Spurious

"The Zone"
This post, as well as sight, is worth clicking to. Spurious has found that wonderful balance between rich prose and academic knowledge that is so difficult to pin down. I love it! Not completely though. When there are posts of this caliber it makes it all the more difficult to write something insipid. And I realize that words like insipid will not set me any higher up on the blog standards chart.

Let Me Pull Your Sleeve a Minute About Oh, The Organization

If you haven't read Oh, The Organization, then this won't make much sense, but I encourage you take the necessary steps.

Well, so far it's great! Here I am wondering what they're gonna do with all this money. How's it gonna go, what will they make for Jeff in Memorium, what if that dude loses it all in his pillow case, when can I see the million dollar changes they've made to the yard? And have I thought about someone dying yet. Nope not once. If someone said to you, "Push this button and tomorrow you will have a story to write, but somone will die when you push the button," would you do it? Am I this shallow? Thanks for mentioning Hardy Boys. It helped me stop mentioning it in my head. I was immediatley able to put those memories away.

Adam shows a gift for foreshadowing, even to set up great punchlines like,"If I give you a million dollars will you promise to never pick up a paint brush again?" Hilarious in context but I won't ruin it for you non-readers.

And Adam's comments on your blogs, his occasional rant leaving you thirsting for more, well thats really him. He's the same character in the book. You hope he's not just watching. You hope he's taking notes for the next novelnino.

I began to wonder if I was only taking interest because I have met three of the characters (Played basketball with Benji, Jason Lee spent three or four nights with me and my wife in NC listening to songs, drinking forties and talking art and Jesus- Had I known about the clown thing I wouldn't have mentioned it but we suspected as much, and Adam. He got stuck in a tree one time and the Fire department had to come and help him down. He said he was just taking notes, but we knew better). But I decided that wasn't the case. I've known a lot of people that write crappy stuff that I chose not to read even if it's about people I know intimately. I mean it's really good. Straight forward. Easy to follow and lot's to think about... ie. Howard Zinn's First Thanksgiving, Ammo from heaven and original words plays like dis-eased. I might ask to borrow that. There are nice conceptual infrastructures that could be developed into equally thought provoking paintings.

Unfortunately I have to go to sleep because I am now employed and need to lie in bed until four in the morning so that I can eventually fall asleep and wake up hours before I've met my sleeping quota. I haven't finished reading the Organization but I will first thing tomorrow.

Just one more thing. I tell everyone to read Cortazar because he's an amazing writer, but Adam, YOU MUST READ CORTAZAR. Hopscotch is the masterpiece. It can be read two different ways, front to back or an alternation of extra chapters that have been added, jumping all around the book and producing profound results. It will keep you up for nights on end. I hate it when people say I must do something so let me rephrase. Cortazar is cool. More soon.

The orginama what? Oh, The Organization...cool

I planned on responding to The Pickle's, Adam Robinson, in regards to an online museum. This however was disrupted when I found he had linked a part of his on going work (Novel, novella, novenino, navratilova?) "Oh, The Organization," on his site. This is urgent. I must read it in it's entirety. This may run into my blogging time, (who's really keeping track anyway) but so goes the life of a (note to self: replace parentheses with something cool later).

For those of you with short attention spans, check out his reviews of movies you might want to check out, more because of his review than the merits of the movie.

I haven't figured out how to put links in my paragraphs yet, so for now, just click on Adam's pickled news or Combed reviews in the sidebar. I'll tell you what I think of "Oh, The Organization" in my next post, and I'll respond to the request for master's degrees, and I'll do something cool. I 'm gonna do something cool. I am cool. That might have been it.

Malayalam

Wow. I can’t help feeling like…
Prepare yourself. Don’t you want to be sad, to be moved, to understand something. Aren’t you hoping this will touch you? Don’t you want to relate to this, to see yourself in these words, to relate to art? Who then will make it?

I learned a new palindrome longer than the rest, and I’m only interested because Cortazar said something about them. Maybe they helped him sleep, like the cigarettes and the mate’ and the company he kept. I bet you sleep like a child when you write like he does. There’s honey on the handle of my cup and it’s spreading from my fingers to the letters to the insides of other fingers but I don’t feel like anything is sticking.

