. Of the two I built two summers past, neither hold more than two people and each carries freedom in its hold. The lone fisherman in a boat on a lake is different than a fisherman on the bank casting a line from shore. The one on the shore is land-locked, tethered to the earth. The one in the boat embraces the fluidity of freedom and can follow the water course wherever it leads.
Looking over boat plans also keeps me from other work, work avoidance, avoiding what else I could be doing, which includes writing. But writing is also a way of freedom. And I want to be free.

The decade ends and?

2009-12-30T23:43:00.000-08:00

The decade ends in less than 24 hours. So what? We measure off time in neat and tidy increments that exist only in our creation of them. Millenia, centuries, decades, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, nanoseconds. Time chopped in order to be measured and then discussed. And all of this created by us for our discussion. Does our dog know of time? Not even days or nights seem to matter to him. At midnight he might want to play as much as he does at noon. He dozes in the sun with the same alacrity as he does in the dark. Does he mark his years in ways other than the grey on his chin? Perhaps he knows of seasons. Seasons are independent of our timekeeping. The equinoxes and solstices happen of their own accord but the date of winter is open. When does weather's winter begin? The first killing frost? The first dusting of snow? Or must it be at least half of an inch and then stay on the ground past mid-day? What of summer? What marks the beginning of summer? Not the coming of green, that's for spring. Not the return of the robin for that too is spring. When then summer? The first time the temperature rises above 90? But then, temperature is another one of our ways of measuring by increments.
In all this I've been remarkably impersonal. My blog speaks little of me and mainly of what? Time and it's measurements. Perhaps it is because right now I feel old. I've been on my hands and knees all day wrestling with a laminate floor. The joints and muscles ache and I don't relish tomorrow's long drive to my sister-in-law's New Year's Eve party. Four hours there. A celebration. Four hours back. It has become part of the tradition. Repeat an event three times and it becomes a tradition. Some traditions are put upon me and I merely accept them. Or put up with them. As as midwesterner I've the talent of putting up with a remarkable number of things. Put up with and go along instead of making waves, rocking the boat, causing the discomfort of breaking the status quo.
My decade? The last or the future. Right now I sit at the midpoint between, having only past and future, lacking the present. The last decade brought many changes and shifts in life plans. Where I began is a far cry from where I ended. Somewhere, ten years ago, I was a Lutheran pastor serving congregations in western Iowa and I thought myself content. That was an illusion. Now I've returned to what I once was, only different: writer, student, teacher, occassional pastor, almost as if the past two decades didn't happen. My body tells me that right now. Ten years past, and more are in the future. I feel melancholy.

Short on words

2009-12-04T11:04:00.000-08:00

I've run out of words and more words are needed. The garden is frozen over and no more are sprouting. I want my words to be like the zucchini, an overabundance; words that must be plucked early before they grow to sesquipedalian proportions. But now, with the hard freeze even the daughty kale has given up to lie limp in frosted decline. I need spring to come in the next two days or I shall be forced to use hot-house words--tasteless, bland, only suitable for packaging.

Non-turkey Moments

2009-11-29T18:43:00.000-08:00

As I was attempting at a catchy title I was going to put something in about turkey, about the turkey event being done and gone, that the leftovers have been eaten, that the carcass soup has been frozen for a future date when it will be discovered, thawed and finally thrown out, but then I changed my mind and decided not to write about turkeys at all. Why should I? They're stupid birds anyway and I've spent too many years with stupid birds, being raised on a chicken farm--hens for the eggs. Chickens are dull creatures. Tuck the head under the wing and they will go to sleep. Or so my father always said. We never tested the thesis despite the numbers of birds at hand. Perhaps we didn't care, or perhaps we took what Dad said on faith, trusting in his truth about chickens. Regardless, the break is over and tomorrow returns to the schedule that is familiar, although that too is coming to an end. Such is life in the academy. The changes of the semester bring changes in schedules. Not great life changes but little ones. Small ones that affect the lives of others. A ripple. Or all by chance and randomness.

Tuesday

2009-11-24T04:14:00.000-08:00

Tuesday, named for the Norse goddess Tew, who did who knows what. We good Nordic-Teutonics don't know our old gods anymore except in remnant names. Thor has a hammer in his hand, like John Henry, who we know by having a catchy song--no song, no memory. Thor didn't get a song, at least in English. Perhaps the Swedish children grow up singing songs of Odin, Thor, Loki, and the rest. Sort of a Swedish childhood of Wagnernian proportions. It's easy to imagine when far away in time and space, even though time and space may simply be constructs to make sense of the senseless. A lot like writing. Why do we write? Why do I write? Because I have words and a love of words with words making sense, if not sense then micro-electrical synapse between brain cells. Crossing the cortex of imagination. I've now reduced us all to electricity which is a transposition of subatomic particles which are ruled more by chaos than design (at least that is what the collider in Switzerland hopes to teach us). Then I am a bundle of sub-atomic parts piled atop the other. A rather handsome pile in my own way.

Magic Moments

2009-11-20T10:40:00.000-08:00

Once in a while writing provides a few magic moments, like this morning when I started to see one of the stories I've been working on in a different light. Perhaps this is a step taken in which rewriting will be less of a chore and more of a moment of excitement. The first rush of a story is nearly always fun and the words and ideas and characters unfold, like falling into infactuation with the pretty girl I sit next to. Infactuation isn't love, however. Love comes in the revisions, that is seeing deeper and getting to know the story on more than the superficial level. (I fear superficiallity.) I hope for the more in the future.

Lethargy

2009-11-19T05:31:00.000-08:00

What to do when lethargy strikes and I don't want to do anything, when writing this is a chore. Chore is a horrid word. A word of dullness, of repetition, of mindless task, of routine. Work becomes a chore, at times, as does life. Could it be any other way since most of what keeps us going bears elements of chores: eating, sleeping, bathing, brushing teeth, etc. To live fully under spontaneity is impossible. Ah, but where's the dancing?

'Tis late, 'tis late

2009-11-18T19:54:00.001-08:00

Late indeed and I should be in bed. Yet, the urge to post arises, the urge to reach out and communicate with fellow... I was going to say humans but what if this goes out, via electronics, out of our control, out into the ether, to worlds beyond? Then who is watching or listening or even responding to our blogs? We assume we know. But on the other hand. Unlike snail mail, our posts and email become public extra-terrestrial property open to all sentient life forms that may come across it. While I'm in the purely speculative mode: what if the world did end each time the end was predicted and instead of ending in a great cataclysmic disaster, was simply and calmly rebooted, with all past memories erased and we started over anew. No memory of the past would exist, would it? Memory would start over where it began, somewhere in the middle. Therefore, don't worry about 2012. If the world ends, no one would notice.

Tomorrow's Normal

2009-11-17T19:33:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow will come soon enough, before.... and it will demand being normal (as tomorrow always does) and I don't want to be normal. Does that mean I don't want tomorrow to come? No. The two are not identical, an error in coincidence. What is wanted is what isn't for it was then it wouldn't be wanting. But normal? Who decides? Black and white or shades of color? Does blue declare that green is odd and therefore lacking? Or maybe yellow? Or a mixing of many; or a palatte.

Running hot and cold

2009-11-17T07:06:00.000-08:00

Without the sun comes the danger of lethargy. Perhaps I am more lizard than I want to admit. Or is it the uncreative chores that beg to be accomplished, like the whole grading business. Meg didn't like the term binge grading when I sit for prolonged periods getting numbers on papers. Abstract concepts laid upon abstract linguisitic constructions. And the students beg for them (like I do when in student mode), setting their self-portraits by the mere particles of ink laid upon the paper in a particular pattern. One slip of the pen would create a different pattern. How easily ink controls us. Ink on assignments, ink on tests, ink on contracts, ink on legislation, treaties, ink on all the licenses we carry from driving to teaching to marriage. Such is the power of the pen.

Not all is gold

2009-11-14T20:12:00.001-08:00

Not all that comes out of the pen (or the keyboard) is gold. I've discovered that while working through the novel and discovered a scened that doesn't work. When I first wrote it, under whatever inspiration, I beleived in it, but now, I have serious doubts. Elements of it will be used later on, but not at the current development of the character. She hasn't matured enough to be doing what I had her doing. Perhaps, I'm learning how to write. Taken long enough to get here. It's too easly to slip into maudlinisms. The good point is that I have been able to see it , and to work to contain it.

When is an author an author?

2009-11-13T05:25:00.000-08:00

This morning's paper listed local authors published in the Arts Update section. One listed was Stuart Sexton of New Haven. Curiosity carried me to amazon and hence his books. They were, as I suspected, self-published via Lulu. While I'm not going to get into the quality of the writing (bad science fiction), I am going to raise the question: when is an author an author and when should such authorship be announced? Does self-publishing count? The ease of self-publishing has opened the floodgates to all manner of words on pages. I suppose I'm upset at the way the newspaper handled it. If my book gets published would I be lumped in with the self-publishers of the area? I may be grousing about nothing since the book isn't finished. Comments appreciated.

Gone for so long

2009-11-12T16:55:00.000-08:00

It has been noted by some that I haven't posted in more than two months. This is not how to maintain a loyal following. I suppose I could fill everyone in on all the details of everything that has transpired over the past two months but please spare me the details of all that I really don't want to read such stuff. A random comment: When I was young I was in love with Sophia Loren. Random comment 2: I never had the chance to meet her. I've never met anyone famous in the entertainment sort of way. I once got drunk with Edward Albee who later invited me to his Writer's Colony on Long Island and I was too young, too arrogant, too stupid to perceive the opportunity when it lay at my feet. I still have a hard time to keep from self flagelation when I consider the time that has passed and that I'm now trying in the desperation of chronology to recover that which was lost which is why I may appear foolish at times, or somehow anachronistic (damn the clocks). Item: On my private bulletin board hang the plans for a 16' sailing barge that would sleep two and would be useful for cruising Lake Erie, slow but steady. On the same bulletin board hang the contests I sent the novel exerpt to and in my fantasies I win to fame and glory while the reality will reveal itself with SASE rejection slips. Item: Beneath the gentle, caring exterior lies an arrogant ass. Watch the last 15 minutes of Hunt for Red October. Comment: Rye whiskey makes the best Manhattan Cocktails, not Bourbon or Canadian. Scotch makes a different drink altogether. Angostura Bitters is the closing touch, that plus a marichino cherry (one of the few grocery items carried by the liquor store). Item: Olga Bergstrom had a recipe for Christmas punch that included: rum, gin, whiskey, lime juice, lemon juice, pineapple chunks, marichino cherries, and something else that escapes me at the moment. The fruit absorbs the alcohol and is a delightful snack for the children. The punch is served diluted with seven-up. Comment: before there was writing there was story telling and the shamans showed the pathways into the caverns of death which end in the realm of life. Then the writers put the stories to poetry for the sake of memory (Illiad, Odessy, Beowulf). The invention of writing ended the need for memory and improvisation locking the tale through pen and ink. Guttenberg merely cemented an ancient process. The computer does nothing but the same, divorcing speaking from writing, reducing it to taps upon electrical connections of the keyboard.
Item: There exists an internet program for the composition of flash fiction. Fill in the blanks for the names, the nouns, the verbs, the modifiers, push the button and zip out comes a ready made story. Comment: Since writing can be so formulaic, why bother with imagination? Item: Maso seeks to do to literature what Abstract Expressionsism did to painting: the reduction to the elements of the story. Comment: Why has writing come along so late to join the artists? Writers are the Midwesterners of the creative concept: twenty years or more behind. It begins in Europe, then twenty years later arrives in New York, then twenty years later settles into the mid-west, already old hat. We still are wrestling with Ezra Pound. Finale: I've made up for lost time. Semi-autobiographical writing carries two dangers: comments on the writing, and comments on the writer. Best stick to iguanas.

