Today, I talked with my adviser about getting the hell out of the Communications and Rhetorical Studies department, to which he responded, "So you couldn't find a home here?" I appreciated the joke, but at the same time it made me a little depressed, maybe because he said it in his perpetually saddened eastern-European "sounds-like-a-refugee" accent, and he had some solemn classical music playing in his office the whole time.
I want to try to write something based on that scene at some point, and frame it with the same emotions: 90% funny and 10% partially sad, with the 10% sadness causing you to question whether you need to lighten up and be less sensitive or if the sadness is genuinely warranted. Is that too personal? I sure hope so.
All pseudo-sadness aside, I'm fleeing CRS and never looking back, that's final. It wasn't a particularly bad experience, but I'm pretty sure it's not for me. July will tell whether I'm going to be in Television/Radio/Film or English for the rest of my undergraduate career, I think regardless of what happens I'll find some kind of enjoyment in doing something.
April is national "school kills your existence" month, but if I navigate successfully through the hellmonth I'll have the excitement of a new China Mieville book to look forward to in May, which better be good. I expect something totally awesome from the writer who made me take writing seriously in the first place.
I'm continuing to work on the airport piece, the direction of which is kind of nebulous and unclear right now. Still, it's good to have something to work on consistently, even if it isn't really about anything. I'll find something worthwhile to extract from the drabble, by god.
Also, started a new thing this weekend which I'm somewhat stoked about, tentatively titled Dad's Rage Box. It's my attempt at screwing with form in a way I haven't before, which is challening and loads o' fun. More updates on that once it materializes.
Sleepin' now.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Spring?
I met another person today who has the same writing instructor as I do and harbors the same feelings of ultrarage about her airheaded midwestern-soccer mom demeanor, I'm hoping I could eventually organize enough people to launch a formal complaint against the school's writing program and its respective worthlessness.
I lamented to my mother about this several times. She told me not to be too hard on the course, because she teaches the same stuff and knows how students tend to approach the tedium of such required classes. Then I told her that the instructor required us to write a full 10 page draft of an essay without a thesis, and achieved maximum persuasion.
It's weird that I look back on having my dad as an English teacher as a sort of academic golden age, it's also weird that my final research project in that class was about a writer whose books are largely concerned with golden ages and the characters who experience their aftermath.
Oh damn, I suddenly love my Rhetoric class, though. It's the only class I have where the papers are graded on your ability to make a good argument and not on your ability to regurgitate the fact-rodents that were puked into your gullet by the institutional mamabird.
I think my sudden love for intensely biological metaphors (like the one above) are a side-effect of reading Lara Glenum's poetry, which is one of my favorite things right now.
The Intergroup Dialogue class continues to speed along at maximum tedium, but it's given me some creative ideas. I'm going to write a parody of some of the readings they've been giving us, amongst other things.
I'm trying fiction again after a long poetry-filled break from it, I'm also trying to re-enforce my fiction voice with some of the syntactical learnings I picked up from writing/reading an assload of poetry. It's hard. I feel like I'm having trouble “breathing life” into my fiction, I always think it sounds empty and bland, and that there's no intrigue or anything to support it.
Here's an excerpt from a little something-something that I started in the airport as I was flying home for spring break:
I needed to climb out of my seat, but my co-passenger was still slumbering. We were the last ones on the plane, so I figured I should wake him up. I said, “Hey,” then shook his shoulder a little. Then I raised my voice.
“Did we pass it already?” he said.
“Did we pass what?”
“The landscape,” he said. I couldn't tell whether his tone was serious or not.
“Yep,” I said. “It's pretty much all behind us now.” I inner-cringed at my own pun, but he didn't make any sneers, mental or otherwise.
“Fuck!” he said. Several flight attendants looked over at us. “Fuck!” He actually yelled this time. The loudness was scary but somehow refreshing.
“What, were you eager to see it or something?”
“I had to see it,” he yelled, turning red and giving off some fresh dectectable agitation. “There's a fuckin', fuck, see, you can see the outline of a neighborhood on the ground from this flight route that looks like a cock. I was supposed to get a picture of it. I'm a photographer. Fuck. Magazine photography.”
“I saw it!” I said, my words came out too excitedly for me not to hate myself for sounding that way. “I remember specifically when we flew over it.”
“Shit! Why didn't you wake me up?”
“I didn't know it was so important to you! How many random strangers would take kindly to me saying, 'Hey, that neighborhood down their kind of looks like the outline of a dick, doesn't it?' How was I supposed to know?” My response was probably over-explained and it was. But it seemed important to talk longer so not to appear meek.
