Barthelme-ed

I've noticed that we all seem to be creating these elaborate (okay, maybe not so elaborate) metaphors to explain our relationship with Barthelme's stories. We all seem to like him in ways (differing ways), and dislike him in others. I find the metaphors the most interesting thing of all, though. Have we all finally been sufficiently challenged as readers, which then challenges us to respond sufficiently as writers? I'm probably over reaching, but I don't care as long as it gets me more interesting metaphors to read.

English major moment

I actually self-referred myself to two stories today to try and figure out a specific technique. I could actually hear the professor voice in my head doing saying "and you should look at these and pay close attention, see if you can figure out how they make it work." I'm still convinced that anything I do will be a pitiful imitation, but I'm starting to figure out how the stories work.

And my research seems to be morbid and a little graphic, just the way I like it.

Now if I could just figure out a way into my story. My goal today? 50 pages, at least one of it should be coherent.

and now for a non-writing related intermission.

I think I have a new addiction in life. It has two wheels and goes "vroom vroom" at high speeds.

Preview...

A paragraph from my senior thesis (it's the fourth paragraph). I'm three pages in, and it's either going to be good or a catastrophe.

I found myself in a wonderland of carbohydrates, things I had been warned against time and time again in a series of after school specials and post-graduate study physics courses. As I walked past a table of innocent looking assorted bagels, I could imagine their dangerous Cartoon counterparts dancing in a kick-line on top of them, harmonizing in four parts about terrorism and obesity and the guarded fight against both. As they dropped into the splits at the end of their number, the cartoon bagels gave me a meaningful look and asked me if I was fighting for freedom or if I was going to join the league of fat terrorists who planned to enslave us all. I grabbed a half dozen bagels and dropped them in my basket before grabbing another dozen. The cartoon bagels called me cowardly and unpatriotic before lighting their little cigarettes and walking away towards the liquor aisle. I ignored them and began to study the sliced bread.

-----
So far the entire story takes place in a grocery store. I have ideas that work into that. We will see what happens.

I also finished the Barthelme reading (I ended up reading 18 stories because I got the page numbers wrong). I feel more warmly towards him than I did before I read the right stories. There's probably some Barthelme influence at work in my senior thesis.

I think I have a story due this week for fiction. This might be the week that I really break in my new version of word.

Donald Barthelme

I think I'm halfway through the stories (assuming that I'm reading the right ones-- most of the page numbers I have written down don't match the starts of stories, so I'm making guesses). I'm not really sure how I feel about Barthelme? In a lot of ways, reading Barthelme reminds me of reading Charles' work, but I enjoy Charles' work more. I keep zoning out when I read Barthelme, and maybe it's just because I'm tired. There are a couple of his stories that I just get completely sucked into ("The Game" and "The School") because they're absolutely brilliant (even when he wavers onto the Gertrude Stein line that I can't stand). But a lot of them, I don't know, maybe I'm just not smart enough to conquer Barthelme?

Or maybe it's because I read Orringer first and her prose is so lucid and smooth, that it just makes Barthelme's that much more stilted and jarring for me?

I don't know, but I will be really interested to see how everyone else reacts to Barthelme.

brilliant.

"Aïda. That is her terrible name. Ai-ee-duh: two cries of pain and one of stupidity. The vines tighten around her body as she spins, and Joseph snaps photographs. she knows he will like it, the way the leaves cling, the way the grapes stain her white dress. we are trespassing on the vintner's vines, spilling the juice of his expensive grapes, and if he sees us he will surely shoot us. What an end to my tall little cousin. Between the purple stains on her chest, a darker stain spreads. Have I mentioned yet that I am fat.?

Isn't it funny how I've learned to say it? I am fat. I am not skin or muscle or gristle or bone. What I am, the part of my body that I most am, is fat. Continuous, white, lighter than water, a source of energy. no one can hold all of me at once. Does this constitute a crime? I know how to carry myself. Sometimes I feel almost graceful. But all around I hear the thin people's bombast: Get Rid of Flabby Thighs Now! Avoid Holiday Weight-Gain Nightmares! Lose Those Last Five Pounds! What is left of a woman once her last five pound are gone?"
-Julie Orringer, How to Breathe Under Water

If I could write like this, I'd never worry about my future. That's from the story "When She is Old and I am Famous" by the way. And I don't even think that's the best story in the book. Granted, I think I might get a little more out of the book if I brushed up on my Judaism, but the book is still absolutely devastating. The stories are actually strong enough that I couldn't read the book straight through, I could only handle a few stories at a time.

