Tuesday, March 25, 2008

A Friend of Bill W.

I'm going to do something new for the blog (and me): I'm going to post a short story. It was written as an assignment for a creative writing class. It's short -- about 750 words -- and we were constrained by our professor only allowing us to use monosyllabic words. I'm rather fond of the final product, so I thought, Hey, why not? For my Facebook readers, I apologize for the lack of paragraph breaks. Something gets lost in translation from my blog to Facebook. If you go to http://imsayinisall.blogspot.com you'll have an easier time reading it.


A Friend of Bill W.

Up to this point in his life, Tom was a man who was, some might say, “fond of the drink.” Those who might say this would say it as friends will, when they tried to make it sound like it was all right, not a big deal, though he had just crashed down their stairs, or broke their chair, or, in one fun tale, barged (broke) in the wrong house at 3 a.m. They called him this so that they could pull a hat down to their eyes and shield them from the truth and thus the charge they all felt to help in some way. They did not see marks on his wife or his kids (there were none; he did not hit), and this helped them to feel that all was well.
Then, though, there were those who would call him what he was, and though they too said this as his friends, they were friends of the man he could be, not of the man he was. This last set of friends would call him what he was to try to get him to change, to see what they saw, and to fix it. This did not work.
So it is that we find him in a bar late at night. It is a bar: bar stools pushed to a long, coarse-wood bar top; a few booths lined the walls; two or three large drink stands with chairs in the space from the end of the bar to the door; some dark, dull glass looked out on the cold, lamp-lit glow of the street. He sat at the bar, on one of the stools, a full glass of scotch in hand.
He stared out into space. My wife is with child, he thought. A new kid. A new life to add to mine. One boy, three girls he had had by now, all grown. His new wife had one of each, both young. He did not think that, at this point, he would have more kids, but here he was, with two step-kids and one more on the way. He thought of his own kids, grown up, raised in the house with him, the way he was. He looked down at the glass, shook his head, slapped a five on the bar and walked out.
  The cold air hit him; he looked left, then right, picked left and walked. He walked, found he had stopped in front of a store, saw a light blink, glanced into the store. The store was dark, and he stood in front of a light on the street; he saw a man in the glass look at him. The man was drawn, pale; fat, but looked too thin; eyes sunk on pouched dark half-moons; chin with rough fuzz; thin hair on his head not combed. He glanced down, and stood in shock. He saw that the man in the glass had on the same shirt and tie, the same three-pleat pants, the same look of shock on his face. The glass-man’s jaw hung down; his breath came in short, quick grey mists in the night air; his hands shook; he bent over and retched up some bile.
  Tom stood up, looked at the green-brown pool on the walk in front of him, wiped his mouth. He looked up to the street signs, struck out south. He knew where to go. He walked fast, a near-jog. He saw the sign, found the stairs; ran down the stairs, turned the knob; walked in, closed his eyes to the bright light; looked out, was stared at. Smiled at. Hands on him, a push to the front. He looked out, saw help. Saw truth. He coughed, took a breath.
“My name is Tom, and I’m an—“

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Attention everyone who reads this blog:

I need ideas for a short story that's due at the beginning of May. I have a couple in mind, but any extra sparks of inspiration would be most welcome.

:)

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Dunkin' Donuts now sucks on a whole other level.

Dunkin' Donuts sucks. On two levels:

1) Their donuts are lame. They're all cake donuts and, while I enjoy cake donuts occasionally, Krispy Kreme's yeast donuts are far superior.
2) Their freaking commercials.
 
The second level of sucking is the subject of this particular diatribe. 

They've had, off and on for the past year or so, a commercial wherein a group of people are in a generic mass-produced coffeehouse (an obvious mockery of Starbucks), standing around staring at the menu. Then they start to sing. "My mouth can't form these words/ My mouth can't say these words/ Is it French, or is it Italian?/ Perhaps, Fritalian?" 

The commercial is making fun of the silly names for some drinks and, I think more to the point, drink sizes. I will grant them this. Starbucks really should just call its sizes small, medium, and large. But they don't. And really, it's not hard to say "tall," "grande," or "venti," is it? I didn't think so. Other coffeehouses do this too, with slightly different names for sizes and drinks. But it's all pretty much the same. As I said, I grand them this: it's sort of lame. But then what happens in the commercial is this: John Goodman starts a voice-over, talking about how "normal" DD is, which, again, I can grant them. Then, though, he says "The Dunkin' Donuts Latte: you can order it in English." This is the point at which my head explodes.

Latte, you pricks, is an Italian word. You cannot order one in Inglese. Sure, you can specify the drink size in English, but the drink itself? No, you have to order that in Italian (unless of course you want to say "May I please have a medium cup of steamed, frothy milk with a shot of espresso [though that's another Italian word for which you should substitute "steam-pressed coffee"] in it?"). This bugs me so much that I actually wrote an angry e-mail to DD (which was, I might add, promptly received, read, distributed, discussed, and ignored).

