Joseph Grammer's Blog, page 2
September 25, 2016
Killing Myself To Live
Oftentimes I straight-up want to die. Why is that? I have a good life, a woman who loves me, a family who pays for my cell phone and even my groceries, more times than I'd ordinarily like to admit.
I guess I've learned by this point it's just a mental thing (wow, good job Joe, you only majored in Psychology and worked in a suicide prevention lab). Nothing more or less, which is nice. It's like a foot or a spleen -- something to be loved and taken care of. Not that I'd like nurture suicidality and encourage it, but just to be all "Hey, brain, you're cool, so let's see what this signal means and then take care of it in a decent way."
Encouragingly, I'm getting better at that. Who cares? Maybe you! Maybe not -- perhaps you're all like, "What a shit-baby. Suck it up, toots." As a response to this hypothetical, I'd like to say, "Go fuck yourself with a rake and call your grandma and tell her you love her."
Suicide! Talk about it more -- it will probably only help. Then maybe you'll have energy to dance.
I guess I've learned by this point it's just a mental thing (wow, good job Joe, you only majored in Psychology and worked in a suicide prevention lab). Nothing more or less, which is nice. It's like a foot or a spleen -- something to be loved and taken care of. Not that I'd like nurture suicidality and encourage it, but just to be all "Hey, brain, you're cool, so let's see what this signal means and then take care of it in a decent way."
Encouragingly, I'm getting better at that. Who cares? Maybe you! Maybe not -- perhaps you're all like, "What a shit-baby. Suck it up, toots." As a response to this hypothetical, I'd like to say, "Go fuck yourself with a rake and call your grandma and tell her you love her."
Suicide! Talk about it more -- it will probably only help. Then maybe you'll have energy to dance.
September 4, 2016
One Right Word
Sometimes I struggle all day to find the word that belongs in a sentence, and during those times I wonder whether writing is worth it. Like: am I being perfectionistic? Who cares, at the end of the day, whether I said "connected" or "united"?
I guess I don't have an answer to that, which is OK. I just wanted to say that it feels really good when I manage to find that right word (which is different from the "best" word), and it falls into place after hours of butting my head against the walls of my own skull.
Maybe it's just luck, or maybe trust, or some combination of the two. Either way ...
I guess I don't have an answer to that, which is OK. I just wanted to say that it feels really good when I manage to find that right word (which is different from the "best" word), and it falls into place after hours of butting my head against the walls of my own skull.
Maybe it's just luck, or maybe trust, or some combination of the two. Either way ...
August 28, 2016
A Book is a Dense Network of Roots Under a Bulb
So I'm reading this picture-book on Wittgenstein's philosophy, because I'm a millennial child who can only understand complex shit in tweet-sized snippets accompanied by big drawings, and I learned that this renowned (and eccentric) Viennese thinker conceived of philosophy as rhizomatic, or lateral and intertwined, rather than hierarchical (e.g., top-down).
Why do I really care about this? I've been thinking about how to make "new" kinds of books, also because I'm a millennial child, and it is this idea that has given me the most hope. For a while I grew disillusioned with the idea that I could tell an engaging non-linear story and be relevant, because I assumed my thought was just the product of my '90s-era cultural education, when broken narratives like Pulp Fiction and Memento and The Limey (to a lesser extent) were all the rage in cool artistic circles, and even broadly.
In a rhizome, which is basically like a bunch of bulby plants, every point of its roots can interconnect with any other point, which is very different from a traditional branching hierarchy. I really like the idea of viewing time this way, and so it is natural that I'd want to extend the metaphor to books, too (and life in general, but that's besides the point).
So what does a rhizomatic book look like? Is it a fragmented hodgepodge, a la modern and postmodern experiments like Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons or Bret Easton Ellis's The Rules of Attraction? I would say no, because these books focused on the fragments, not the connections. (Which doesn't mean they can't be good.)
Its goal would be to celebrate connections and meeting-points, which, incidentally, was one of the main goals of surrealism as practiced by Andre Breton and others.
I guess that means you could stick any two traditional parts of a novel (e.g., point of no return, moment of solace) together and have it both make sense and be emotionally (or spiritually) enriching! Connecting disparate pieces wouldn't be haphazard, meant to break things down to intelligibility. No, it would build stuff up.
I think you could make some pretty cool stories that way.
Where is this already being done? Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch? (In some way David Mitchell comes to mind, although not fully.) Let me know!
Why do I really care about this? I've been thinking about how to make "new" kinds of books, also because I'm a millennial child, and it is this idea that has given me the most hope. For a while I grew disillusioned with the idea that I could tell an engaging non-linear story and be relevant, because I assumed my thought was just the product of my '90s-era cultural education, when broken narratives like Pulp Fiction and Memento and The Limey (to a lesser extent) were all the rage in cool artistic circles, and even broadly.