Exhaustion

2009-09-10T17:39:00.000-07:00

Exhaustion has set in. I have not felt this tired in quite some time. Each word needs at least one correction, if not more. The backspace key is getting work out. At least I can still focus on the words in front of me. If I were at my typewriter I wouldn't give a shit. Those are always gracious rough drafts. These are for the public, as broad or limited as that it. I'm exhausted because the class load is getting to me, perhaps, or the classes, or attempting a writing career and other matters. When insomnia strikes, which is for an hour each night, I get up and rewrite a few pages on the 50,000 word wonder. Then there are the deadlines for contests for the section of the novel that I shared with the class that started this blog, those are coming do. Thinly I am stretched and it is not yet 9, and I know that on Thursday evening Troy sits down for creative work. I'm whining. Or pissing and moaning as we used to say.

First Sentence

2009-08-26T18:48:00.000-07:00

I knew I had to be standing on the corner of Coliseum and Coldwater waving a “Going Out of Business” sign and that X, the cell-group leader, would drive by, look me in the eye, and send the Intuitor my next assignment.

This is the first sentence of my speedily written novel. I spent some time wrestling over it, knowing how important the first sentence is, not so much for the reader (as I was thinking about this on the walk home) but as for the agent and editor. The reader isn't the gatekeeper to publication, agents and editors are. Without publication who will read it? Yes, I could go down to my local Office Depot and have them run off and bind copies which I could then hand out on the streets but to what avail? Self publishing boosts the ego, I know I self published a chapbook of poetry in my courageous youth (Songs of the Lonely Heart, by Derfla Publishing-- Derfla being Alfred, my middle name, spelled in reverse). Not a copy remains, as far as I know which may be a blessing to the poetry world. For whom is the all important first sentence? The gatekeepers who lay such heavy judgment on the first collection of words, on the first subject and predicate. Such a weight for such a small thing to bear, but bear it it must for such is the world.

Now What?

2009-08-11T13:54:00.000-07:00

pOkay, I've got a draft so now what do I do with it? I'm in the process of seeing what has come out of the typewriter, breaking it down to scenes and possible chapters, seeing what should be tossed, and what should remain, and what should be rewritten, etc. I could try to rewrite it in third person, if I was a masochist. Or simply wade on through it, line by line. Surprisingly, some parts of it haven't turned out a complete mess. As I enter rewrite on the computer, I'll post a few bits of it for reaction. I don't know if the narrator is sane or not. Conspiracy theories are so much fun, ask any Birther.

"The End"

2009-08-04T18:34:00.000-07:00

Nine- 35 pm, day 30, finished. One-hundred and twenty-five pages, 50,000 words. A novel that ends with a shameless cliff-hanger. At least this draft. And it was a fun run for the summer. So, how am I feeling? Like I got something done, like I've finished a task, that I was able to maintain first person narrative for the run of it, even if it is very existential. I didn't mean it to go that way but stories have away of going off on their own. This I learned. The best of the writing was when the words poured out as fast as I could type (thank heavens I didn't stop to make corrections). Scenes came, dialogue came, characters were real, even the minor ones, except for a homeless bum who will be written out of it. I don't know how to qualify it except as a sci-fi, conspiratorial thriller. Or an existential exploration of identity. Or a romance. Or betrayal. It's got it all except some kind of structure. That comes next. Any suggestions? I've a few ideas on my own but I'm more than open . Maybe the next time we gather I could read a few sections. Now I drink a glass of wine in celebration. I'd like to shout it out from the roof-tops "finished" but who would listen? You would, I know and I thank you for that along with all the moral support.
The next official NANOWRIMO begins on November 1. Depending on the schedule I may be game again. This was so damn fun. Not Pulitzer material. Maybe paperback. Too bad tacky pulps aren't being published any more. But it's written and I celebrate. I know I'm bragging abou this and if I've bored you, stop reading. If I've bored you, you probably have stopped by now. Tomorrow I take the day off. A complete day off. I give myself one every five or six years and I'm due for one. Again, thanks.

Crossing the Rubicon

2009-07-30T10:58:00.000-07:00

OK, so I'm not Caesar and I'm not taking over the Roman Empire but I have crossed the 100 page threshold. If my original count is right as far as the number of words per page, I need 125 pages to reach the goal of 50,000. With classes over and duties down a bit, I'm getting 10 pages in per day and the story is getting stranger. It will be interesting when I attempt a rewrite, or reassembly of the whole mess. And mess it is. The number of typos on the page rank in the several per line. I'm glad spell checker doesn't exist on the manual machine. Sometimes I don't even look at the page, but focus on the keys as I assemble letters into words. As I come down to the wire I need to ask if this has been worth it, and I'll probably come down on the side of yes. I've never tried anything in first person for such an extended write. Writing in first person has been more personal, but has also shown me how impersonal and intellectual my writing has been. Crossing over to show what the main character is feeling has grown in development. Like Bill Clinton, I need to feel his pain. I wonder if I could write first person from a woman's point of view? This will also be a great project involving rewriting because I know it has been a real cobbled affair. Learn by doing.

Behind!

2009-07-25T16:53:00.000-07:00

I've used up my cushion of words. I went off on vacation and didn't write more than a page or so, and that hand-written. Should I have brought the typewriter and disturbed the entire campground? Should I have been more disciplined with my time? Should I stop "shoulding" all over myself? Probably. August 6th has not yet passed. My class gets its final on Tuesday. I'll have some time to write. I know the routine: set the coffee maker on auto, get up at 6, stumble to the studio, tie seat to chair, put words on page. That's all it is. words on page without worrying about quality. I think I can do this. It's ten days or so. Much can be accomplished when the deadline is at had. Hell, I used to put together a 52 page tabloid sized weekly with a staff of four. More importantly, I've had support from those reading this. Thanks a lot. I appreciate it. Truly.

Past 55

2009-07-15T08:30:00.000-07:00

I passed the 55 page mark and the story seems to be taking different turns. What had begun as a lark is turning sinister and darker. Still not sure where it is going but the last time I looked, the main character ran out of the house naked. He is running from everything. Running from the life the Intuitor has taken him into. I'll see what happens tomorrow morning. Thanks for keeping up.

Week One Ends, Week Two Begins

2009-07-13T17:39:00.000-07:00

I'm still at it, going at five pages per day of 400 words per page. I've 45 pages as of this morning. Morning seems to be the best time to write, and drink coffee. Fourteen cups this morning. The problem with Rough Draft is the lack of toilet facilities. Being male has a certain advantage. The characters continue on in their own ways and something major is about to happen. Don't know what it is, but it is. All hell is about to break loose. I'm sure of it. If I can keep up this rate, I'll be able to meet the deadline. Typing on a manual typewriter has been exhilarating as long as I don't look at the massive number of typos per line. I hope I can make head and tail of it on the rewrite. With classes running down the next few weeks, I should have more time to get more done. The cool weather has been a welcomed blessing. Keep in touch.

Success from Rough Draft

2009-07-09T10:16:00.000-07:00

So far so good. Twenty-five pages to date, with 400 words per page. Do the math. The story is progressing word by word without any real direction. Merely words and a main character and such. Since I"m composing on a manual typewriter I won't have anything to share until the second draft. For those who haven't composed on a manual typewriter, you should try it. No carpal tunnel when the keys have to be forced down for an image to appear. Great for the hand muscles, and great for the typing skills as well. Every typo, every misspelling, every spatial error shows up. To some this could be humiliating, to others merely humbling. For me, I don't look at the page at all, but hunch over the typewriter keys and pound away. I am not quite sure what is coming out on the page. I don't look at it at all. At least not yet, that's for the second draft. And the keyboard layout is a bit different as far as the apostrophe's and double quote marks and the tab key, the rest is still the old QWERTY. I'll let you know more of how it's going if you are interested. If not, then ignore the blog.

Off and Running- Almost

2009-07-04T20:34:00.001-07:00

Day after tomorrow it begins. I mentioned that I was about to embark on a new project-an absurdist novel of 50,000 words written in 30 days. I know it will be rough, even with a family vacation stuck in the middle of the 30 days, as well as the closing off of the summer IVY Tech term, but so what? Are there not always extra activities, etc.? Duties, delays, and what-not? Tomorrow is Sunday, and I can get most of my IVY tech stuff out of the way. Then comes Monday morning. Six-thirty and the coffee pot goes off. Then to the Rough Draft for a really rough draft. On the Voss typewriter I need to complete 5 pages. Coherency is not a requirement. Nor is spelling. Nor is grammar. Nor is a decent plot, dialogue, or anything else. What counts is word-count. I don't know when I'll be able to respond again. If I have good days, I'll report that. If not, I'll be sullen and unresponsive. The Gummi bears are praying for me. At least the ones not devoured. They have formed a monastary of sorts. Finding little robes to fit was a problem until they realized they could get their outer layers wet and then roll in lint thus taking on the feel and appearance of velvet. This also keeps them out of mouth's way. Every now and then tell me that I can do this. I will need moral support. Thank you.

A new mileu

2009-06-29T19:10:00.000-07:00

Okay. I'll try to write dead-pan humor. Like I tried to do once about gummi theology. Or the comment I gave to Jess a moment ago. Humor is good as long as it has a bite to it. Slapstick is painful and can't be delivered over the internet. You would have to slap yourself and then fall down on your own banana peel. No surprise there, and why would you want to. I could comment on the world around me that doesn't make any sense at all, as if no one was paying attention to what is going on. Like where do women get nylon quilted jackets that are grey in color and fit too tight and are only worn by people who look like they have used up their lives? I never see those coats in any regular store. Are there special stores that I don't know about? I realize I seldom go into a woman's clothing store. I'll walk all the way around in Target so I don't have to look. Maybe it's because of a bad memory of having to sit quietly and watch my mother try on dresses at a really nice department store. Or that my sixteen year old son alwasy points out the bra and panty sets that I hope the girlfriend he doesn't have never buys and wears, at least with him knowing about it. Quilted nylon with snagged stitches aren't found there. Where are they?
I tried to write humor and I think it flopped. Like telling a joke from the pulpit. Tried it once and the listeners were too polite to laugh, but then they were trained Lutherans.

Stretched too thin

2009-06-29T16:40:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've been feeling stretched thin. Teaching duties, parental duties, and now, preaching duties (the second and fourth Sundays at St. Paul, Otis, IN, east of Valpo) has been impinging upon writing duties. And the writing has been neglected for the past three days, which means It'll be all the more difficult when, on Wedneday, I finally get back to the novel. The last time I was at it, little came out other than the feeling that this was all very insignificant. Yes, that's the word I entered into the journal, insignificant. I suppose what I'm looking for is someone whom I trust to tell me that it is significant and that I am skilled enough to finish the first rough draft by Sept. 8 (the anniversary from when I began it).