I have continued my boycott on DD, which was began in response to Suckiness Level 1, but has since been expanded to include both levels of Suck.

On writing

W.E.B. DuBois spoke of double-consciousness as it relates to race. Specifically, he posited that black people are always aware of being of a bipartite soul (or at least, feeling as they are of a bipartite soul). He describes it, in The Souls of Black Folk, as the "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."
 
Emerson spoke of this phenomenon first, in 1843, but in a slightly different vein, and I find the DuBoisian concept a bit more apt for everyday life. But I digress. I'm going to borrow DuBois' term and apply it to writing. Authorship, really. I suppose one could consider it simply a gender-neutral version of Sandra Gilbert's concept of "anxiety of authorship" (which was itself borrowed from Harold Bloom (I'm beginning to wonder if there's any such thing as an original theory, here)), but it's more than that.
 
Bloom's anxiety of influence is the unpublished writer's desire to break free of his immediate literary forebears (think Cormac McCarthy "breaking free" of William Faulkner), finding his own voice and making his own path through the dense underbrush of the literary world. Gilbert's anxiety of authorship is mostly similar, though it deals with female authors. She said that women couldn't suffer from this particular anxiety (of influence), not having any female forebears against which to rail. So instead of struggling against their antecedents, they struggle against themselves, trying to find a voice of their own at all. Women are (were), according to Gilbert, stuck in the middle of the jungle and just trying to find a path -- any path -- to follow.

Now I've sort of digressed again (can you tell I'm enjoying my literary theory class?), but all of that actually has a point. In order to explain how my idea differs from those others that sound kind of similar, I needed to explain them. So now we can move on to the most important part of anything: me.

My idea is almost an amalgamation of double-consciousness and the anxiety of influence -- but not quite. See, a writer has a different sort of double-consciousness: following some 19th century critic whose name escape me's assertion that (and I'm paraphrasing here, obviously) every writer who aims to get published must be one of the most egotistical sons of bitches that's ever lived because he feels that, after careful review of all the great literature that has ever been published, he deserves to be put on the shelf along side them, so he has to have pride, and ego, and chutzpah. On the other hand, I can't believe that every author really feels that he is the be-all end-all of literature, so an author must, along with being egotistical, have a sense of humility, for he knows that there are some pieces of literature that can never be outdone -- at least, by him. 

The creature that emerges is both full of himself and humble. He knows he's a better writer than 99.5% of the people on the face of the planet, but he knows that he'll never measure up to the other .5%. Now, this may seem a bit lopsided, but when you consider the relative awfulness of Dean Koontz (what? He sucks. Seriously. I put him below even the unpublished masses, because he's that awful. Dan Brown lies at .00001%) at the bottom of the 99.5% and the greatness of Shakespeare at the top of the remaining .5%, the divide between where a given author feels his talents to lie on this scale compared to where he feels the greatest writer(s) of English lie is just as immense (if not more than) as the divide between the writer's own perceived talent and the bottom of the barrel. A visual aide:

Dean Koontz @0% <--(the masses)--> Author @ 99.501% <--(other authors)--> Shakespeare 100%

And so, with this dualistic egotism-humility in mind, the author sets forth to publish. But this bipartite nature of his soul forces him to be very anxious about the prospect, and to wonder if he should publish at all. If he gets rejected, he'll be relegated to the masses; published, and he is at the bottom of a new barrel. The worst part about it, though, is that he knows that he will never surpass most of the authors who have already been elevated to the canon.  It's like halving the distance between yourself and the door to your room. No matter how many times you halve the distance, you will always be infinitely far away from the door.

The anxiety my author feels is not the anxiety of Bloom or Gilbert, really. My author's anxiety stems, not from trying to break free of a seemingly oppressive/confining literary father (or mother (or lack thereof)), but from just trying to force his way into the same league as his literary forefathers. He hasn't even thought about breaking away from them yet; I guess this stage precedes Bloom's anxiety of influence in our literary psyche the same way that Lacan's Imaginary Order comes before the Real Order in our regular psyche. Without the influence of the forebears, the unpublished author has absolutely no chance of making it into the canon, so he can't think about breaking away until he's milked it for all its worth.

The little engine that could (blog).

OK. I know I've said this before, but you're all going to have to just trust me this time.

I am going to update this stupid thing on a semi-regular basis. I mean, I really think I have a lot to say, and though it's all completely useless and utterly trite, I nevertheless feel that it should be shared, so that the rest of the online community (i.e. the 2 or 3 people that read this on a regular basis (although having Facebook import new posts might up my readership to a good 6 or 7)) can bask in my drollery.

Promise.