In a rhizome, which is basically like a bunch of bulby plants, every point of its roots can interconnect with any other point, which is very different from a traditional branching hierarchy. I really like the idea of viewing time this way, and so it is natural that I'd want to extend the metaphor to books, too (and life in general, but that's besides the point).
So what does a rhizomatic book look like? Is it a fragmented hodgepodge, a la modern and postmodern experiments like Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons or Bret Easton Ellis's The Rules of Attraction? I would say no, because these books focused on the fragments, not the connections. (Which doesn't mean they can't be good.)
Its goal would be to celebrate connections and meeting-points, which, incidentally, was one of the main goals of surrealism as practiced by Andre Breton and others.
I guess that means you could stick any two traditional parts of a novel (e.g., point of no return, moment of solace) together and have it both make sense and be emotionally (or spiritually) enriching! Connecting disparate pieces wouldn't be haphazard, meant to break things down to intelligibility. No, it would build stuff up.
I think you could make some pretty cool stories that way.
Where is this already being done? Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch? (In some way David Mitchell comes to mind, although not fully.) Let me know!
July 11, 2016
Christmas
So I really want to have this part in one of my books where a guy gets ripped apart by dogs. I know Game of Thrones stole my thunder on this, and I know it sounds homicidally psychotic, but hear me out: a warlord in post-apocalyptic Washington, DC, imprisons a woman and tries to woo her, because his ideas on romance are disturbingly skewed. I could mention he's the distant descendent of the last Vice President of the United States, and that she shares genes with the final (and only female) President, but that's a little too much backstory for now.
Obviously, this woman hates the warlord with an unquenchable passion, but lucky for her he gets called away to fight my protagonist (don't worry about him). In the meantime, the woman uses her learnéd brain to take over the city-state while he's gone, because his minions are mostly uneducated crooks. When the bad guy crawls home, defeated, his army gone and his self-esteem in tatters, he bangs on the walls of his home to be let in. Only now, his incensed unrequited love is in charge.
Now, this warlord has a nasty defining trait: he beats dogs. Dogs are used as messengers between the city-states of our brave new world, and there's one dog in particular named Gore Vidal, whom the warlord strikes repeatedly and castigates with swear words too horrific to repeat here. (I think he says "durn mutt" at one point.)
So anyway it's fitting, isn't it, that this woman unleashes a bunch of hounds to chase the warlord away from his own gates? The answer to that is "yes."
The dogs hunt down this warlord like a dog and tear him to shreds. And Gore Vidal, the cross-eyed, mostly ineffectual, entirely dumb pup, happily laps at his master's severed head as the sun rises on a beautiful nuclear wintry Christmas morning.
Now, for a touch of heart and humor, I wanted the scene to be set to Perry Como's rendition of "O Holy Night," sung in this case by the warlord's longtime white servant, Crimmsy Fitch.
This is probably the only Christmas song I actually like and find meaningful, so I don't simply intend to use it blasphemously. For some reason it made my head-hair stand on end to think of the busted warlord limping towards the Potomac in slow-motion while a pack of dogs runs him down and eats him. (I'll probably cut, erm, tastefully away from the grislier consumption parts ... I don't need to wallow in gore.)
I think I wanted this dude to go out this way because, as a warlord and "leader" of a community, he never understands the consequences of his actions. In the beginning of the book, he actually feels rejected and sorry for himself when his prisoner deters his advances. His actual hope when he returns from his defeat abroad is that the woman he's kept forcibly imprisoned will somehow welcome him with open arms ... with love, even.
So part of the "meaning" I get from his death scene is his horrified, slow-motion understanding that maybe, just maybe, his paramour doesn't like him. And then the doggos descend.
Obviously, this woman hates the warlord with an unquenchable passion, but lucky for her he gets called away to fight my protagonist (don't worry about him). In the meantime, the woman uses her learnéd brain to take over the city-state while he's gone, because his minions are mostly uneducated crooks. When the bad guy crawls home, defeated, his army gone and his self-esteem in tatters, he bangs on the walls of his home to be let in. Only now, his incensed unrequited love is in charge.
Now, this warlord has a nasty defining trait: he beats dogs. Dogs are used as messengers between the city-states of our brave new world, and there's one dog in particular named Gore Vidal, whom the warlord strikes repeatedly and castigates with swear words too horrific to repeat here. (I think he says "durn mutt" at one point.)
So anyway it's fitting, isn't it, that this woman unleashes a bunch of hounds to chase the warlord away from his own gates? The answer to that is "yes."
The dogs hunt down this warlord like a dog and tear him to shreds. And Gore Vidal, the cross-eyed, mostly ineffectual, entirely dumb pup, happily laps at his master's severed head as the sun rises on a beautiful nuclear wintry Christmas morning.