The start of something, maybe

2009-06-20T09:29:00.000-07:00

I’m not sure what to do with the following. Any suggestions? I’m not sure if I should remake it as a short story, flesh it out further, or merely tidy it up a bit. The chronology is a bit off. Or does it have the weight of a synopsis for a novel? Comments welcomed.
She came from a time and place that was fearful of flavor, favoring the bland over the spicy because flavors would bring undue excitement and chaos into the confines of her well ordered and regular life. Her hair was set just so, as it had always been, or at least as long as always had been for her. Her clothes were of a style she had grown accustomed to when she was young and confident and she had not yet seen a reason to change from what she considered a classic mode of dress even though her coworkers saw her as dowdy and priggish.
It hadn’t always been this way. Once, she would have relished the opportunities to sample, to taste, to try new flavors. Once, in years past, she would have jumped at the chance to not only try exotic foods, but to rush off on a plane to the roots of origin of those flavors. Once, she would have flown off on a whim to what had been called the Dutch Spice Islands, suitcase already packed and waiting in the hall closet by the front door. Once she would have gone if she had been asked. If only she had been asked, if someone would have ventured into her life to disrupt the flow that it was headed down, if only someone would have set up an eddy in her stream. But no one did and in time she took the suitcase from the closet, unpacked it, and let her passport expire. Then she enrolled in Jones Business College and learned her trade, a trade befitting a young woman of her time.
She graduated near the top of her class but she didn’t accompany the top students to careers (and husbands) in Chicago. They were younger than she had been, going straight from high school to the college and she had allowed a few years to elapse. And so, with her parents’ approval, she settled for a position near at hand- the Des Moines Insurance Company. She entered the workforce there, and there she stayed. Over time she became the anchor around which her department revolved. She knew what was what, and what had been, but never did she figure out what might be.
Her penmanship had always been a point of pride for she had worked hard and long at it in the waning days of the Palmer method. She labored to match the loops and curls with utmost precision, fighting against her natural inclinations to find her own way through the letters and words. She recalled those long days of practice, of making each loop just so, and each slanting letter just so, seeing in their perfection a doorway to freedom, seeing in each uniformly shaped letter a way to grab her suitcase that then had remained in the front hall closet, still waiting for the chance to fly out the door to the taste forbidden spices she had only heard of.
What she didn’t now (nor could she know) that each loop, each careful turn of the pen, each perfect and impersonal letter was a trap that would keep her locked in a time which no longer valued such niceties. She did as her superiors instructed her. When the manual typewriter gave way to the electric, she followed suite, thankful for the sake of her arthritic hands. When the computers entered the office bearing word processing, her thanksgiving gave way to disgust. At least with a typewriter she could see the keys strike the paper making a permanent mark on the page. She placed no trust in the computer, despite the constant assurances she was given. When they unpacked and installed the computer at her desk she began to think of the suitcase that once had sat on the closet floor. And of spices never tasted.

Retrowriter

2009-06-13T19:39:00.000-07:00

In today's garage sailes (made unavoidable since they filled the neighborhood) I found the perfect tool for the studio- an Amish word processor. It needs no electricity and still produces a printed page in New Times Roman- a Voss manual typewriter. This machine represents the high point of post WWII craftsmanship, filled with signals of vaunted German design and efficiency. The lines are sleek with chromium imbellishments. A beauty, a dream, and perfect for typing out the second draft. The first comes by hand, the second by typewriter, then the third on the electronic devise. Does composing on a manual typewriter throw me back to some romantic age? I did most of my earlier work on a manual machine for self evident reasons. I'm beginning to think that my writing bears a retro ethos. Not quite post modern. Not brutely modern. Somewhere that hopefully is myself.

Death by Hepatitis

2009-06-12T19:39:00.001-07:00

Dark title, isn't it? I had a flash of insight that I will die by hepatitis, a liver gone bad. No, not gone bad. Used up. Slowly desicated from the years of rugged misuse, of too many delicious cocktails and wine (red or wine, doesn't make a difference) taken for the sake of health. Antioxidants are a delightful excuse. I should give a warning to Jess about such activies but I doubt if she would listen. When I was one and twenty (so goes the poem) I believed in my own immortality and hold the stories to prove it. At fifty four I still stuggle against mortality but now with an added dimension--time lost. I have begun attempting to create a body of work, or at least I tell myself that. Today I crossed the threshold of 200 pages of the most recent project and the end is still not in sight. That's 2oo handwritten pages, not typed, and it comes out to about 4o,ooo words, more or less. I suppose I should count this as success since I began it on Sept. 8, 2008. I date beginnings and I date ends. The middles can care for themselves. I have wandered from the theme. Accept my apologies. Hepatitis turns the patient yellow or yellowish-green. The color is returned when the liver is more fully functioning. Why I'm offering this up, I don't know except that it's late, my defenses are down, I'm tired, and I wanted to write to someone. Thanks for listening.

Writng certain scenes

2009-06-08T08:16:00.000-07:00

Writing certain scenes can be very odd. A poor sentence to begin with. Not a decent lead for a news article, hopeless for a freshman comp essay: too much ambiguity, not enough concrete reality. What I'm trying to say is that writing sex scenes is ... what? I'm not sure of what word to use to describe it. I've spent the past several days writing up to, and into a scene in the novel that becomes explicit. And here's the odd part: while it may seem a bit voyeuristic, it isn't. I'm trying to be honest and true without being trite, hackneyed, or textbookish. (Textbook sex was well illustrated by Monte Python's Meaning of Life.) When we talked in class about breaking out first and second space, how about breaking out of moralistic space- which is one of those "supposed to be" places. And here's another question- why am I blogging this topic? I'm the lone male in the remnant since Troy has gone on to other ventures, and should I be raising the issue? Regardless of the answer, I need to be off to the next task, which is preparing for tomorrow's class in which I lecture on Anselm's Ontological Argument for the existence of God.

Coming in December

2009-06-06T16:33:00.000-07:00

Last night, Friday, George asked me if I would be willing to read at a first Friday in December or February. Looks like I'll need to get creative over the summer. Actually I have been, in the studio. Even though I have three windows, on the cardinal points of the compass except for the south, I face the south looking at a white wall. I had been looking out the window at a tree trunk but the action on the tree became too involved. A squirrel would come by and try to stare me down. There we were, eyes locked, neither willing to break the gaze for whoever broke the gaze lost the game and the stakes were high. Who had the right to the nuts? Who would prevail over the territory? The squirrel, you see, was attempting to lead me down the wrong path, trying to force me back into safe territory, back into first space, back into the known, back into the manipulated lies of squirreldom. I have turned my back to the squirrels of the world after discovering how akin they are to rats. If you skin a squirrel's tale you get a rat. And we know what rats are like. Michelle and her beau were the only ones of the class present on Friday. Not another until August. I'll keep writing until then.

Layers of homes

2009-06-03T19:07:00.001-07:00

Here is a bit of a story I've started. The germ came from walking down the street of an old neighborhood and noticing sidewalks that went to houses that no longer existed.
Little Tony lingered by the steps that no longer were at the house that had long since been gone. All that remained was a change in the sidewalk, the sidewalk that had been poured when the house still stood and the steps were needed. The grass and weeds had tried to break up the relic and had nearly succeeded. He stood motionless, except for his eyes that moved like a movie camera’s up the missing steps and stopped at the place door of the absent house should have been. Then he saw the absent house. It lay like a faded transparency over his own house, nearly blocking the view of his house except for the door. The doors of each houses was in the same place and through the faded oaken door of the absent house he could make out the green steel and fiberglass door of his own. He put his hand on the knob of the oaken door, turned it, and tugged. The door was stuck—it hadn’t been opened for many years, not since the house had been torn down to make may for a more modern subdivision. He tugged again, harder, with both hands locked on the ethereal knob. This time the door opened, slowly at first and then quickly, giving a soundless screech. The steel and fiberglass door opened effortless, allowing Little Tony into his own (that is, his parents’) house. He walked in and expected the aroma of dinner being prepared, but instead of catching the scent of his mother’s garlic and onions, he sneezed—once, twice, then to five times. Layered atop the garlic and onion aroma was the dusty smell of strong fish and sour cabbage.
“Mom! You know I can’t eat fish.” he called.

Tis true, Tis true

2009-06-03T13:40:00.000-07:00

What they say about writing each and every day is absolutely true. I spend a horrid morning attempting to write five pages this morning. I didn't write the day before because I was preparing a lecture on the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God. When I got down to the writing this morning very little came out. I couldn't get a handle on my character who I thought I knew. There are strands that are simply "out there", floating above my head and I can't seem to catch them. One would be a lifeline. Other than that, life is good. I'm attempting to discover modern and post-modern literature. Most of my writing is influenced by too many dead guys. Or long dead guys.

2009-05-29T19:41:00.000-07:00

I had my first morning of writing in the studio, not that it is finished. It needs more paint, a bit more trim around the door, things like that, but if I don't get writing, the studio will become the project and not the writing. I hadn't worked on the book for about a semester and I had a scene I had wanted to get finished for several months. It's finished now, at least in a rough first draft. More of a main character came out that I hadn't seen before, which is always the fascinating part about fiction, when the characters start taking over and doing what they want to do. Maybe something is right with this one. I'm hoping for a productive summer.
I hope we can all keep in touch. I've seen too many friends drop off the face of the earth. I wonder if they are lying in a heap at the bottom? Imagine that.

Shed's name

2009-05-21T14:11:00.001-07:00

The studio needs a name and I've decided to call it "Rough Draft".

A fearful shed

2009-05-20T04:17:00.000-07:00

The exterior work is done. The floor needs to be installed. Then the roofing. The final editing will be the painting. The studio is a lot like writing, from concept to final editing. But as it nears completion, it is taking on its dark dimensions. I plan to enter the shed to descend into the place where the words are found; where the stories dwell. I speak this way because it is a common thread running through the many books on writing that I've read. The authors speak of the place where the words and stories come in terms of descending, caverns, rivers, even Hades. I have feared entering that place and have spend many years avoiding it. I can write glibbly, ironically, cleverly. But does it come from the deepest source of truth? And truth is what I'm after. I take a motto from Brenda Ueland: Be Bold, Be Free, Be Truthful. (I recommend her book, by the way.) The truth can be fearful, however, for the truth reveals what I fear. The studio is a place to pursue the truth, or to be found by it. Maybe that is why the studio has a dark side. It is a place I've dreamed of having for the longest time and the dream is becoming material. Dreams materialized leave the completeness, the etherial beauty of the fantasy and meet a world which may or may not be friendly to the dream.
I look at entering the studio as descending into the place I need to be, want to be, seek to be, and fear to be. The fear should be the least of the worries. Like many folks who live so much in the head (and all the self destructive conversations that rise there) I create fears where fear need not be. Perhaps it is a way to become a hero, for if I overcome the fear, then I am brave and possess courage. It looks like I'm still posting to this blog where I have a reader.

Taking time off

2009-05-18T18:32:00.000-07:00

The studio is almost finished. Classes start again next week, teaching possibly three, taking one on line, writing. Right now I'm tired and don't know how much time I'll have for this blog. Check out the one on tsabel.com.

2009-05-17T17:25:00.000-07:00

The crate that carried Lindberg's "Spirit of St. Louis" back from France was turned into a poet's cabin (now it's a museum in Maine). While the source of my studio's material has a much more common source, the inspiration remains the same. The studio has had remarkable progress since the last post. The walls are up and sheathed, as is the roof. The windows and doors have been fitted, but not installed. The exterior trim work needs to go on, as does the roofing. Then the task of painting a decorating. The outside will be an attempt at faux brick. The interior (more of a challenge since the walls aren't finished and its all open studs, repelete with nooks and crannies) should be a color to encourage creativity. I hope I haven't worked so hard on it that I'll simply fall asleep. No, it will be a sacred place. A place where I hope to go deeply into the create heart. I'm excited.

Aching hands

2009-05-12T23:50:00.000-07:00

Since Monday I've been hard at work on the writer's studio. My hands aren't used to the carpenter's life as they once were. The hammer grows heavy and the wood seems so much heavier than in years past. The wood must have taken on the perverse physical qualities of rooms known in childhood. Those rooms, when revisited as adults, have shrunk in size. The wood has grown heavier and it must be on account of the change in climate. The trees, in an attempt to solve global warming have been working harder and harder to absorb more and more of the excess carbon. While a single carbon atom weighs little, trillions upon trillions add up to an enormous mass, thus weighing down the trees. (Local evidence of this phenomena was experienced in the great ice storm that came throught Fort Wayne. The trees broke apart, not only from the weight of the ice, but also of the weight of the excess carbon atoms.) But despite the increased heftiness of the wood, I'll slog on. The walls are up. Two are covered. The roof is expected to go on before tomorrow's rain. I may be taking a hiatus when the weather goes wet. Photos may be forthcoming.

A Place of His Own

2009-05-09T18:41:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the bit of thievery from V. Wolf. I've started on the construction phase of my writer's studio. This is one of those great impractical and, when seen through Firstspace eyes, useless or silly activities. The studio, which is a separate building about 5 x 7 feet, began its life as a collection of packing crates from the IVY Tech construction project Piles of free lumber are exciting to the creative carpenter. These have been deconstructed into their original 2x 4s, 6s, 8s; and many 1 x 3s, 4s, 6s, (and half a bucket of scrap nails). Free windows and a door have been procured. And today I started building it on the other side of the dog's fence. I will be working beyond the pale. It has no electricity. By week's end I hope to be in it, writing. G B Shaw had a writing shed. As have many others.