He paused, then unbuckled his seatbelt. “You should've assumed it anyway.” He promptly got up and grabbed his bags.On the side of one bag, a sticker read “PROPERTY OF THE UNIVERSE: Scorch Magazine” At that time I wished I had owned a cigarette lighter and that he had grown a beard so I could have set it on fire. His walk down the aisle was brief and I could taste the arrogance, and I imagined the least decrepit flight attendants in the fuselage assaulting him and tackling him to the floor like so many women had probably done to him in their minds.
I lamented to my mother about this several times. She told me not to be too hard on the course, because she teaches the same stuff and knows how students tend to approach the tedium of such required classes. Then I told her that the instructor required us to write a full 10 page draft of an essay without a thesis, and achieved maximum persuasion.
It's weird that I look back on having my dad as an English teacher as a sort of academic golden age, it's also weird that my final research project in that class was about a writer whose books are largely concerned with golden ages and the characters who experience their aftermath.
Oh damn, I suddenly love my Rhetoric class, though. It's the only class I have where the papers are graded on your ability to make a good argument and not on your ability to regurgitate the fact-rodents that were puked into your gullet by the institutional mamabird.
I think my sudden love for intensely biological metaphors (like the one above) are a side-effect of reading Lara Glenum's poetry, which is one of my favorite things right now.
The Intergroup Dialogue class continues to speed along at maximum tedium, but it's given me some creative ideas. I'm going to write a parody of some of the readings they've been giving us, amongst other things.
I'm trying fiction again after a long poetry-filled break from it, I'm also trying to re-enforce my fiction voice with some of the syntactical learnings I picked up from writing/reading an assload of poetry. It's hard. I feel like I'm having trouble “breathing life” into my fiction, I always think it sounds empty and bland, and that there's no intrigue or anything to support it.
Here's an excerpt from a little something-something that I started in the airport as I was flying home for spring break:
I needed to climb out of my seat, but my co-passenger was still slumbering. We were the last ones on the plane, so I figured I should wake him up. I said, “Hey,” then shook his shoulder a little. Then I raised my voice.
“Did we pass it already?” he said.
“Did we pass what?”
“The landscape,” he said. I couldn't tell whether his tone was serious or not.
“Yep,” I said. “It's pretty much all behind us now.” I inner-cringed at my own pun, but he didn't make any sneers, mental or otherwise.
“Fuck!” he said. Several flight attendants looked over at us. “Fuck!” He actually yelled this time. The loudness was scary but somehow refreshing.
“What, were you eager to see it or something?”
“I had to see it,” he yelled, turning red and giving off some fresh dectectable agitation. “There's a fuckin', fuck, see, you can see the outline of a neighborhood on the ground from this flight route that looks like a cock. I was supposed to get a picture of it. I'm a photographer. Fuck. Magazine photography.”
“I saw it!” I said, my words came out too excitedly for me not to hate myself for sounding that way. “I remember specifically when we flew over it.”
“Shit! Why didn't you wake me up?”
“I didn't know it was so important to you! How many random strangers would take kindly to me saying, 'Hey, that neighborhood down their kind of looks like the outline of a dick, doesn't it?' How was I supposed to know?” My response was probably over-explained and it was. But it seemed important to talk longer so not to appear meek.
He paused, then unbuckled his seatbelt. “You should've assumed it anyway.” He promptly got up and grabbed his bags.On the side of one bag, a sticker read “PROPERTY OF THE UNIVERSE: Scorch Magazine” At that time I wished I had owned a cigarette lighter and that he had grown a beard so I could have set it on fire. His walk down the aisle was brief and I could taste the arrogance, and I imagined the least decrepit flight attendants in the fuselage assaulting him and tackling him to the floor like so many women had probably done to him in their minds.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
And other ways to Waltkellify language
I think that the "coming-of-age" subject needs to be treated more absurdly. My favorite coming of age story that I've seen so far is a 6-episode anime series called FLCL, which most people don't really look at seriously because of how bizarre it is. It's a short but pretty thorough exploration of the tectonic shifts of puberty, covering all the classic topics such as sex, parental alienation, and the sudden impending pressures of adult life. The story itself is fairly cool on its own, even without the adolescent overtones, but the show's unusually hyperactive way of describing action/interaction tends to get defaulted to the category of being "on drugs," which is dissapointing. I wish more people would realize that while narcotics can be a source of creativity, they are not THE source of ALL creativity. (this problem will get an entire post/rant dedicated to it sometime later on.)