Now, for a touch of heart and humor, I wanted the scene to be set to Perry Como's rendition of "O Holy Night," sung in this case by the warlord's longtime white servant, Crimmsy Fitch.
This is probably the only Christmas song I actually like and find meaningful, so I don't simply intend to use it blasphemously. For some reason it made my head-hair stand on end to think of the busted warlord limping towards the Potomac in slow-motion while a pack of dogs runs him down and eats him. (I'll probably cut, erm, tastefully away from the grislier consumption parts ... I don't need to wallow in gore.)
I think I wanted this dude to go out this way because, as a warlord and "leader" of a community, he never understands the consequences of his actions. In the beginning of the book, he actually feels rejected and sorry for himself when his prisoner deters his advances. His actual hope when he returns from his defeat abroad is that the woman he's kept forcibly imprisoned will somehow welcome him with open arms ... with love, even.
So part of the "meaning" I get from his death scene is his horrified, slow-motion understanding that maybe, just maybe, his paramour doesn't like him. And then the doggos descend.
July 9, 2016
My New Catchphrase
"No one's coming to rescue you. No one's coming to save you."
Repeat that 1,000x, then keep going.
(I mean this in a positive way, not like in a bitter-dad-life-is-tough-get-over-it-I'm repressed-way.)
The world is not always a bleak hellscape full of hostile psychos. I actually believe it's mostly good, and good shit happens in it fairly frequently. ... But even so, I can reconcile that relatively happy idea with the fact that no one's going to swoop down and save me from my troubles. The tricky part, then, is not turning that mantra into resentment or cynicism or lack of faith in my environment, or in other people.
No one's coming to rescue me -- and that's good. Insert ideas about dignity, self-worth, pride here.
I say this having like very rarely done stuff on my own or without guidance. Most of my life I've relied on other people to do stuff for me, to pave the way financially or explain how I should think or act, so this is absolutely new territory for my brain (see: manchild).
Eventually you become responsible for other people, and you can't throw up your hands like you used to and cry, "Shit! I have no clue what to do." Or like you can do that, but then also just make sure to take action after, preferably a decision that has a real value underpinning it.
For going on two decades, I've spun a really nice story to myself that I'm some helpless victim, when in reality I've been like making life harder for other people around me. I don't get to be the curl-in-a-ball guy all the time. It's pretty lame, and to be honest no one wants to be a part of that.
Now I need to work work work work work work.
Repeat that 1,000x, then keep going.
(I mean this in a positive way, not like in a bitter-dad-life-is-tough-get-over-it-I'm repressed-way.)
The world is not always a bleak hellscape full of hostile psychos. I actually believe it's mostly good, and good shit happens in it fairly frequently. ... But even so, I can reconcile that relatively happy idea with the fact that no one's going to swoop down and save me from my troubles. The tricky part, then, is not turning that mantra into resentment or cynicism or lack of faith in my environment, or in other people.
No one's coming to rescue me -- and that's good. Insert ideas about dignity, self-worth, pride here.
I say this having like very rarely done stuff on my own or without guidance. Most of my life I've relied on other people to do stuff for me, to pave the way financially or explain how I should think or act, so this is absolutely new territory for my brain (see: manchild).
Eventually you become responsible for other people, and you can't throw up your hands like you used to and cry, "Shit! I have no clue what to do." Or like you can do that, but then also just make sure to take action after, preferably a decision that has a real value underpinning it.
For going on two decades, I've spun a really nice story to myself that I'm some helpless victim, when in reality I've been like making life harder for other people around me. I don't get to be the curl-in-a-ball guy all the time. It's pretty lame, and to be honest no one wants to be a part of that.
Now I need to work work work work work work.
July 5, 2016
Making Yourself Indispensable
A lot of my problems with fiction and fiction writing come from the idea that stories are inessential. As soon as I write this sentence I can see that's not true -- stories are the shapes we use to govern our lives, to explain ourselves and our histories and our families and our countries -- but a lot of people don't recognize that. And because they don't recognize that, they might not want to pay $15.95 for a sheaf of bound paper that tells a story.
But this is blaming the audience. It's very nice to think that the world's readership is ignorant or unappreciative of "art," but, as people from Isaac Bashevis Singer to David Foster Wallace have said, it might be because the available art is shitty. (I replaced their more eloquent words with the word "shitty.")
In short, my fear that most writing is inessential is true. I mean, I'm writing this on the Internet for Christ's sake. Do I need to convince anyone over the age of two how much bullshit drifts around here? So most writing sucks. Mine included, obviously -- maybe twenty to thirty humans truly care about what I say, and I haven't said much of anything yet. But what does it mean to make yourself "indispensable" in writing? To make sentences that are so good, at least some portion of the audience feels like they can't do without them? Does that even exist?