I guess I don't really have anything constructive to say, except that I'm now beyond excited that she's visiting campus in a month.

Here I go with seemingly insomniatic posts again...

At any rate, I've just finished watching a little (very little at only 84 minutes and two characters) movie called "Conversations With Other Women" and I'm completely won. The two actors are Aaron Eckhart (as "man") and Helena Bonham Carter (as "woman"). I think what I'm most blown away by is the really well written dialogue. And the naturalness of it all. And did you know that Microsoft has chosen not to recognize the word "dialogue" as a correctly spelled word? Maybe they think it's French...

Anyways, if you're looking for a good film to fit into a small amount of time, check this one out. The performances are outstanding and the writing is exceptional.

Visiting Writer 3/8/07

In the grand tradition begun with Chris Offut (who was so list worthy it was unreal), with each visiting author, I make a list of the things that I learn, as well as a list of books to read. I will now continue this tradition on my blog.

Things I learned from Josip:

1. It's a little odd that you can become a trained killer with the United States Army at the age of 18, but you can't drink away the Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome for another three years.
2. War & Lust (from the title of his book) is a play on War & Peace.
3. Josip struggles with titling his work, too.
4. The way to do it is just to write stories and then every so often, publish a collection and get paid for them.
5. You must be very smart to write and publish an essay (especially if you're not quoting Derrida)
6. Josip seems to really like St. Patrick's day, but it's probably just because of all the green tea.
7. When you've written something subtle in which not much happens, you've written a poem
8. Write what you can, be prepared to work at it, especially when you don't want to-- your mood will seep into your words .
9. Write in different locations, the unique obstacles and distractions of each place can be very good for your writing (feel like you're writing in a factory)
10. When you hit people with chunks of rusted metal, they will stop picking on you; especially if they have to go to the hospital.
11. you can write stories based on themes.
12. War complicates and dramatizes everything which makes for better stories.
13. What would Jesus do in this story? (Don't do that)
14. Be careful of writing addictions (like setting stories in war-torn Yugoslavia)
15. We all want cute lives. (but Tolstoy will make it terrifying)
16. Credit any sentences you borrow so you don't get accused of plagiarism.
17. Rob the Cradle. Rob the Grave. (use your childhood and your ancestry)
18. You can cull a story out of several instances and ideas.
19. Men are very simple and easy to understand. Women are not.
20. Go against the cliche, look for the unusual person-- a sensitive, poetic mass murderer.
21. Poets can be very dangerous.
22. Medical School exams can be an exercise in public humiliation.
23. "Linguistic seduction"
24. The legal age of consumption shouldn't be 18, if it were, more students wouldn't pass college.
25. Writing is an athletic discipline and requires great perseverance.
26. 3rd person narrative will force you to imagine and transcend the experience.
27. to defamiliarize the familiar, take it out of yourself with 3rd person.
28. If it's really foreign and weird, use 1st person to make it more familiar.
29. Plan a story, but leave enough room for you and your imagination.
30. The game of Chess revolves around the idea of threat.
31. There must be some sort of threat in your story.
32. Stories have chemistry and it doesn't always work.
33. you should edit a story more than twice-- Josip edits 10-15 drafts.
34. "You write about your people and I'll write about mine"
35. We are always at least a little absent minded and thinking about other things.
36. You're doing good if your deterioration is slow.
37. If you cut the first half of your story, the second half usually implies the second.
38. "All those guys in the army wanting to jump on each other"
39. Nebraskans are patient ("you patient Nebraskans")
40. It is better to give elephants than kittens.