Insomnia strikes!

2009-05-05T00:28:00.000-07:00

What do you do when insomnia strikes? Walk the house looking for sleep? Check the back closet or the forgotten corners? Sleep must be somewhere, where did I put it? I must have mislaid it somewhere. Too bad sleep isn't like the keys or a Walmart reciept needed to return a poorly planned purchase. Sleep vanishes. Or perhaps Macbeth is right: sleep is murdered. Dead sleep. Not the sleep of the dead but the death of sleep itself, and now the sleeper is doomed to wander the castle in a living nightmare.
Enough on sleep. Recieved a rejection on the YA fantasy, again. I don't know if I have the energy to send it out again, poor thing. I labored over it for quite some time and now it is languishing for lack of a publisher. And I doubt if it is as good as I once had thought. I could rewrite it, but I no longer care for it as I once did. Am I a fickle lover? Or a jaded one? Odd what language is used to describe work of my creation. I'll research new horizions for it and send it out again, although I do question whether or not it has an audience.
Another change of subjects. I am embarking on a rediculous project, one that is spurred on by the desire to find a different space, a space to write. I've been collecting packing crates and tearing them down to build a studio, scavaging the neighbor's trash for discarded windows, and working out the design in my mind. Those who write can understand. Those who don't find it curious (no, weird or disdainful). I've found the process exhilarating for it is much akin to writing. I'm taking the flotsam and jetsam of what surrounds me and attempting to reassemble it into something of value. Isn't this what writers do? Don't we take the words that surround us, the experiences we've gathered (many of which have been unintentially gathered), dived into the dumpsters of our lives and try to pull out a treasure? I want the studio completed before too long because I want the summer to write. And read what I've lost.
I think sleep is trying to return. Good night.

2009-04-27T05:48:00.000-07:00

Whether anyone is reading this is beyond my ken. Two weeks of teaching time. One week of class left, sort of. This must mean good-bye. Good-bye is a loaded word with layers of lost meaning. The most common of our phrases often carry layers long forgotten. The Good has been traced to God, and the Bye has been connected with roads, traveling, and journeying. To say good-bye can be taken as a prayer, as an invocation, or as a blessing: God be with you on your journey. Or should I say pilgrimage? Pilgrimage is a better fit because I see life as a pilgrimage, as essntially a spiritual journey from the Here to the There, and once There on to the Next. On this pilgrimage some folks join us on the going. Some travel with us for a great long time, others for the briefest of moments- a quick passing and then gone. In a few rare instances paths reconnect, but this is seldom. Under Mary Ann's tutelage we have pilgrimaged for 16 weeks and have shared a bit of each other's lives. We may or may not meet again. Mutual paths may take us from from each other only to recross at the most unimaginable opportunity. Should that happen, we will rejoice at the meeting. Should it not, we have the joy of remembrance.
This all sounds like a good-bye (or is it God's Speed) but not yet. I'll keep poking away at this blog until I realize no one is reading it and then it shall fade into the internet ether. I'll leave the blog open ended.

Exerpt from "Century Farm"