It did when I was little, and when I was a teenager. For me, the Redwall fantasy series was like the coolest and best thing that ever existed, and I would be horrified if someone didn't praise its numerous virtues and unquestionable perfection. I hung on every word and wrote 400-page fanfictions about Brian Jacques' weird, peppy animal stories. (I realize I was not a normal child.) Later, as I got older I gravitated to Stephen King's Dark Tower series, which is about to become probably like six-hundred movies (the final book of course being split into 694 separate films to maximize revenue). Then in college, I literally tried to find the meaning of life inside Gravity's Rainbow. I failed, obviously, but the mere fact that I tried is friggin' insane. Granted, I was whacked out on various hallucinogens and twenty years old, but still. I cared a lot about it, is the point. So those words had meaning to me. And where did that go?
When I really think about it, I've actually found quite a few "indispensable" books. When I was traveling for work and just beginning my road to relative sanity, Infinite Jest gave me a roadmap for support groups and mental health. When I felt like all literature was meaningless and dead, I found Azar Nafisi's Republic of Imagination, which single-handedly restored my faith in the value of stories. And there was even a book I never read, but which my now-fiancee did, and whose title I don't even know (I think it's Overcoming Perfectionism), but which changed my whole brain's perspective on controlling life and making it "perfect." So those words are indispensable.
There's Why People Die By Suicide by Thomas Joiner. Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch. Etc. These books became part of me, changed my ideas about the world and about storytelling, and made me grow as a person. That's why they're necessary for me, and it took writing this right now to understand that. These are indispensable books because they changed me. They didn't change everyone who read them, I'm sure, and probably not even most. But for whatever reason, these books clicked with me, and I'm grateful for that.
Now, how do I do that in reverse? I.e., provide someone else the same experience Redwall gave me as a kid? How do I change someone so they feel my brittle little sentences are indispensable? (Sorry for using that word so much.)
Well, be honest, for one. We've all heard someone say, "Fiction is lies that tell truth," so I mean that deeper, soul-level honesty, not where Tribeca is in relation to Canal Street (hint: it's below). But Iris Murdoch said authenticity is different from truth, and I agree with that. Meaning, I can't just spew my inner feelings onto the page and pray you like it. I have to search for some larger "truth," something real in the world beyond my own skull, which tends to involve other people. We can say, then, that indispensable fiction honestly portrays relationships, whether between a married couple or a physicist and a barkeep or sixteen dogs named Henry or a woman and the wilds of Afghanistan. It looks at the boundaries between at least one Self and at least one Other ... even that weird David Markson book where a woman is left completely alone in the world (which I haven't even read, so I don't know if it's indispensable).
Takeaway 1: write honestly about relationships among people, places, and things, and search for Truth while knowing you may never reach it ... this means you need to involve more than one character
What else? Well, Azar Nafisi says every great book hinges on a decision, a choice, and I agree. So have characters make, uh, choices. Check out the aforementioned The Republic of Imagination if you want more info, but basically, she believes the "core" of a book revolves around a central choice. This decision might relate to your book's central theme, or it might not -- I don't really know yet. But my guess is that the central choice literally expresses your main thesis or theme, which leads me to my next point ...
Takeaway 2: let your characters make choices, and identify which choice is the central one of your book. (e.g., in Huck Finn, it's Huck ripping up his letter to his aunt and refusing to turn in Jim.)
Have opinions on things. I learned this surprisingly only recently, like yesterday, but for a long time I felt I needed to take a journalistic or naturalistic approach to writing, because I was so afraid of "pushing" the reader towards a certain idea or conclusion. But fuck that. Have a stance on something, and trust that your reader is intelligent enough to agree with or refute your argument. If you think America should close down all of its overseas military bases because it's essentially a capitalist colonial power, then say so. People might throw verbal or physical rocks at you, but that's the risk you always take when you open your mouth.
Note: this is a relative of the maxim to "not be boring" in fiction, and in all writing. So find a viewpoint. But also I want to say don't be preachy, because that's just irritating. We have what we in the business like to call a spectrum: total cowardly silence on one end, healthy expression of belief in the middle, and raging fundamentalist dick on the other end. Be in the middle. (That's my opinion as an avowed moderate.)
Takeaway 3: have actual opinions on things (and share them)
I realize these rules are not super-global, since in a nonfiction psychology book you might not have "characters," but oh well.
Let's also be clear that I'm not pretending to be a wise sage who is vouchsafing knowledge to a less informed populace. I wrote this as much for me as anyone else out here on the existential planes of the Internet. But still, I hope it helps.
Peace!