I've been thinking about making up my own personal vocabulary lately, y'know, just little everyday terms that can be used for everyday things. For example, winter coats tend to have dark colors for the most part, so they're somewhat solemn. A pile of winter coats could be called, a "solemnheap." However, if someone had a bright, vibrantly yellow winter coat, and they threw it on the pile, you could say, "Someone canaried the solemnheap."
etc.
Here's the 1st draft of a poem I started last night, which got me started on the whole coming-of-age train o' thought:
The new aging is a young, flimsy mountain
plugging the earth's hot hernia, to stifle but not
stop completely, something overtly inevitable, a boy's
testosterone-laden granitic magma, ready to make a hellacious
stew of the whole deal.
The town below is doomed docile, living out a tropical finity:
the ground shakes but they are still in their beach clothes, tossing balls that will eventually deflate, cooking steaks that'll decay creatively in their stomachs. As the fresh earth pops with
ash and gas, bleeding its future self into the habitus, the creeping
gummy heat is still hypnotic, and they stand outside, unable not to be in awe of it even as their
dream homes sink into a flaming bolus of the earth.
On some summers, after the rock is solid enough to have eroded,
you can still smell the old young rock
blowing on in from the crevices where a remainder
was left to be savored smoldering.
The former town residents are exiles/fossils, now still furnishing their follicles
for more obliged destructions.
I've been thinking about making up my own personal vocabulary lately, y'know, just little everyday terms that can be used for everyday things. For example, winter coats tend to have dark colors for the most part, so they're somewhat solemn. A pile of winter coats could be called, a "solemnheap." However, if someone had a bright, vibrantly yellow winter coat, and they threw it on the pile, you could say, "Someone canaried the solemnheap."
etc.
Here's the 1st draft of a poem I started last night, which got me started on the whole coming-of-age train o' thought:
The new aging is a young, flimsy mountain
plugging the earth's hot hernia, to stifle but not
stop completely, something overtly inevitable, a boy's
testosterone-laden granitic magma, ready to make a hellacious
stew of the whole deal.
The town below is doomed docile, living out a tropical finity:
the ground shakes but they are still in their beach clothes, tossing balls that will eventually deflate, cooking steaks that'll decay creatively in their stomachs. As the fresh earth pops with
ash and gas, bleeding its future self into the habitus, the creeping
gummy heat is still hypnotic, and they stand outside, unable not to be in awe of it even as their
dream homes sink into a flaming bolus of the earth.
On some summers, after the rock is solid enough to have eroded,
you can still smell the old young rock
blowing on in from the crevices where a remainder
was left to be savored smoldering.
The former town residents are exiles/fossils, now still furnishing their follicles
for more obliged destructions.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Potentiality Batter
Leafy Lad looks over, finds
a pamphlet on a coffee table,
labeled “Profound Inspiration”
The first page reads: “The road
to roadliness is self-persevering,
paved with self perseverance in
its most solid form!”
The next page reads:
“Girl, you know Imma gon'
do all kindsa nasty things 2ya
once I get outta dis jail” (learn
to profit from this), a footnote reads.
the next pages aren't real, the back
cover isn't of much help either,
it's just covered with ad copy
for the Jet Fuel IceCream diet.
Noticing the clamminess of the paper
L. Lad tries to shake his hands of the thing,
only to find fins on the end of his arms. Seven months
later, after the surgery, L. Lad asks if he will still
be able to type. The IV stand bends over and adjusts its
bow tie, says: “DON'T TRY TO TRICK ME WITH THAT GOD DAMN
'I COULDN'T BEFORE' PIANO-WHATEVER FUCK JOKE, YOU
MONGOLOID.” Panting, it laughs, damn uncomfortably,
then rephrases: “Haha, just kidding. But seriously, please
don't make that joke, I've heard it like, 50 times today.”
a pamphlet on a coffee table,
labeled “Profound Inspiration”
The first page reads: “The road
to roadliness is self-persevering,
paved with self perseverance in
its most solid form!”
The next page reads:
“Girl, you know Imma gon'
do all kindsa nasty things 2ya
once I get outta dis jail” (learn
to profit from this), a footnote reads.
the next pages aren't real, the back
cover isn't of much help either,
it's just covered with ad copy
for the Jet Fuel IceCream diet.