Infidelities: Stories of Mini-skirts and Machine Guns

"It's not much of a plot, but that's fine; I don't need plots. In a way, after 9/11, it's nice not to have a plot, or big events; I've written so much about war and murder-- and crime and sex, for that matter-- that it's a relief not to have any of that." -- from "59th Parallel" by Josip Novakovich


So now that I maybe feel ready to talk about Novakovich's short story collection (see title), I'm not entirely sure what to say. I suppose starting out with the stories that really stood out to me might help. "Spleen" didn't do much for me. I felt sorely let down but like I was, as the reader, in a Catch-22 from about halfway into the book. Also, like Bret and Chelsea (?), it took me a long time to figure out that the narrator was female. But then as soon as the narrator decided to sleep with the emigrant, I felt like the story, for lack of phrasing, screwed itself. Why, you might be asking yourselves right now? Because if the emigrant was in fact the rapist, then the story was going to feel like a cliche. If the emigrant wasn't the rapist, then I was going to feel like I'd been built up and let down for no good reason.

But anyways, on to the stories that I actually liked, which would be "Night Guests", "Tchaikovsky's Bust" and "59th Parallel". I think these stories stood out to me because the narrator felt the most legitimate to me (whether they are fictional or confessional, they still passed the honest voice test for me). I was a little thrown by the meta-fictional daydream at the end of the story "Tchaikovsky's Bust", but I loved the sensory imagery that came out really strongly through out the story, as well as Novakovich's intense attention to the idiosyncrasies of his characters (for example, a three year old who occassionally breaks out in strings of profanity when she's upset) was something that I found to be highly admirable and would probably be advantageous to try and imitate.


What I loved about "Night Guests" was Novakovich's use of such strongly contrasting dialects (between the narrator who had a sort of European emigrant syntax reparteeing with the full out rural dialect of the other characters). I also thought the crazy cop and the difference between Italian and American underwear was pretty nifty.

Granted, I haven't met Novakovich yet, but I felt like, after reading "59th Parallel", maybe we had been introduced. I don't usually go in for non-stories like this (I don't usually get the point of them), but this story seemed really honest and somehow vital to me. Maybe it was the juxtaposition of such a little story like this amongst all of the gruesome deaths, dyings and grotesques of the Balkan conflict that made it seem so touchably real. To be honest, at the height of the Balkan conflict, I was ten. The most that I really remember about it was that there used to be news clips about it on the Nickelodeon news show for kids (with the bald woman...Linda something). I never really liked that show, it seemed so boring compared to everything else on Nickelodeon on a Sunday night. I will say though, that these short moments of fiction made the Balkan conflict/civil wars real to me in a way that (short of the opening scene of one of the most graphically violent movies that I've ever seen which would be The Hunted) I've never known it.

Sorry if this all comes out as gibberish, I should probably not be writing these at 3 in the morning, but that seems to be my best opportunity right now.

The Writing Process

As the idea that Spring Break means half the semester is gone starts breathing down my neck, I find myself dichotomized.


Here is my situation. I am in need of at least two twenty page stories this semester. One, I need for Fiction. The other, for a little thing called "SENIOR THESIS OF DEATH AND DOOM". Okay, so maybe it's not quite that dramatic, but it's kind of overwhelming (kind of like when you take Advanced Composition with Sandy and the last assignment simply says "write your best essay"). So that's the first half of my mental dichotomization.

The second part of my dichotomization is this: For those of you who may have missed our greatly enlightening "What Can I do with an English Major" panel last Tuesday (Technical writing, anyone? Anyone?), Will Holmes was on the panel and made a really interesting comment about learning to write on demand. He made a reference to the quote "Inspiration is for amateurs" (the rest of the quote is "...the rest of us just show up" and it's from Chuck Close). So I should be able to pound out a decent story on demand, yeah? So then why am I having so much trouble finding stories that I want to tell? I keep finding elements that I want to include, but that vital little thing called "narrative thread" is eluding me viciously. If any of you see it, trap it, cut off it's legs and give me a call letting me know where it is, would you?

So, what would you do?

And, now that I've found the secret key to coaxing blogspot into letting me into my account, I will attempt to post more frequently, even if they become posts similar to Charles' insomniatic typing sprees or Bret's real-life commentary.