But this is blaming the audience. It's very nice to think that the world's readership is ignorant or unappreciative of "art," but, as people from Isaac Bashevis Singer to David Foster Wallace have said, it might be because the available art is shitty. (I replaced their more eloquent words with the word "shitty.")
In short, my fear that most writing is inessential is true. I mean, I'm writing this on the Internet for Christ's sake. Do I need to convince anyone over the age of two how much bullshit drifts around here? So most writing sucks. Mine included, obviously -- maybe twenty to thirty humans truly care about what I say, and I haven't said much of anything yet. But what does it mean to make yourself "indispensable" in writing? To make sentences that are so good, at least some portion of the audience feels like they can't do without them? Does that even exist?
It did when I was little, and when I was a teenager. For me, the Redwall fantasy series was like the coolest and best thing that ever existed, and I would be horrified if someone didn't praise its numerous virtues and unquestionable perfection. I hung on every word and wrote 400-page fanfictions about Brian Jacques' weird, peppy animal stories. (I realize I was not a normal child.) Later, as I got older I gravitated to Stephen King's Dark Tower series, which is about to become probably like six-hundred movies (the final book of course being split into 694 separate films to maximize revenue). Then in college, I literally tried to find the meaning of life inside Gravity's Rainbow. I failed, obviously, but the mere fact that I tried is friggin' insane. Granted, I was whacked out on various hallucinogens and twenty years old, but still. I cared a lot about it, is the point. So those words had meaning to me. And where did that go?
When I really think about it, I've actually found quite a few "indispensable" books. When I was traveling for work and just beginning my road to relative sanity, Infinite Jest gave me a roadmap for support groups and mental health. When I felt like all literature was meaningless and dead, I found Azar Nafisi's Republic of Imagination, which single-handedly restored my faith in the value of stories. And there was even a book I never read, but which my now-fiancee did, and whose title I don't even know (I think it's Overcoming Perfectionism), but which changed my whole brain's perspective on controlling life and making it "perfect." So those words are indispensable.
There's Why People Die By Suicide by Thomas Joiner. Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch. Etc. These books became part of me, changed my ideas about the world and about storytelling, and made me grow as a person. That's why they're necessary for me, and it took writing this right now to understand that. These are indispensable books because they changed me. They didn't change everyone who read them, I'm sure, and probably not even most. But for whatever reason, these books clicked with me, and I'm grateful for that.
Now, how do I do that in reverse? I.e., provide someone else the same experience Redwall gave me as a kid? How do I change someone so they feel my brittle little sentences are indispensable? (Sorry for using that word so much.)
Well, be honest, for one. We've all heard someone say, "Fiction is lies that tell truth," so I mean that deeper, soul-level honesty, not where Tribeca is in relation to Canal Street (hint: it's below). But Iris Murdoch said authenticity is different from truth, and I agree with that. Meaning, I can't just spew my inner feelings onto the page and pray you like it. I have to search for some larger "truth," something real in the world beyond my own skull, which tends to involve other people. We can say, then, that indispensable fiction honestly portrays relationships, whether between a married couple or a physicist and a barkeep or sixteen dogs named Henry or a woman and the wilds of Afghanistan. It looks at the boundaries between at least one Self and at least one Other ... even that weird David Markson book where a woman is left completely alone in the world (which I haven't even read, so I don't know if it's indispensable).
Takeaway 1: write honestly about relationships among people, places, and things, and search for Truth while knowing you may never reach it ... this means you need to involve more than one character
What else? Well, Azar Nafisi says every great book hinges on a decision, a choice, and I agree. So have characters make, uh, choices. Check out the aforementioned The Republic of Imagination if you want more info, but basically, she believes the "core" of a book revolves around a central choice. This decision might relate to your book's central theme, or it might not -- I don't really know yet. But my guess is that the central choice literally expresses your main thesis or theme, which leads me to my next point ...
Takeaway 2: let your characters make choices, and identify which choice is the central one of your book. (e.g., in Huck Finn, it's Huck ripping up his letter to his aunt and refusing to turn in Jim.)
Have opinions on things. I learned this surprisingly only recently, like yesterday, but for a long time I felt I needed to take a journalistic or naturalistic approach to writing, because I was so afraid of "pushing" the reader towards a certain idea or conclusion. But fuck that. Have a stance on something, and trust that your reader is intelligent enough to agree with or refute your argument. If you think America should close down all of its overseas military bases because it's essentially a capitalist colonial power, then say so. People might throw verbal or physical rocks at you, but that's the risk you always take when you open your mouth.
Note: this is a relative of the maxim to "not be boring" in fiction, and in all writing. So find a viewpoint. But also I want to say don't be preachy, because that's just irritating. We have what we in the business like to call a spectrum: total cowardly silence on one end, healthy expression of belief in the middle, and raging fundamentalist dick on the other end. Be in the middle. (That's my opinion as an avowed moderate.)