I finally turned the water faucet handle off. I heard it dripping and I told myself I would turn it off as soon as I got a chance, but I forgot three times. I finally turned it off. Now I miss it. I wish music played as soon as I stopped writing. My paragraphs need a coda not made of words. Then they’d set themselves apart from the rest. Water dripping would do it but if it were a part of my writing I would not turn it off. The honey is sweet and I wish I could play piano.

That’s what I was thinking. I was sitting on my front steps, waiting for cars to go by and I was thinking these exact things. I thought we should look up more as humans. I mean it literally as well as metaphorically.

Do flies have an ethereal quality? I kill a lot of them like a fool. I do plenty of other things that do not pay tribute to the ethereal qualities of my life. I don’t look up enough and I don’t pick proper times to repeat myself. Stories hinder creativity in my book. Stories are so easy to tell but to tell them I need to block all of the other things that run to my fingers. I’ve tried typing with gloves on but these things still find their way through. They bleed through the gloves and leave the keyboard a mess. They seep through the fabric and switch the position of the letters. They turn letters backwards because it’s the only way to make the words interesting. They over compensate for my lack of creativity and try to make up for my bad spelling. They create grammatical errors that I am capable of myself. Instead of gloves, I devised a method of typing with a system of pencils. The eraser side is attached to my fingers. This keeps a comfortable distance between the letters and myself. But, and I’m only trying to accurately describe this process, before I know it the pencils have reversed themselves. The cursor on the screen begins going in the opposite direction. This is inevitably when I write my masterpieces. I don’t see the cursor erasing the words. Instead I write as fast as I can, in an impulse that has the creative potential of a woman’s womb. After 3 hours I stop to reread the culmination of my perspiration. The screen is blank. The pencils have shaven themselves into small splinters of wood and on my hands written in lead are the remains of the first good thing I’ve ever written. The words are in a jumbled mess smeared from sweat and blood splintered like Jesus’ back, crucified to a cross made of yellow wood.

I started writing with a pen attached to the end of an umbrella. I’m just trying to write a story, but you know as well as I do, it’s just not possible. Writing a story censors all of the great things that are really being written in your head. You have to keep to the story. You have to keep the readers attention. How can you expect them to concentrate? Why are you still reading this? Why are you still reading this? You have to keep to the plot, the storyline, and the master narrative. I wrote for a long time trusting that the umbrella shield would catch everything and judging by the increasing weight of the thing I assumed it was working. The umbrella caught all of the things I wanted to write but couldn’t. Without catching these things the story becomes incoherent and seemingly random. It isn’t however. I took this umbrella filled with the filtered stories that ruin my coherency and dumped it down the drain of the faucet that had recently been turned off. In the steel sink the stories ran down the drain in search of a hair they heard Cortazar talking about finding in the depths of a sewage system. Having taken care of the problem I was excited to return to my paper. The words had been blocked because the open umbrella was blocking the paper so I was unable to see what had been written. I thought I’d read this story and hear the coda I have longed to hear towards the end of my story. It was no surprise to me that there was only one word on the paper. It was scratched into the paper, void of ink. I can’t play piano. The word was Malayalam. It's a palindrome. If you could see me now Mom, if you could see we won.

A Discourse on Where to Keep Good Writing

Act 1 Scene i
Where to keep good writing is a topic often ignored, yet immediately appropriate to our current state. I have on occasion found a piece of wonderful grammatical construction under my foot on my way to or from an event. In this case it seems most appropriate to read and enjoy the construction, fold it symmetrically, and place it in my pocket for a later date when it will be more convenient to translate it to another piece of paper or book filled with such inscriptions. However if the words have been dropped onto an older portion of brown paper or on top of an aged piece of newsprint then the folding of the paper may be skipped entirely. If the folding of the paper will in any way change or deconstruct the original thought or idea of the piece in a way that does not entirely improve it then the paper should not be tampered with. In some cases, it is wise to either hold it or memorize it, in an attempt to conserve it until it can be more safely translated.