2009-04-16T19:31:00.000-07:00

Following is an exerpt from my novel in progress, "Century Farm." I welcome comments.
Steve Bauer selected the light blue silk shirt from the closet and slipped into it, allowing it to caress his arms and torso, thankful of the long-gone girl friend who had introduced him to the joys of silk clothing which stood out as a harsh contrast to the flannels and denims worn by his neighbors. The oven timer shattered his moment of bliss declaring that the Schwann’s Beef Stroganoff in Burgundy Wine Sauce was thawed and cooked, the thirty-year-old oven still holding a constant and reliable temperature. He was careful, as always, when removing the flimsy tray, to avoid all spills, leaving the oven as spotless as when Mrs. Milliken, whom he had hired to clean the house, scoured it out the last time.
To Mrs. Milliken’s mind, it was unfair to Steve that he paid her to do such little work. His was the last remaining house she cleaned, her body could no longer keep up the schedule of two per day, and not only was her body giving out, so was the population. Half of the houses she once cleaned twenty years before were either abandoned or leveled to give way to crops. As she drove the six miles to Steve’s each Thursday, her memory saw the cheery houses where now corn or beans flourished. Like many of the old-timers she longed for the days of young womanhood when the farms were small and the families large. When she was in a foul mood, she would silently curse those who, in her opinion, had driven off the good families like the Kosbergs, the Ritters, the Beckmanns, her Uncle Jacob, and others, buying up their farms as cheaply as possible, taking advantage of their misfortunes, bulldozing the homes, barns, and sheds into a hole like an unmarked grave, laying topsoil back on thus obliterating all trace or memory of their inhabitants as if they had never existed, never worked the land, never supported church and school and had been neighbors and friends. Now she drank her coffee alone and it left her with a bitter taste combined with bitter words against men like “King” Karl Rauchenbart. Mrs. Milliken lacked both the education and the sophistication to understand the industrialization of farming practice, of the rise and fall of commodity prices, the cycles of boom to bust, and all other aspects of economic theory that coldly eliminated the need for neighboring farms. All she knew was that her days and nights had become lonelier and lonelier.
Mrs. Milliken began cleaning the Bauer place a month after Steve’s mother, Tillie, had gone into the Greenview Center Nursing Home. Steve had met her one morning at the coffee shop and had asked her if she still doing housekeeping.
“Not so much as I used to,” she answered.
“Think you could do our place, at least as long as Mom is in the nursing home?” She agreed not only to provide weekly cleaning but also to do his laundry. Steve slipped the house key off the ring and gave it to her, not that a key was needed as the house was seldom, if ever, locked.
Over the past months she began to notice changes in Steve’s life—not that it was her place to voice her concerns to him. The changes were subtle ones like fewer dirty socks and underwear in the laundry or fewer dishes needing to be washed, signs telling her that he had stopped setting a proper table and had begun eating his defrosted meal straight off the disposable cookware. Had he been her own flesh and blood, she would mention it, and in strong terms—but he wasn’t and so she didn’t. That didn’t, however, prevent her from worrying about him, fearing he had begun the decline, the long decline she had seen in many of the single men of the valley—men made single from lack of choice, or divorce, or death—men still sufficiently virile to begin new families, men with many long years ahead of them provided they might receive the proper womanly care, but lacking the tender nudging of a wifely hand would steadily meander down the short road of eccentric decay until they were shells of the men they were or would have been. She had seen it in men who went about mostly unshaven and musty smelling as if they had been left too long in the back closet. She didn’t want Stevie, as she had always known him, to end up like those men, like the way her younger brother Earl did when his wife left him, taking their three children with her back East to the suburbs of Chicago. Earl had gone from strength to weakness to death before his time, sapped by the loneliness, the hard work of trying to keep the farm going by supplementing the meager income through driving long-haul truck routes, through smoking too much, solitary Jack Daniels vigils, and the emptiness that only a meaningless life can provide. When the years of eating his own fried food clogged his arteries and he lay in the hospital bed and she sat by his side, holding his hands and silently praying for her brother (the only other one who came to pray was the preacher and he did so because it was part of his job description) she knew the Lord wouldn’t hear her prayers for healing because Earl’s spirit fought against such prayers, deflecting them away from their heaven-bound goal. She knew Earl would die because once his life had become a solitary act, the meaning was gone and he had been dying day by day, trudging on out of habit neither fearing nor welcoming death as relief from suffering, but simply as one more dull event.
When she felt the lightness of Steve’s laundry bag, and the small amount of living going on in the house, she recalled Earl in the hospital.
Her observations where close to the mark and while Steve was blind to path his life was taking, others weren’t. Karl Rauchenbart, the largest landholder in the Little Sioux River Valley, had also seen these symptoms and saw the opportunity before him.
Steve sat down to settle into his stroganoff when the flash of light reflected off a vehicle pulling into his drive caught his attention. As soon as he saw the highly polished Dodge Charger pickup stop by the house, he knew who it was for there was no mistaking Karl’s truck; it was too polished for a regular dirt farmer. Karl liked his property kept clean and so it was the duty of Old Man Bert Hansen to clean Karl’s truck every morning. Hansen had been old as long as most could remember. At one time his family had owned the farm across the road from the Bauers. The Hansen place had never been prosperous. All held together by chewing gum and baling wire, as Butch, Steve’s father, would say, with equipment bought second-hand at auctions and left to rust in the open yard for lack of storage. The place had been littered with dogs, cats, and the eleven Hansen kids, of whom Bert was smack in the middle. With no hope of inheriting the farm, Bert let himself out for hire to whichever farmer could pay. Bert became sort of a migrant within the valley, having worked for most of the bigger farms, always trying to save enough money to get his own place, but like Sisyphus pushing the rock, each time he neared his goal life entered, like the time his niece found herself pregnant and needed cash to get a fresh start in Omaha, or his sister Eileen’s health insurance failed to meet all the expenses, or any other time someone needed a bit of help, always promising to pay it back but never getting around to it. Bert worked on, finally settling in with Karl Rauchenbart when Karl was beginning his steady and focused climb to wealth. Karl provided Bert with a small house in Goethe (pronounced to rhyme with growth) that had been acquired through a sheriff’s sale and a steady income. It wasn’t long after his hiring that Bert evolved into Old Man Hansen, and quickly became a familiar sight around Karl’s several farmsteads. Even though arthritis and years of hard labor bore mightily on him, Old Man Hansen had become the faithful handy-man, errand boy, and general laborer who made sure that Karl’s vehicles (especially the one Karl happened to be driving that day) maintained their show-room polish against the prairie’s dust and grime.
Steve stepped out of the house as Karl stepped from the truck, Karl’s polished rattlesnake skin cowboy boots ill-matched to the worn jeans stretched over his wide belly.
“Hullo, Steve. I’m not interrupting anything am I.”
“Not at all. Come on up.” Steve opened the screen door to the porch, and waited for Karl to use the door to pull himself up the three steps to the porch. Nearly out of breath, the visitor fell gracelessly into the chair Steve offered.
“It’s been a while since I’ve sat up here. The old place looks pretty much the same,” he said, patting the arm of the worn wicker chair. “Yes, Butch and my boy Cal used to play ball together back when Goethe still had its own high school.” He paused, cast a long view out of the porch, past his truck, and into the fields. “Dan’s been doing a pretty good job on the fields—not too much burdock, but the beans by the road look like he forget to get the spray arm down on the turns, but Dan always was a bit sloppy when it came to the turns.”
Steve didn’t respond. Dan Tillison, paid the cash rent on time, faithfully and without complaint.
“But I guess Dan can afford to be sloppy since you haven’t raised his rent in five years.” The first jab went out. Karl couldn’t have been more clear in his contempt of either Dan’s farming practices or Steve’s lackadaisical approach to farm finances. Steve’s stomach churned as he tried to hide the tightening of his jaw muscles. When his breath began to quicken he forced himself to breath through his nose, slowly, struggling to maintain control as the memory of seeing his father face down this same man twenty years earlier when Karl sat in that same porch chair.
That summer day had been a hot one, a scorcher. The ten year old Steve had been trying to find a cool spot to get out of the heat and out of the house. His older sister, Stephanie, and their mother were up to their ears in some kind of girl stuff and he didn’t want to be anyplace near it. “Let’s try by Sterickiana,” he said to Link, the farm’s collie. Sterickiana was the name he and his former friend Ricky Jones called a patch of marsh caused by the confluence of drainage ditches that straddled Bauer and Jones farms. He and Ricky had found it two years before and claimed it as their own country. They followed the letter of the law (as the boys interpreted it) in creating their own nation—they wrote up a 99-year lease and solemnly had both fathers sign it. Ricky’s aunt Beth ter Horst happened to be Notary Public, and she duly notarized and witnessed the signatures. With the 99-year lease in hand, the boys drew a flag on an old pillowcase and declared Sterickiana (named for each of them; it would have been Rickosteria, but Ricky had lost the coin toss) a free and independent country with themselves as co-kings, sharing power equally and able to declare war on their worst enemies which then consisted of Stephanie and Brandon, Ricky’s older brother. Shortly after the founding of their nation, the Jones family sold their farm to Karl Rauchenbart and moved to Minnesota, leaving Steve sole ruler and only citizen.
When he neared the marsh, the wind shifted the remnants of the flag that had been nailed to the electrical pole that rose from the midst of the ruins of their fortress, a mighty stockade created from parts of old stoves, refrigerators, and other junk that had been dumped in the marsh to get it out of the way. Weeds had taken nearly all of it back, growing through all their hard work. Link’s tongue hung almost to his paws by the time they got there and the dog headed straight for the slivered bit of creek that trickled from one dinner-plate sized pool to the next. Steve felt the dryness on his tongue as he watched with envy the refreshment Link gained through the cool of the water. He sat on one of their ramparts—a toppled Frigidaire with all of its guts removed and he fiddled with a broken fan blade he had picked out of the dust. He threaded stick through its hole and tried to spin it in an effort to cool his face, but the stick broke and the blade fell back to the ground.
“Come on, Link.” The dog, who had found cool shelter beneath the dismembered hood of an old Chevy, reluctantly obeyed and walked beside his master back to the New House. Steve scuffed his feet along the tractor path, raising small brown clouds of the loess around his feet. He’d catch it from his folks for coming back so filthy, for sure, he thought, giving him one more reason to delay going into the house.
He hadn’t paid attention paid attention to the dust cloud raised by a truck speeding down the road until the wind carried it into his face, the grit stinging his eyes and drying all memory of moisture from his mouth so that even his teeth felt dry and he imagined the inside of his mouth to be that of a skeleton—teeth rattling loose in their desiccated sockets. He would get to the barn as quickly as he could with the promise of a long drink out of the hose that was used to wash down the pens becoming his light in the darkness, drawing him, pulling him to salvation and life. Hold on, he told himself, don’t give up now, you can make it. And so he trudged on firm in his convictions.
He was so focused on getting that drink of water that he didn’t see the shining pick-up in the drive, even though he walked within ten feet of it. Link noticed it, however, and marked the driver’s side front wheel with his liquid canine signature.
The cold water revived both his spirits and his curiosity for when he had slacked his thirst, he remembered the truck. It was odd, a truck being that clean, in the drive, at that time of day. His first thought was of a salesman, but as he neared the house, he heard the familiar rumble of Karl Rauchenbart’s voice, familiar through hearing it in church each Sunday. Karl and Donna sat two pews behind Steve’s family and Karl sang out with a deep bass that had frightened him when he was little. He saw both Karl and his dad sitting on the porch, side by side, and looking out past Karl’s truck, past the barns, and into the fields. Karl’s deep voice carried most of the conversation, and Steve couldn’t make out what was being said. He only heard this low rumble that Butch occasionally interrupted with a single word sentence. From his hiding place, Steve heard the chairs shift against the porch floor, a deep grunt given out, and Karl saying, “Well, you think about it, Butch. I believe it’s a sensible way to go.” The porch door opened and then slammed shut behind the two men as Butch walked Karl out to his truck. Now Butch did the talking, but Steve couldn’t hear it. When the conversation continued through the truck’s open window as Karl started the engine, Steve tried to push his hearing where his body couldn’t go, but the effort failed. He remained hidden and continued his observation as his father stood his ground in the middle of the drive, arms crossed against his chest, and his eyes following Karl’s truck retreat down the road. Butch planted himself on the spot for he didn’t move a muscle for what seemed to Steve the longest time. He was about to go out to his dad when the porch door opened and slammed again. This time Tillie came out, paused on the porch step and hurried over to her husband’s side. Steve didn’t move; he kept watching, sensing that this was one time not to interfere.
“Butch,” he heard his mother call as she halved the distance between them. Butch turned and revealed a scowl on his face of brows furrowed deeply and lips tightly pursed. Steve had seen this look only once before when his father had directed it a man who had wronged Tillie that caused the man to shrivel. It was a scowl Steve wasn’t supposed to have seen, a grown man’s scowl set against all odds of survival, yet determined to persevere regardless of the odds, the scowl of a focused warrior ready to fight to the uttermost breath, a scowl of a man who had faced down death and hell in the blizzards that wailed across the prairies, in the droughts that pulled the moisture from the eyeballs of new born calves, in the steady decline of markets and was now marshalling forces against the threat to the very land beneath his feet.
Butch dropped the scowl the moment he saw Tillie, his face sagging into familiarity. She went to him and then, on the open driveway, in front of God and everyone, the two embraced, not in passion, but in support knowing that four feet anchored to the ground were mightier than two pair of feet. Steve watched and his breathing stopped for a moment—his hand went to cover his mouth, to hide the astonishment of seeing his parents embrace for so long and so openly because they had always been private in their affections. He knew better than to rush out to them and shatter the moment.
The longer he lay hidden, the longer he watched, and the more the guilt developed. He felt he had committed some grave sin in watching, knew he shouldn’t desire entrance into their secret conversation that was being carried out in whispers beyond his hearing. He knew the wrong he was doing, but still he held his post.
Whatever intimations of the passions between a man and woman might have fleetingly passed over his imagination as he watched his parents’ long embrace, they vanished the moment the pair separated, turned, and walked to the house. They had aged rapidly in those moments on the driveway, as if seasons and years had passed, and they had become old people; no longer quite his parents, but closer to being grandparents. An unseen tidal wave of age had rolled off the back of Karl Rauchenbart’s truck and had overwhelmed them so that they hobbled more than walked to the house, leaning on each other for support. They stopped at the porch steps. Tillie was about to return to the kitchen when Butch reached out, took her hand, and pulled her back into his arms.
“Tillie, I love you,” he said and kissed her cheek. The kiss opened the gates to the tears and she began to sob, burying her face into his neck. His thick, calloused hands gently stroked the back of her head as he whispered, “Shh,” into her ear.
A metallic clang from the hog feeder brought on by an anxious pig ended the comfort Butch tried to bestow upon his wife. When she turned from him this second time, Steve saw the redness of her and her eyes and the tears still wetting her cheeks. Without bothering to wipe them off, she went back into the house, and through the kitchen window, he heard her sob. He waited quietly until he heard her opening and closing the cupboard and sliding items in the pantry and only then did he allow himself to relax and sit on the ground, leaning against the house. Now he wished hadn’t spied, hadn’t gained that glimpse into the adult world at so early an age. What he had witnessed made no sense to him but it made his mouth dry again with a parched taste that water wouldn’t erase. He wanted to cry, but he had no idea way. He snuffled back the tears, swallowed the sob that was attempting to form in the back of his throat with a gulp. Link came up and licked his face. Steve put his arms around the dog’s neck and tried to embrace him but the dog slipped out of the hold and ran off, letting the loneliness fall unimpeded atop the boy.
“Stevie!” His mother’s call broke him from the cold stillness his spirit had entered. “Stevie! Time for supper!” He ran from his hiding spot and into the kitchen where he grabbed his mother, hugging her tightly, burying his face into her chest, imbibing deeply the aromas of the kitchen that clung to her apron—lingering hints of bread-dough, onions, bacon grease, vegetable soup, coffee. He clung to her as she put her arms around him gingerly at first, then tighter. “Are you alright?” she asked.
He looked up at her.
“You’ve been crying, haven’t you?”
He shook his head in reply but the paths the tears had made tracking down his dirty face revealed the truth. He tried to hide his face in her apron again, vainly attempting to wipe off the evidence of his unmanly emotions. “I love you, Mom.”
“And I love you, too.” She bent down and kissed his forehead. Earlier in the summer she would have kissed the top of his head, but with the placement of this kiss she realized that in the near future their places would be reversed with him kissing the top of her head when manhood came fully upon him. He would become her protector, but not now, and at this briefest of instances, the old patterns still controlled the universe.
“Best you wash up before supper. And make sure you scrub your face before your father sees you.
##
Fewer words than usual were spoken over the supper table. Steve knew better than to ask questions. He knew the reply he would have gotten—a variation on the theme of children needing to be seen and not heard. If Stephanie had been there, she could have asked; she could have raised the issue without being shot down, being the oldest as well as being closer to their dad. But she was out with Merle, Karl’s grandson, as usual. Later that evening, on his way to bed, Steve stuck his head into her bedroom, curious about this hidden part of his sister’s life. Before today, he had accepted Stephanie’s dating Merle as a matter of the course of the world, but now, he began to wonder. With Tillie and Butch lost in their deep-toned and worrisome conversation Steve slipped into Stephanie’s room, turned on the light and furtively examined everything visible. He had no idea what he was looking for, but he was hoping for some kind of evidence. He was about to give up when he saw the corner of an envelope sticking out from beneath her bed pillow. With all the stealth he could muster, he tip-toed to the side of the bed. He heart beat quickly and his hands began to sweat, and being careful to touch nothing, struggling to keep his balance, he reached out with thumb and finger and pinched the envelope’s corner and eased it free. This must be the guilty love letter from Merle that he knew had to be in the room. As he began to slide his finger under the envelope’s flap the door suddenly opened.
“Steven Roy Bauer!” What do you think you are doing?” His mother’s voice froze him into a statue. “Get out of your sister’s room right now and get yourself to bed!”
##
The safety of his bedroom failed to block the murmurings—murmuring without and within. The indistinct sounds of his parent’s long conversation seeped through the walls and no matter how hard he tried to hear, no real words made it through the dry wall and wood paneling other than Butch’s angry comments about “no way in hell” and Tillie’s plaintive, “Why can’t he be satisfied with what he has?”
Steve guessed that it must have had something to do with Karl Rauchenbart’s visit, but he wasn’t sure. “King Karl,” Steve said softly to the dark. Yes, he knew the nickname the men used against Rauchenbart behind the man’s back. Everybody knew (or guessed) at how much money he had, and how he had taken over many of the smaller farms, especially in this corner of the valley. “Oh my God!” Steve sprang up, eyes wide open. “He’s after the farm! He’s after our farm…. And Stephanie’s boyfriend is his grandson… Jesus H. Christ!” At this last phrase he clapped his hand over his mouth and offered a silent prayer for forgiveness in taking the Lord’s name in vain.
He lay back down, hands clasped behind his head. He saw it clearly now. Stephanie was on their side, fraternizing with the enemy. He used that phrase, one he had picked up from the T.V. “I’ll have to keep an eye on her,” he planned in his mind as he began to doze off.
Steve brushed the dust raised by Rauchenbart’s departure from his silk shirt without thinking about it. His eyes were focused across the fields to the old farmstead, and the place was silent except for the continual hum of the wind. As he looked the muscles in his face tightened, beginning with the brow and quickly moving down, forming into the warrior’s mask his father had worn on the same sort of day. The muscles in his legs and arms began pulling together, tensioning up like an enormous clock’s spring, coiling tighter and tighter until they hung in the balance between breaking or exploding wild. With a sudden burst, Steve took off at a hard sprint, straight through the bean field, heedless of the rows he crossed and the damage done in his dash to the old place. He ran hard, breathing in the freedom of the open prairie, the freedom exercised by the hawks that perched on the telephone poles, the freedom of the deer to jump fences and cross boundaries, blissfully ignorant of the human’s property rights, the freedom of the ceaseless prairie winds which honored no legislative laws of ownership; he ran free until his breath gave out, leaving him panting an heaving, bent over and leaning against the cottonwood tree for support. There his breath caught up with him.
Steve had not been to the old place for several years. The cottonwood still clung to life with half of its branches dead and the other half green. It was still doing its work on the old house having successfully removed the majority of the additions to the original two room cabin built by Steve’s great-great-grandfather, Gunter Johannes Fredrick Bauer. Gunter had ridden the tide of the German migration to this corner of the prairie, astonished that land was here for the taking and all he had to do was endure hardship for five years and then the property would be his. This offer, along with the opportunity to finally marry his beloved Wilhemina and give legitimacy to their first born, Oskar, drove Gunter to leave his cabinet making job in Schleswig-Holstein and head for the American land of promise. When it came time to build his house he poured his skills into it, putting in far more care and devotion than necessary, building it not as a carpenter but as a cabinet maker, as if it was a jewelry box for a giant with all the mortise and tenon joints carefully fitted, using as few nails as possible under the fear that too much iron in the walls would attract lightning. This gave the two room house incredible strength and tightness against the weather. The cottonwood seemed to respect Gunter’s craftsmanship, leaving it in peace while it sent its branched through the later additions to their destruction.
Relaxed and calmed from his run, Steve entered the old house through the door that was still balanced on its hinges. Even though most of the windows had been broken and water stains darkened the floor and walls the old place was remarkably intact. “I thought the rooms were much bigger,” he thought, trying to remember the last time he had been inside—unable to recall any specific moment except that he must have been 11 or 12—a distant time and all the room large and frightening.
The two rooms were bare except for a few dried leaves that had been pushed into a corner by the wind. The floor remained firm under his step as he gave a casual inspection. Even when he bounced up and down a few times, gently at first without his feet leaving the floor and then more vigorously the floor refused to yield much.
A noise came from the attic loft. He carefully climbed the built in ladder. Mindful of the rungs, he avoiding stepping in the middle and kept his feet close to the stiles. He lifted the attic hatch and slid it back along the attic floor and it made a scraping sound. He poked his head through the opening, feeling the bravery of a child entering an unknown zone. A dim light filtered through the shutters that closed off the windows set in each gable end. Here, under the dust of the fine Iowa topsoil blown in by the wind, lay scattered remnants of a long forgotten life—a broken child’s chair, a table balancing on three legs with the fourth laying on the top waiting to be restored to its rightful place among its brethren, a small, narrow bed with a delicately carved headboard still made, the covers weighed down by the dust and dirt. A shuffling noise came from his right. He turned and at eye-level saw a sparrow, nearly dead from exhaustion or thirst or starvation. The bird had found its way into the attic but had never found the way out. The bird shifted weakly, tried to stand and stretch its wings, but it collapsed, looking straight into Steve’s eyes, it’s eyes growing pale and lusterless. With his free hand Steve cupped the bird and lifted it up; the bird too weak to react.
Holding the bird to his chest, he slowly descended the ladder. He could feel the pulse of the bird’s heart—first rapid from fear and then abruptly stopping. By the time he had gained the safety of the floor the bird had died, becoming a limp and lifeless thing. He took it outside into the fresh, clean air and understood the bird deserved a proper burial. Behind the ruin of the chicken coop he found a bare patch of ground and with his bare hands he scraped a shallow grave. He place the bird in the grave and eased the dirt back over the bird and with both hands laid flat upon the ground, he pressed down with all his weight. He pressed and continued to press far longer than was necessary. He remained in that position: on his knees with his hands out in front of him as if he were attempting some kind of peculiar push-up. But he didn’t want to push himself away from the soil, he wanted to feel it through his hands, to cling to it, to send his hands down into it like roots. The earth began to warm under his hands and he felt the individuality of the soil through his tender palms, the sharp point of a tiny pebble, the grains of an earthworm’s casting, the damp slime of a grub’s crushed carcass. Through his hand he began to share in that feeling that for more than a hundred years of struggle salted with harvests of bounty kept his family anchored here. Through the soil, the land beckoned him to share in its life and become more than simply one who lived on it without being part of it.
He would turn down Karl Rauchenbart’s offer despite having no logical reason for the decision. Logic had no place in a decision of such magnitude. Logic would follow the road into Goethe where his grandmother’s old house sat, vacant and awaiting a tenant. Logic would tell him that the little house on Monroe Street fit his needs far better than the farmhouse for it was smaller, more easily maintained, and closer to his commodity broker’s office. He could even, logic might argue, move his office into his grandmother’s house and off of Main Street, after all, most of the businesses had dried up on Main Street, and the storefront he rented wasn’t all that great to begin with. It was ridiculous, cold reason might add, to be wasting money in such a way; and while he was at it, he could go ahead and sell the farm to Karl, after all, the offer was a generous one being ten percent above market value. Logic would further point out that he really didn’t like farming all that much, and except for the tiny flower patch, he seldom got his hands into the dirt but lived more like a transplanted city dweller, keeping to the inside of the house except for driving in to work every day and coming back in the evening. Why, he was no different than those folks who moved out of Sioux City to get a place in the country—living on their five well-kept acres with the horse barn, twenty-five chickens, and a garden—pretending to be gentleman farmers, taking a space but never really fitting in, like fox-glove in the bean field, a weed, an alien species. Logic and cold reason would go along with Karl’s argument, laying out all the correct and indisputable points as to why Rauchenbart’s offer should be accepted and soon.
In the face of logic and cold reason Steve dug his fingers into the soil and held on.