Takeaway 3: have actual opinions on things (and share them)
I realize these rules are not super-global, since in a nonfiction psychology book you might not have "characters," but oh well.
Let's also be clear that I'm not pretending to be a wise sage who is vouchsafing knowledge to a less informed populace. I wrote this as much for me as anyone else out here on the existential planes of the Internet. But still, I hope it helps.
Peace!
June 30, 2016
February 14, 2016
Heck, Part I
That's what she'd said: "Kill yourself." The pale face had popped out of a hole in the ground, no neck or anything, and told Jerry to commit suicide. Then she receded into the dirt.
Being in hell wasn't awful, he thought. Some people were nice. But then you had rude, moonlike heads with luscious hair who insulted you without any warning. His mother hadn't prepared him for that.
"Always eat potatoes," his mother had said. "No matter what." And he had listened! So many boiled, baked, fried-up spuds. He'd even eaten them raw on many occasions, although these had made him sick. But what did he care? Life was sick and baggy, like a grandfather in sweatpants.
Hell, where Jerry lived, looked like the suburbs: a denuded landscape pitted with businesses whose titles reflected a sensibility less vulgar than merely uncaring: Nail Place, Fashion Bag, Nail Palace, Bub's Grocery. Well, Bub's Grocery was nice. He went there now for a danish, skirting a fat woman with tentacles for breasts.
"Excuse me," he said.
Fluorescent lights sparred overhead with flashes and sparks. Dead bugs collected in their plastic bellies, were cleaned out once a year when the Fly came around with his leather bag, scooping the burnt unloved carcasses inside and taking them over to the pit behind Chili's, where he would weep and rend his exoskeleton and chant passages from the Upanishads on his knees before dumping the dead ones into the hole. Sometimes Jerry came and watched, for solidarity.
"9.99," said Bub. Jerry looked at her.
"It was 5 yesterday."
Bub didn't answer. If she wanted, she could shoot you full of rock salt and have one of her ten sons dismember you with a rake. But she liked Jerry.
He forked over the cash. Of course they used dollars in Hell; it was only practical, with the relatively loose visa laws between nations.
Outside, Jerry sat on a massive whale carcass and ate his pastry. The blubbery reek bothered him little; when he was young, his sister Debra had slashed him in the face with a paring knife, and after that bad smells had stopped smelling like themselves.
"Delicious," he said. In the center was the cheesy goop he rather liked. He shut his eyes, rocked back and forth on his butt, and felt the wind on his jeans.
Five hundred fiery dog-bats tied together with chickenwire struggled and flapped overhead. Jerry could hear their cute straining squeaks.
"Must be the Koolepper boy," he said. The Kooleppers let their kid Dale do whatever he wanted, because he was starting pitcher on the baseball team at Actython P. Harris Middle School, which brought to the community's name all the violent, pathetic prestige that attends such talent.
Jerry flung his wrapper on the ground and watched it crumble into cinders. Hell was outstanding at waste management.
He strode along the Pyx River towards the Kooleppers, savoring the pops of boiling gas that emanated from the water. He breathed in strongly through his nose and then belched, because he was alone, because his girlfriend wasn't around to correct him.
The sun was a gauzy tan egg in the sky, mostly because it wasn't a sun but a deathless, luminous egg left by the White Dragon Billfried as a gift to this arrondissement of Hell. Each neighborhood got its own source of light, not all from Billfried, of course, because he only spat out unfertilized ova when he felt like it, and he was rarely motivated to do anything anymore because of his depression.
Jerry was interrupted in his stroll by a weeping, castrated wolf who continually vomited forth involuntary abortions. He wrinkled his nose at the trail of slick, hairless pups in their curled poses, but didn't smell anything negative.
"Bayliss dog got out again," he mused.
"Skewer thee, ancient catamite, false Christ of Gethsamane!" said the wolf, its eyes bleeding tears the color of charred flesh.
Jerry made cute kissing sounds and approached the wolf from windward, stroking the soft, silver fur between his eyes until he sat down.
"Good boy."
The wolf gagged as a last embryo slid past his jaws, then got down on its belly and whimpered, softly. Jerry took some care in avoiding the viscous grave while he scratched the Bayliss dog behind the ears, along his spine, up and down his great, muscled flanks. He felt peaceful.
"Sweet deal, huh?" he said. The wolf yipped like a child imitating a wolf. Then Jerry said, "Go on home, boy," and patted the creature lightly on the side, and the wolf trotted off, no longer crying.
Jerry felt happier, but he also acknowledged a sweet, tender sadness spreading through his breast like a tea stain. He sat down on the banks of the Pyx and wiped some dust on his hands and watched a lone woman, encased in chrome, unable to move, yet balanced in a perfect surfer's position on a translucent board, coast by on the roiling surface of the water.