Noticing the clamminess of the paper
L. Lad tries to shake his hands of the thing,
only to find fins on the end of his arms. Seven months
later, after the surgery, L. Lad asks if he will still
be able to type. The IV stand bends over and adjusts its
bow tie, says: “DON'T TRY TO TRICK ME WITH THAT GOD DAMN
'I COULDN'T BEFORE' PIANO-WHATEVER FUCK JOKE, YOU
MONGOLOID.” Panting, it laughs, damn uncomfortably,
then rephrases: “Haha, just kidding. But seriously, please
don't make that joke, I've heard it like, 50 times today.”
Sunday, March 1, 2009
March done started real good like
It actually did, though. Today was my first real productive day in a long time, and it was productive on both fronts (creative and obligatory.) I think I'll survive this semester, even after the annual February decline in academic success (I used to fight it, now I welcome it with open arms in the hopes that it'll get out of my house faster.)
Friday I fly home, which'll be a funfest. Family, friends, freedom, etc. Possibly some extended Atlanta-related excursions. Oh, and warm weather, which I have a newfound appreciation for.
Talking about the weather at Syracuse is so universal that I think it might be enforced by some secret brainwave device; I think people who don't talk about the weather enough have to "withdraw" or "go back home." I can't tell you the number of conversations I've had that begin, "It's so cold right now." The weather is a massive small-talk resevoir that everyone dips into way too much.
Top College Smalltalk Topics
1. Weather
2. Grades
3. Stress
4. Class
5. What you did this weekend
I realize that bitching about smalltalk is so commonplace that it rivals smalltalk itself, still, I think it's necessary if we are to ultimately reform it. The hell am I talking about?
Oh well. Back to dat homework.
Friday I fly home, which'll be a funfest. Family, friends, freedom, etc. Possibly some extended Atlanta-related excursions. Oh, and warm weather, which I have a newfound appreciation for.
Talking about the weather at Syracuse is so universal that I think it might be enforced by some secret brainwave device; I think people who don't talk about the weather enough have to "withdraw" or "go back home." I can't tell you the number of conversations I've had that begin, "It's so cold right now." The weather is a massive small-talk resevoir that everyone dips into way too much.
Top College Smalltalk Topics
1. Weather
2. Grades
3. Stress
4. Class
5. What you did this weekend
I realize that bitching about smalltalk is so commonplace that it rivals smalltalk itself, still, I think it's necessary if we are to ultimately reform it. The hell am I talking about?
Oh well. Back to dat homework.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Industrial Litgriculture
Syracuse's required academic writing classes are like the USDA of writing: all they care about is form, not content. Much like the department of agriculture doesn't give a damn about how your meat looks and tastes as long as you irradiate/freeze the fuck out of it, so also does the Writing Program not care how bland your essays are as long as you adhere to their unnecessarily byzantine structure of how the "creative" process should go.
USDA policies are tailored to the messy mass production that produces our food. A big university isn't too different from a factory, come to think of it.
I'd petition SU's ass for a redress of grievances, but there ain't no time for that.
USDA policies are tailored to the messy mass production that produces our food. A big university isn't too different from a factory, come to think of it.
I'd petition SU's ass for a redress of grievances, but there ain't no time for that.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
aorta gitton upf thurr
mm hmm oh that's great
suckle more pitas
suckle as much as it permits
oh and yes I am fond of quite yes fond of that
m yes you should mm I know how that is
hmm I wonder oh yes is yes that's good
yeah I am oh sorry meant to say yes
oh revamping is a must oh yes it is oh yes it is
goodness yes it shall would be must yes oh great
GAVE ME A CHANCE TO REFEEL SOCIERTY
GURVE ME A GOOD GOLLY DONE GOOD GANDER ATT'ER
DONE DURLVED INTO DEM DIRTY POORZ WIF FRESH'NIN PRODUCT
PURT HER ON A REEL PERT PERK FOR 'PEARANCES
suckle more pitas
suckle as much as it permits
oh and yes I am fond of quite yes fond of that
m yes you should mm I know how that is
hmm I wonder oh yes is yes that's good
yeah I am oh sorry meant to say yes
oh revamping is a must oh yes it is oh yes it is
goodness yes it shall would be must yes oh great
GAVE ME A CHANCE TO REFEEL SOCIERTY
GURVE ME A GOOD GOLLY DONE GOOD GANDER ATT'ER
DONE DURLVED INTO DEM DIRTY POORZ WIF FRESH'NIN PRODUCT
PURT HER ON A REEL PERT PERK FOR 'PEARANCES
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