Why discuss the weather.

2009-04-14T18:22:00.000-07:00

A brief excerpt from the novel in progress:
The common lesson of the land was one of begrudging acceptance of the circumstances that were beyond either control or reckoning. While the weather was the frequent topic of many conversations everyone knew the weather was merely the opportunity to have an exceptionally safe discussion. Neighbors could compare the amount of rain found in the rain gauges down to the quarter of an inch and some like Bob Higgins were known to always fudge the amount to their favor, no heated arguments would arise over the matter. Conversations about the weather taught acceptance, an unthinking, cattle-like acceptance that this is how ones’ earthly life is supposed to be spent. Like the children in the valley who learned early on to eat what was placed in front of them regardless of taste or texture of the plate’s contents, all learned to take whatever was dished out with thanksgiving.

bleeding wrists

2009-04-12T15:57:00.000-07:00

My wrists are sore and bleeding. Not what you think. For my celebration of Easter my family and I ran a log splitter on Saturday and Sunday. A third stack of wood measuring 36 feet long, two feet wide, and six feet high now sits in the yard awaiting a conflagration. The soreness and bleeding, along with a collection of bruises, has been one the results. Hubris has its price and my hubris is that I can do nearly anything I set my mind to. Bullheadedness. Or being a stubborn Swede (not swede, which is a kind of rutabaga). Does this have any merit on writing? None, except one more major chore is out of the way so that more time can be given over to what is important.
Gad, I hope I don't come across like I'm complaining. Or whining about it. No need for that. But the statements of facts can come in the form of whining. As ... I tire. I must grade papers. The week-end vanisihed in a morass of home ownership.
Easter candy goes on sale tomorrow. Enjoy.

2009-04-10T12:42:00.000-07:00

Since I discovered that some folks have been reading this blog, I've decided to keep going. After all, an audience is an audience. And the audience is important. As a one time community theater actor I know how the audience effects the performance. What goes for actors goes for writers with the greatest difference being the time lag between the feedback. Actors feel the response immediately, writers must wait for little slips of paper or email responses (all too frequently polite no thank you). We keep on going regardless. Right now I'm going to stop because I wrenched my shoulder earlier this week and typing is painful. Who would have thought it was all so connected? "The foot bone connected to the ankle bone..."

2009-04-08T18:14:00.000-07:00

I really don't have to write this and like every good student, I probably won't do much more than babble on into nothingness. Absolute nothingness. Nothing. Not a thing. Not a. Not. No. N.

a synopsis for a book not yet written

2009-04-01T05:58:00.000-07:00

Synopsis of Tamsin’s Twin by Thos. Sabel

Didymus Bosch, middle school English and History teacher in mid to late forties, dutifully and moderately successful with a 50- year old Cape Cod style house in a passable working-class neighborhood, a marriage of 20 years, two children (details on the children), realizes something is profoundly missing from his life. This sense of the missing thing gnaws at him, a gnaw he first tries to ignore. He has had intimations of this feeling many times before and had vainly attempted to fill the void through a collection of unfinished projects, some of which filled the house and raised his wife’s ire. In preparing to teach a unit on World War II he chances upon an article concerning recently released experiments by Dr. Josef Mengele that had been held by the Soviets and now released to the public. These experiments dealt with the feasibility of testing the psychic communication between twins in the hopes of finding the perfect method of sending communications between the German High Command and its officers. Curiosity drove him further to the lab reports. As he read them, images of a twin sister kept invading his dreams, thoughts and intuitions. He tried to drive the images away but they would not go. When he spoke with his older siblings about his supposed sister they gave evasive answers. His mother became angry with him for asking about such nonsense.
Their answers failed to satisfy which drove him to the country church where he was baptized and he sees that beneath his name another name had been carefully scraped off and another written in its place. When there, one a very old parishioner called him “Tamsin” and then excused herself. The pastor explained that this man suffered from the early stages of Alzheimer’s and occasionally made strange, incoherent comments.
Convinced he must have a twin he began the process of creating what she might have looked like by using photos of himself and having them feminized through computer manipulation, with these he created a photo album of her life. Then he began writing her letters which he kept hidden in a box. To receive the answers his letters sought he then began writing her responses, using his left-hand (he is right-handed) and mailing them to himself. Through their correspondence he creates her life, her travels, her memories. He even goes so far as to write a brief autobiography of her (which appears as an appendix to the book) He attempts to keep this under wraps by having Tamsin’s letters mailed to his school. His wife believes he is having an affair and begins keeping a closer eye on him, watching for clues of phone calls, hacking into his email, managing his time very closely yet none of these reveal anything. When she finally discovers the truth by finding the letters and realizing he is the author of both, she is convinced his is crazy and demands counseling, etc. She contacts his family. They respond in a curious, off-handed manner, not in the way experience taught her to expect. Instead of being the friendly and forthright family she has known, they become evasive. The truth is that when the mother was carrying Didymus she dearly wanted twins, was told she bore twins, planned for twins including redoing the nursery for twins. When Didymus was the only child born she was devastated and went into a deep depression, rocking the empty cradle while ignoring crying Didymus. The twin’s name was to be Tamsin. She had a nervous breakdown leaving Didymus to his older sister’s care until the mother returned after a three-month hospital stay. This is what the family is ashamed of.
Back to Didymus’ wife. She demands he put all this away. He follows her wishes, puts the letters away (but doesn’t burn them as his wife orders him to) and life goes back to normal, at least for a year. Then he receives an actual letter from Tamsin, wondering why he hasn’t written, urging him to come to her and help her because her memory, which he has been restoring, is fading. The letter fails to say where she is and so he has to find her by tracing her life through her letters as clues to where she has been. The choice for Didymus is to chose between his wife and the life he has known, and his twin who never was, but is. This is the turning point in the book. If he remains with his wife what has been missing from is will always be missing with no hope of being found. If he goes to seek his twin, all that has been known will be lost for the sake of what may or may not be. He may well be insane. (what if his wife’s lover has sent this letter in order to get rid of him, for she has taken a lover because of Didymus’ strange behavior. Yes, the lover sends it to get rid of him. We still don’t know if Tamsin is real or a figment of all imagination.) His quest takes him through her life and discovers his twin who never was, but is, has been an artist in Brown County, Indiana, Montreal, danced with the Winnipeg Royal Ballet, part of the Gimli, MB, art colony, in Niagra, NY, ultimately made her way to Europe where she has been living as an expatriot for many years ending up in Gozo, Malta. Didymus finds her strolling along the beach . The immediately recognize each other but are unsure. He tells her of her life, as well as his. She takes the letters and autobiography from him and read them while he takes in the island. With his encouragement she flies to their old home to regain what never existed for her, but did. Didymus remains on Gozo, filled with what was missing and now a citizen of the world.

Soja and the Revelation of St. John

2009-03-31T18:37:00.000-07:00

This is only the beginning. Much more will follow later. When Soja talks about Levevbre's Production of Space as a fugue I am reminded of the better way to read the Revelation of St. John, that poor misunderstood last book of the Bible. The misunderstandings highlight what happens when a nonwestern text (and possibly a reflection of Thirdspace) is read in a western, linear fashion. I will discuss this later.