"Good morning, Brenda!" he yelled.
Brenda could not respond with words, but he felt a sharp pain behind his eyes that meant she had heard him speak. Jerry smiled, no longer sad. He watched that fantastic, frictionless disc of hers propel her downstream: it was said the red arterial structures bobbing inside were the blood vessels of people she had lied to, and who had later destroyed their families: it was said Brenda had been a real beauty on Earth, but had wielded her gift like a Scythian bow. Jerry was half in love with Brenda, like everyone else, but he could never touch or approach her.
Moving on, he veered away from the water towards the city. Even from this distance across the waste he could see the billboards advertising plague unguent, plus the churlish dome of the US Capitol, which had also gone to Hell, and deserved it, as well as ziggurats from the Aztec Empire. The Aztecs and Assyrians got along rather well, although once in a while they flayed each other alive. Then they went and had a beer together.
Jerry pulled a cigarette from his pocket and lit it a tad furtively; his girlfriend disapproved of his smoking, and because she had spies in the region, it was a risk to injure his lungs so close to civilization. Still, he felt he needed one after seeing Brenda.
Jerry smoked Marlboro Skylines, which were city cigarettes, even though he had grown up and even died on a farm. But he lived in a city now, right? Basinski was the biggest of them all -- or not the biggest, for that honor fell to Penderecki -- but it was the most powerful, the seat of government in Hell, and it was a great melting pot of every time, place, region, creed, and culture. Predictably, people maimed and swindled each other without pause, although of course many neighbors were cordial and even gracious in their own ways. Jerry liked to think of himself as one of those.
The ghastly female head erupted from the soil once again and screamed, "Kill yourself!" Jerry stopped in his tracks and beheld the full, incarnadine lips, the painted eyes with their irises burnt amber, and the dark, straight, long hair that ended just above the ground. He had hardly time for a single puff on his Skyline before the head receded once again.
"Jeez," said Jerry, and crushed out his smoke in agitation. He pulled out instead a mint and started to suck on that, hands in his pockets, boots scuffed with the dust of the ever-expanding desert that made up the environs around Basinski. All the time the billboard proclaiming: "Fuck the Hague! Get rid of the plague," with a picture of a white man torching the International Court of Justice while smiling confidently, upright, buber-free. Above the carnage were the words in uppercase white: CLOROX BLEACH.
Jerry shuddered. Before his walk, the sign had just said MARCO RUBIO, which meant he mayor must be angry at him.
Back in town, he stopped by at his friend Lorraine's apartment for some coffee. She buzzed him in, and he climbed the nine flights of rank, claustrophobic stairs, passing children slicing up their arms with sharp can tops, and at least three breathing versions of Kirby, the pink puffball Nintendo character.
"Want a blowjob?" the last Kirby said.
"No thanks," said Jerry.
The Kirby laughed harshly and squatted among its fetid rags and lit a crack pipe. He passed the flame of his lighter in slow, mesmeric figure-eights around the metal bowl's bottom and breathed in with the force of a hurricane, yanking Jerry a foot or so towards him and making the nubs of rock vaporize down the clear glass tube. "You don't look like you have any good powers anyway."
Jerry smiled, encouragingly, he thought. "I know how to milk a cow."
The Kirby reeled back in disgust and spit on the concrete. "Get lost, you fucking pervert."
Jerry shrugged and continued his climb to Floor 9. He found the door open and waiting for him, the smell of coffee filling his heart with delight. Good smells he could have.
"You want some biscotti?" called Lorraine from the kitchen. She was a hideous white grub the size of a small horse, and her face was brown, hard, with restless mouthparts. She never wanted for a boyfriend, and even now had at least three suitors constantly texting her or DMing her nudes.
"I'd sure love some," said Jerry, and sat at the table in front of the TV, which was playing a rerun of Seinfeld, the episode in which Jerry ritualistically disembowels Kramer with a butcher's knife while George chokes himself with a bike chain and gets off to it, sexually. Elaine tries to decide if she should be herself on a date or pretend she's a florist.
Lorraine set two steaming mugs of coffee down, as well as a plate of chocolate-dipped biscotti. The two of them munched and drank in silence for a few minutes before the whine of an airplane drew them out of their own reveries.
"You think I should dump Greg?" Lorraine asked.
"Do you like Greg?"
Lorraine rolled her eyes, of which she had several. The bristles alongside her thick, tubular body wriggled in indecision. "Well ... "
Jerry spread his free palm out to his side and raised his eyebrows. "Isn't that your answer?"
"Sure, but you can't just decide like that, right? It's so boring."