If, for instance, you fold the paper and then reread it and the word “cease” has morphed into “ease” due to your folding, making the entire logic of the note more meaningful (I’m hoping you can imagine a circumstantial sentence where this is possible) then by all means fold it. This brings up an interesting point that I will currently bring to your attention. You may proceed with the folding, but should you now put the paper into your pocket or should you leave the piece where you found it, now possessing the authorship solely to yourself having altered the piece entirely? Does the filing into your pocket then deaden the work hiding it from plain view where it will eventually be either read, or stepped on and possibly further altered? If it is further altered, will it be for the better, as only your judgment can ascertain or will it be altered for the worse, which you have now played a part in. I for one would not choose to be responsible for changing the great work of an anonymous author for the worse. This is a fantastically numbered die.

If on your way to or from an event you find a wonderful combination of words taken in or out of context and decide to fold the piece of paper symmetrically and place it in your pocket until it will be easier to transfer to another piece of paper or a book filled with such inscriptions, where do you put this so called book? And is a book the best place for great writing? More often than not, my great writing is kept in my brain, safely transferring from right to left hemispheres, making adjustments between both, evolving for the better in a constant state of flux. This is by far the worst place to keep writing.

By following the precedent, we keep this great writing in books. These books are then usually placed on shelves made for books or the aptly named bookshelves. But lets say, as in the case of Jack Kerouac’s original script for On the Road, the writing is entirely on one scroll of paper. Or perhaps more profoundly, the original script of the book of Jeremiah filled with prophecies and forebodings that were integral to the fulfillment of the scriptures. These two scripts in there original form are incased in glass prisons, never to be touched for fear of deterioration or more profoundly, for fear of altering the piece accidentally for the better (or worse as the case may be). This is understandable on a few accounts. For one, I’m sure the monetary value of each changes drastically due to the condition each is in, and the more use the more damage I’m sure is incurred. I could only wish that my writing were susceptible to such damage. Secondly, there must be great nostalgic or sentimental value in each, knowing that the actual author had actually touched this piece of paper. Were this true of all books, the argument here would be more complicated. I understand that the difference between a piece of scrap paper found on the street and the original script to the book of Jeremiah are drastically different, but I suggest they are drastically the same. Each is composed of words, each communicates, and each is potentially prophetic. The similarities between Kerouac’s piece and something found on the road should be obvious, but not nearly as thought provoking.

No MoveOn, but boobies...they're OK

I guess I found it a little bit funny. For the past couple of months MoveOn.org has been running a contest to come up with a commercial that explains or brings light to the truth about the Bush administration. The winning commercial was to be played at halftime of the Superbowl, the superbowl of commercial airtime if you will.

Well, MoveOn picked their winner (Child's pay) a humorously serious commercial where children are portrayed working in factories, emptying garbage cans into garbage trucks and serving cafeteria food, illustrating how the debt will eventually have to be payed off. CBS, of course, refused to air the commercial. "In a time of war we must stand by our president," kind of thing. Well MoveOn passed around petitions and gave out CBS comment line phone numbers so that people could show their disapproval of CBS's disapproval. CNN ended up airing the commercial during half time, to a much smaller audience.

The punchline. During the halftime show, I saw boobies. Yes, Justin Timberlake ripped off Janet Jackson's costume in what was deemed a "Costume malfunction." Thats pretty funny in and of itself. I'm really not trying to be a leftist or and activist or anything label-able (good word, isn't Alan? I thought you'd admire the palindrome similarities, or aspirations if you will). It's just funny. No commercials that point out promblematic political policies (alliteration too, Mariah on fiyah), but men tearing clothes off of women in a sexual plee, that''ll be alright. Our kids won't have to pay off the national debt...Boobies. It worked. I was completely distracted. Phew! I was starting to get nervous. Every time I think of the national debt and the election and the possibilty of Mr. Bush being re-elected I begin wondering how we're going to get him out of office and how we're going to remedy this Iraq mess and who is best equipped to take over the white hou...Boobies. Ahhh. All better.