2009-03-21T12:40:00.000-07:00

Saturday afternoon. Beautiful day outside and I'm inside getting a few things done. A few things done. Odd sort of phrase, all ambiguous and abstract. How many is few? What is meant by things? Does a time limit commit itself to done? Or am I asking too many questions, or the wrong questions. Asking questions has tended to me in trouble because my questions arrive with multiple layers or try to pop holes in the illusions and lies which surround us. Like Socrates I sometimes ask questions to get people to think and thinking can be a subversive act especially when the authorities and experts are to do the thinking for us (but who is the us?) But I don't want to drink hemlock. Or, to go Biblical, earn a prophet's reward- which was the equivalent of drinking hemlock. But to not tell the truth for the sake of keeping some sort of peace for peace's sake is little more than drinking hemlock in a slow and as deadly way. I really didn't plan to off on philosophical veins again. That is part of my nature. A strong philosophical bent perhaps because philosophical discussions are safe in their distance. I can do that without getting into the nitty gritty of how I feel. I can keep feelings at a distance by being smugly philosophical. What sort of constraint is this? One that comes from the inside, or one that has been placed on from the outside by the controlling community. This is wrong, because as calm as I seem it is a bit of a facade; a facade I've worn for so many years that it almost seems real , but I know it isn't . I know the truth but it hasn't set me free. Instead, I feel chained, or caged, or alone. All are the same. "If you scratch me, do I not bleed?" Shylock's statement claimed in a different way.
I was envious of the folks hanging out at the Shady Nook. Yes, they were busy taking their shots and beer, possibly to a greater extent than needed, but I envied their friendship and creation of their third space. But I didn't envy them enough to want to join in, even though the Nook is but a few blocks from my house. We walk to Dairy Queen during the summer. But I doubt if I'll go back even though I still have a free beer token. One of the aspects of controlling constraints is guilt. Guilt used through generations to maintain control. Subtle control and so difficult to break from. So I try to tell myself in story and poem. Someone said that all fiction is autobiographical to some extent. I believe them. My difficulty is... what? honesty?... freedom?... courage?... who knows? I could ask you, but you wouldn't say perhaps because there is no you out there. In that regard blogging is like prayer. One blogs or prays in earnest but is anyone on the receiving end? How am I to tell? Ah, there must be faith. Faith is distant commodity. And this from one trained in the ministry, and... oh, you know the rest so no sense in the telling.
For the rest, I'm going to tack on a poem. I hope you enjoy it, Mrs. McGilicuddy, wherever you are (nod to Jimmy Durante)

I join the chorus of corpses

walking on deadened feet through

deadened fields of waving

conundrums already at blossom,

moving as one along the way

with arms linked tight and ankles

bound with silken cords,

attending life’s travails

in a slow melodious shuffle

raising clouds of mild despair.

I join the chorus of corpses

undead and yet still dying

gleeful of our brotherhood,

moaning our undead song.

2009-03-16T12:06:00.000-07:00

Spring break is past and the rivers have crested. I'm sitting at IVYtech, Harshmann, Adjunct Lounge. Listening to others talk about the flood and the amount of sewage that runs through the water which led to a discussion of sewer systems. Sewer systems and the subterranean lands underneath. Hidden worlds beneath our feet. Secret tunnels. Follow Jean Valjean down the sewers of Paris, a place of excitement. Tours are given daily. Step in the boat but please don't let you fingers trail in the water (or whatever the liquid may be). I'm going to stop this because I have to go teach in a few minutes. I'm never quite ready but it usually goes well. I'm goin to add more to this later.
Now I'm home. It's late. Everything has been graded and Pat Benetar is wailing on Barracuda. Four Gummi Bears are living in fear because the gods are going to snatch one up deus ex machina but not in rescue but in sacrifice. One will be taken and three remain. Which one? Because three are red and one is green, the red ones assume the green will be gone. That, in red Gummi Bear logic, is justice. The odd one is justly removed, restoring homogenity to the system and their world is in equilibrium. What they don't know is that the gods they fear are capricious and have no logic. Only desire, only hunger and a lust for Gummi blood. A rather primitive religion. And yet... Don't we often see life in this way? Don't we have a sort of Gummi logic, or Gummi theology, fearful of what the gods might do to us? Forgive me, the theologian creeps out once in a while. (The red Gummis were wrong; one of their kindred was taken from them. Now there are three.) I must be in a theological mood because of reading "The History of God" over spring break. I find that what I read often gets under the skin and influences my thoughts, at least for a while.
One of the things I did not get done was clean up the study. I did, however, come across a card with a note. I like to use blank 3x5s for random notes and ideas. The card reveals a work that was birthed by a spelling error: worskopping. Sounds sort of Scandinavian. With the mood I am in, I could apply it to the Gummi to describe the taking of one of their kind by the gods. "What happened to Fred? Worskopping. And the Gummi crowd suddenly quiets at the word, the word they would rather never hear, a word that strikes terror into the hearts of all. Worskopping, when the fingers of the gods blacken the sky, throw shadows over them suddenly and then one is gone, never to return. Some have suggested that in worskopping the Gummi is assumed into heaven, but that is a pious lie told to soften the blow. The truth they wish not to see. The writer brings a mind to the Gummi and creates thoughts and language into lumps of gelatin and high fructose corn syrup. The writer's task to give life and voice to the dead and voiceless.
Want a Gummi?

2009-03-02T17:20:00.001-08:00

Does feeling mellow count? Odd question perhaps but so often it seems that I must be dealing in angst as the Weltanshauung impedes upon the Zeitgeist. Forgive the German which may have been used incorrectly. I was playing with the term angst. Playing with words instead of wringing meaning out of them. Two ways to look at the same event perhaps but with very different results. The anguished writer wrings out words like a washerwoman (feminists forgive me) of yore wringing out rags with mighty arms and a vice-like grip. The anguished writer trapped by the spirit of the age, rebelling against all comers like a tent-show wrestler, past his Champion Slapdown prime but still strong and able, eking out a future by taking on the town bully until... you know the tragic ending with the long-lost daughter coming on the scene at the last moment in order to cradle the dying wrestler's head in her lap, a tear falling from her eye. Camera moves in for the close up. Unless the wrestler is from Gaul and then he becomes the subject of an ancient Greek sculptor, Pergamon by name, copied by the Romans (those great forgers) and will live on forever reproduced in countless Art History books. So goes the writer, a Dying Gaul, seeking immortality by way of anthologies.

That is, the writer wrapped in anguish. What of the other kind. Not trapped in Romanticism. (I wish I had discovered them later in life and not in the impressionable teens.) The Romantic myth of the anguished writer may have served us ill these many years. Writers, like all heroes, live by the myths of the forefathers. Seek out Homer to live the hero's life. Who are your forefathers? Who are mine? Who are those I seek to emulate. Like a chameleon, I tend to pick up on the colors of my surroundings. Leave me too long with Shakespear and my speach patterns begin to change. Gingsberg's Howl sent me off down a strange verbal path. But what of my voice? (the mellowness is changing to introspection). This course has brought me to examine the issue of voice- the real and valid voice, the bare voice, the pure voice, the living voice--viva voce! Or some such linguistic butchering. Where is it? Or is it? Have you found your voice? The one you use to call out in the dark, not sure if you truly want an answer? Or the voice to speak love? Or the voice to... maybe not a single voice but a plurality of voices. More voices than meets the ear. A choir of voices (and they may not be so heavenly). A mellow voice in all this? I wonder. Why not? As long as it isn't as mellow as Manilow for such is the way to dullness, and excited ennui--the attempt is made but the excitement manufactured. Then the voice again. Where do I find it? Jump down my own throat and sit among the vocal cords, reaching out to pluck them like the harpist on the strings or the piano tuner with head under soundboard? Pluck, pluck and send the sound out around the world for distant pleasures.

For those who have made it this far, thank you for putting up with the ramblings. I hope you had fun.

2009-02-21T11:14:00.000-08:00

Saturday afternoon and I'm in a usual place- CM 143. Odd you might think, but let me explain. My eldest, Jon-Mark (Mark is part of his first name, not middle), attends the Japanese classes from 2 to 4:30 in Kettler. I use the time to "do work" or at least that is the excuse I give. I've brought my work along which consists of files of papers from IVY Tech students to grade nestled in a green military type bag. The military type bag is a give-away of my era, that of the immediate post-Vietnam War, the era of non-camo army fatigue jackets, air-cooled VW Beetles, jug wine before it became fashionable, and the movies Jesse likes, of holding in living memory the race riots, the '68 Chicago Democrat Convention, and young men scheming to avoid the draft. My number was too high in the lottery so I didn't have to worry. My military service came in later, 1979-83, and I had a fatigue jacket long since lost. Not lost, but remaining, is a fondness for an era that still clings to the psyche of which army surplus (or pseudo-surplus since much of what passes for surplus was created to feed the surplus trend) remain a part. And in that bag remain a file of papers. I haul the papers around as a form of penance, letting their combined weight dig into my shoulder and pain the bag. Penance for not having graded them all and returning them to students who may or may be present to take them, students disapppointed or elated depending on the numerical scratchings I leave for them to receive as a moral judgment. Moral judgment because students percieve grades in highly moralistic terms--good grades equal a good person, bad grades equal a social reprobate. Salvation hangs in the balance. The A-level heaven is the prefered place; the C-level edges close to purgatory; receive the F and you will pass the slothful, the gluttonous, and the depraved on the way down in the Inferno. I see the judgment in the student's eyes and feel it in their hearts, and judge it by the level of engagement in the class discussion. Perhaps I avoid grading papers because I don't like passing judgment on anyone. I could ignore the papers for another day, grade them on Sunday, or do the minimum for the week.
That and grading is boring and depressing. More boring than depressing. I can create depression on my own. Like Churchill (and others) the black dog of depression hounds me at times. Not simply getting down, but the full blown, diagnosible clinical depression that makes the world dark and ugly, and set me in the pit on heavily clouded days so that the only light at the bottom is the remnants of sunshine soiled through their passage in the clouds, dirty, colorless. As of late I've eased off the meds in the hopes of tapping into a greater creativity that may have been dulled by the SSI's effect. Still in the experimental stage and wondering where it will go.
There, I've let out a bit more of myself. We seem to be in the self-exposure mode in the blogs. Put the heart on the sleeve. Bare the pain and let the others see the vulnerablity, becoming human in contrast to???
Let me pull my jacket back over my sleeve to hide the heart left bare. We all have more secrets than we want to admit. Hidden lives that we are uncomfortable with. Little bits of data about health and morals and marriage and future and past.
We'll be all right. We've made it this far and we can make it the rest of the way, so long as we don't pass by the destination without noticing it.

Tuesday morning, almost 9. Awaiting students who will break my dawning. I've been considering writing a parable that would go something like this: Once a man walked out onto a frozen lake, but neither the ice, nor the lake was normal. The ice was warm to the touch and crystal clear. Beneath the ice the man could see what he is yearning for. He lays down upon the warm ice to get a better look at what is going on below the ice and yes, there it is--his hopes, his dreams, his being, his now. He knows it is there but he fears breaking through the ice to gain his dreams. He has tried to measure the costs of staying above the ice versus breaking through the ice by making a rational list on a yellow legal pad with one side pro and the other con. The list tells him that life is better above the ice for it is more secure, more familiar, and more comfortable. Almost comfortable, that is. The world below the ice carries great dangers as well as his dreams. On impulse he grabs a pick-ax and gives the ice a good solid whack. He feels it shiver beneath his feet and a crack spreads out from the point of impact. From the crack a delightful, beckoning aroma arises. He is about to make another whack at the ice when he hears his name being called from the edge of the lake. His friends and family are there entreating him to stop and walk back to them. He has the pick-ax in his hand. He raises it up...
Does he break through or does his stop and set it down? Or is there a third option (and a fourth, fifth, sixth, on to infinity) open to him.

2009-02-16T08:11:00.000-08:00

This is my attempt at a speed blog. Coffee is rushing through the system, calling the body to certain biological functions which, if neglected, will demand embarrassment. So how can I write as quickly as possible with the fewest number of mistakes on matters of great importance. I'm sitting at IVY Tech, Rudisill, having finished a remedial class on writing. I wonder if grading all the remediation will have an effect on my writing, on my quality, on style. Would I need remediation or is all education a form of remediation of what we should have learned but didn't or didn't learn when the opportunity arose, or never had the opportunity. If no opportunity, then no learning and hence no remediation. No re- can't go back to what never was; which opens the doors to what will be - ever the hopeful door. Read Jesse's depressing blog on sitting at Panera's watching couples that have fallen out of love, or at least are not gushing over each other (or mooning over each other, as my dad would say-- but mooning has taken on a whole new meaning bringing a very different mental image to mooning over each other). Relationships change, shift, and move. Some couples have little to say because it has all been said before and the pair relax in the comfort of the other without the need to entertain the other with dry wit or jokes or gossip or the rest. Being relaxed and comfortable in another's presence is also a type of communication. A communication of not being put on the spot, or not being required to be anything other than what we are, that is, at the root of what we are when we are in the bathrobe, or less. I have seen this between old people who have to take care of each other. Helping your old, wrinkled, incontinent partner in and out of the tub, off the toilet, wiping their ass, are all forms of communication. To be sure, a CNA could do this, but then it would be done by reason of employment. When I am older, more wrinkled, and not much to look at in the nude (not that I ever was) and in need of tiresome care, how will it be? I have no idea. My dad, at 93, still cares for himself in a very independent way. No one needed to wipe the ass, thank you very much. Will he need it someday? Not for me to say.
A breather. Yesterday, when I was bowling with the family, only the third time I've gone bowling in about 20 years, I had the most remarkable experience. I felt like I wasn't there but was somehow seeing it, feeling it from a distance, that I could have stepped out of time and place and been somewhere else for the moment and then return back and not have been missed. Time had no meaning. Rolling the ball had no meaning. That I could have willed the outcome, somehow. And no, this was not the effect of medications or the like. Have you ever felt that? Someone once said that writers occassionaly percieve such moments, that they are more observer than participant. How does this fit in with the two charts on the blackboard? Could I be both observer and participant at the same time, which would either be some sort of synthesis, or not being either one. Perhaps I'll blog more of this in the next posting. (Posting is a great word, have you studied its roots?)

Acceptance is a delightful word

2009-02-08T12:54:00.000-08:00

Acceptance is a delightful word. Except for the few hardened hermits who have completely turned away from the company of others, we seek acceptance from some community, be that a community of one other or several. For writers this is critically important because writing is both creative and solitary. Creativity, as has been discussed, puts one on the fringe of the culture, if not out of the circle altogether. When the creative act is done in solitary, a fear of the May Nots lurks about the corners. It May Not be truly creative, but shallowly derivative. Consider the young man Mary Ann mentioned in class on Thursday. He assumed he was creative when he was not. Or the work May Not be any good, but merely banal. It May Not within the boundaries of understandability but so idiosyncratic that it moves Finnegan's Wake into the realm of clarity. (I had one Joyce scholar tell me that no one could understand what Finnegan's Wake was about. I haven't read it, still trying to work through Ulysses.)
Against the May Nots comes Acceptance. Yesterday I received news that a piece I had submitted to a literary review had been accepted. The review is wordriver out of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Late last semester some one had posted an announcement saying that wordriver was seeking submissions from adjuncts. I submitted a story; they accepted. Which means that my writing has some value and validity. That I'm not what I feared- a banal hack so cut off from the judgements of the world that my writing is less than valueless. A mediocre writer so disconnected from others' writings that the mediocrity is presumed greatness. Yes, I realize I write in hyperbole but this is how the untamed mind tends to go.
Being accepted is bit like hearing, "well done, good and gentle servant," only it is the Muse who is speaking through the editor. Being accepted is working to revitalize a flagging spirit. Yes, the spirit flags in the face of "reality" (a term with so many variant meanings that I wonder if it has any meaning at all outside an economic one and even that is suspect). I will receive more rejections- some are probably in the pipeline, but not always. Notices of acceptance are also out there, wondering about, looking for a home, looking for my home. I will welcome them.

Poetry:reading,marketing, creating

2009-01-31T13:14:00.000-08:00

First, a note about the Grind- it's not closing. The shop has a new owner who's trying to get more up and running, including poetry readings. I have become the de facto organizer. You know the routine- if you want to get something going, do it yourself. I wonder if this would count as a public project? Reading reams of poetry to a near empty room except for for folks bribed in off the streets (and family members who have a certain obligation). I suppose I could make a requirement for my IVY Tech and IPFW students to attend since we all know how much students will do for a grade.
Second, Saturday afternoon ramblings. Much of the post-nap afternoon has been spent doing internet research on finding places to send off poems and stories. I realize that a good portion of the marketing is a numbers game but I hope the chances of acceptance are better than making a sale via spam (one sale per 12.5 million spams) [A side question: why is it called spam? I personally like the canned ham product and don't care for its name being besmirched. Slide the loaf out of the can, stud with cloves and pineapple chunks and back for 20 minutes. {not sure why a recipe came out}]
I had mentioned in one of the reaction papers that most of my writing has been done off on my own without benefit of too many classes or workshops which tends to feed the insecurity already present. This may be one of the difficulties of having such a scattered education consisting of seven undergraduate institutions, two graduate, and now I'm off on a third at IPFW. Why all the schooling? Why not? I enjoy learning and the academic environment. And it provides a level of acceptable purpose.
That last phrase is one I want to play with for a moment: acceptable purpose. Is creative writing, the production of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction (a category I have little familiarity with) an acceptable purpose beyond the notion of "hobby"? Yes, I know that we have attacked this notion in the class every time it comes up but it continues to nag. While we rail against the notion, don't we have to live in it? Jesse said that she would take any shit job provided evenings and weekends remained for writing, but isn't trying to fit writing in the edges of life turning it into a past-time? The idea of taking any shit job is a romantic one which becomes leads to disillusionment. Life moves in and writing moves the corner of the room. I have now written myself into a place I hadn't intended- a place of grumpiness and curmudgeondom. Scrowls grow upon the brow making intense the signals of delusion. I'm going to stop now and get on with something else. And I have yet to resolve the issue of acceptable purpose. Check back again, if you like.

Poets Wanted

2009-01-25T13:04:00.000-08:00

Wanted: Poets willing to give public readings for the promotion of poetry and their own writings. My son and I stopped in the Grind Coffee House on Maplecrest this morning shortly after 10 and after realizing that the layout could easily fit an open mike reading, I asked the owner who quickly went along with the idea. Anyone interested? Nothing concrete as of yet, but if you are interested, let me know. See you Thurs.

A pot of soup

2009-01-25T12:46:00.000-08:00

Sunday afternoon. The chicken carcass is on the stove, boiling with its vegetable buddies. The chicken, before becoming a carcass, was dinner, with roast vegetables, and Irish soda bread I baked Saturday morning as a break from the usual pancakes. I didn't have to go to all the trouble to roast a chicken whole, carefully tending it so that the bird was neither raw nor dry, basting it with olive oil and herbs. An easier meal could have been had and, more than likely, would have been appreciated as much. Boiled hot dogs. Instant potatoes. Crock-potted cut up chicken rendered down to mush with a can cream of chicken soup reminiscent of countless church recipe collections and "easy meals for the hurried and harried homemaker." Such food would have been eaten with about as much bother, and would have given necessary nutrients for the day, sufficient calories to feed the internal fires of human life. But I didn't. I took the more rigorous way and, before you give too many accolades to the love and care of family demonstrated by such devotedness, I did it from very selfish motives. I did it for me because I like to eat good food, food prepared, (nay, crafted) to taste a cut above the average. I cook for myself and my family sort of tags along with what's set on the table. My dislike of the mundane drives me to do what may take a bit more time but tastes so much better. And this is why the carcass is on the stove being recrafted into chicken stock. Thanks to a modern gas range (and not hot coals on the hearth) the task will be accomplished without much help from me. Let her simmer! Let her steep her flavors into the water, magically changing Fort Wayne tap water into something delightful. Not quite turning water to wine, but still delightful.

Why whine about the wine

2009-01-21T17:08:00.000-08:00

This blog is inspired by the glass of mediocre merlot sitting three inches to the left of the computer. I could go in greater detail but I fear I would be going the way of certain French hyperrealistic literature of 20 years ago. Such activities are to be refrained from. I had lunch with an old friend with whom I meet about once a year in January. He comes to Fort Wayne for an annual business meeting and we make sure to have lunch. Old friends with whom one can speak openly are to be cherished for they are rare. Brenda Ueland wrote a piece on our need to find someone to tell our stories to and without those listening ears, we tend to move away from our deeper humanity (or our truer humanity) and into the conventional realm of polite, yet stulifying discourse. I would not go so far as to call it conversation because conversation has a much deeper effect. True conversation can change both parties. The opposite of true conversation is a hurling of doctrines at each other in the pattern of "I'm right and if you refuse to agree with me you must be wrong." I've experienced far too much of this sort of discourse over the years to have any ear for it any longer. Civility is a lost art which, I hope, is making a slow comeback. One more point of hope to lay upon the new President.

2009-01-19T08:26:00.000-08:00

I did a word count on the previous blogs and discovered for the week that I was two words short. Here they are: Two Words.

2009-01-19T08:02:00.000-08:00

Here's the situation: I read a book on reading and I go off searching for those books. Like Erasmus I have a difficulty deciding betweeen books and food. My family would much prefer that I go for the food, they like to eat. They like to read as well, but are more akin to going to the library than the bookstore. But if all went to the library to borrow a book rather than the bookstore to buy a book, how would authors be paid? Do library purchases count toward sellerdom (best and otherwise)? Perhaps we have a solemn duty to go and buy books in order to support publishers in the hopes of better and better books being made available to the buying public. I find I rattle on. Is this not allowed in a blog? Since blog is so close to bog this opens the way to enter the swamplands of verbal meanderings. I have meanadered from my first point, that of going after recommended readings. On my most immediate shelf I have several books on writing such as "Read like a Writer", "Chapter after Chapter", "ABC of Reading", "The Art of Writing Poetry" along with many others. Each of them has a recommended reading list. Add to that my own compilations of lists of books to read. I feel like I am always many books behind. Add to this the difficulty of which era to delve into. Ezra Pound suggests I go back to the Iliad in Homeric Greek. Koine I can handle. Homeric would be a new study all together. I could dismiss it out of hand as being totally impractical or I could look at is as a challenge. Could I do it, that is, do I have the mental and linguistic resourses to tackle such a project? Yes, given a pile of dictionaries, lectionaries, etc., I could make a go of it. Do I have the time for it? That is another question. Mr. Pound also suggests I delve into Chaucer, a more wholesome prospect for I do love Chaucer even though I have been remise in getting through the whole. Maybe a few bottles of mead and a roaring fire would lend to a fulsom and vigorous reading- aloud of course, not worrying if I got all the proper Middle English pronounciations correct. After that, more books tracing literature's past. Here then the frustration: I'm always going back to the beginning, like an undergrad.
I hope that in the above I don't sound like too much of a prig. Or intellectual effete. Though traces of that abound. The simple truth (can truth be simple?) is that I love to read, want to be well read, and am always playing catch-up. And I love to write. The two go hand in hand. I've chatted enough about my frustrations. Next time, perhaps certain joys and delights.

A first blog

2009-01-16T09:05:00.000-08:00

First blog, and I've a cold that has wrapped itself around the throat like a tightening band of barbed wire, or I've swallowed barbed wire, or a hawthorn tree, or sandburrs, or an alien with claws, or a cyber hedgehog of titanium. You get the idea.
This afternoon, despite the cold Iim braving the weather to search out a used bookstore for Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading. I'm a sucker for books. Tell me to go read a book and I'll hunt it down and read it. This could be a problem, this bibliophilia.