Jerry dipped his snack into his drink and wicked it out before it could get too soggy and crumble into the mug. He was an expert at letting it soak up the maximum amount of fluid without compromising the structural integrity of the Italian double-baked bread dessert.
"Life can be boring. Sometimes boring's good."
Lorraine sighed in mock-exasperation and leaned back in her seat. "God, you're so white. I love you but you're like fucking Steppenwolf's neighbor."
"How's he doing, by the way?" said Jerry.
"Oh ... " Convulsing her smooth, translucent segments. "Just wandering around, lamenting in German. He thinks he knows someone who can smuggle him into Purgatory."
Jerry creased his brow and lit another cigarette, not afraid of spies here. "Who'd want to go to Limbo?"
Lorraine stared at him, deadpan, which was easy with a face that could really only clack its pincered jaws, and they both broke into long, porous laughter.
"Well, I better be going," said Jerry, dusting his pants and easing himself upright. Even standing, he was barely taller than Lorraine while she was sitting down.
Lorraine fixed him with her compound eyes and smiled, or performed what Jerry thought was a smile. Non-prehensile mouth appendages could be surprisingly emotive once you got to know someone.
Being in hell wasn't awful, he thought. Some people were nice. But then you had rude, moonlike heads with luscious hair who insulted you without any warning. His mother hadn't prepared him for that.
"Always eat potatoes," his mother had said. "No matter what." And he had listened! So many boiled, baked, fried-up spuds. He'd even eaten them raw on many occasions, although these had made him sick. But what did he care? Life was sick and baggy, like a grandfather in sweatpants.
Hell, where Jerry lived, looked like the suburbs: a denuded landscape pitted with businesses whose titles reflected a sensibility less vulgar than merely uncaring: Nail Place, Fashion Bag, Nail Palace, Bub's Grocery. Well, Bub's Grocery was nice. He went there now for a danish, skirting a fat woman with tentacles for breasts.
"Excuse me," he said.
Fluorescent lights sparred overhead with flashes and sparks. Dead bugs collected in their plastic bellies, were cleaned out once a year when the Fly came around with his leather bag, scooping the burnt unloved carcasses inside and taking them over to the pit behind Chili's, where he would weep and rend his exoskeleton and chant passages from the Upanishads on his knees before dumping the dead ones into the hole. Sometimes Jerry came and watched, for solidarity.
"9.99," said Bub. Jerry looked at her.
"It was 5 yesterday."
Bub didn't answer. If she wanted, she could shoot you full of rock salt and have one of her ten sons dismember you with a rake. But she liked Jerry.
He forked over the cash. Of course they used dollars in Hell; it was only practical, with the relatively loose visa laws between nations.
Outside, Jerry sat on a massive whale carcass and ate his pastry. The blubbery reek bothered him little; when he was young, his sister Debra had slashed him in the face with a paring knife, and after that bad smells had stopped smelling like themselves.
"Delicious," he said. In the center was the cheesy goop he rather liked. He shut his eyes, rocked back and forth on his butt, and felt the wind on his jeans.
Five hundred fiery dog-bats tied together with chickenwire struggled and flapped overhead. Jerry could hear their cute straining squeaks.
"Must be the Koolepper boy," he said. The Kooleppers let their kid Dale do whatever he wanted, because he was starting pitcher on the baseball team at Actython P. Harris Middle School, which brought to the community's name all the violent, pathetic prestige that attends such talent.
Jerry flung his wrapper on the ground and watched it crumble into cinders. Hell was outstanding at waste management.
He strode along the Pyx River towards the Kooleppers, savoring the pops of boiling gas that emanated from the water. He breathed in strongly through his nose and then belched, because he was alone, because his girlfriend wasn't around to correct him.
The sun was a gauzy tan egg in the sky, mostly because it wasn't a sun but a deathless, luminous egg left by the White Dragon Billfried as a gift to this arrondissement of Hell. Each neighborhood got its own source of light, not all from Billfried, of course, because he only spat out unfertilized ova when he felt like it, and he was rarely motivated to do anything anymore because of his depression.
Jerry was interrupted in his stroll by a weeping, castrated wolf who continually vomited forth involuntary abortions. He wrinkled his nose at the trail of slick, hairless pups in their curled poses, but didn't smell anything negative.
"Bayliss dog got out again," he mused.
"Skewer thee, ancient catamite, false Christ of Gethsamane!" said the wolf, its eyes bleeding tears the color of charred flesh.
Jerry made cute kissing sounds and approached the wolf from windward, stroking the soft, silver fur between his eyes until he sat down.
"Good boy."
The wolf gagged as a last embryo slid past his jaws, then got down on its belly and whimpered, softly. Jerry took some care in avoiding the viscous grave while he scratched the Bayliss dog behind the ears, along his spine, up and down his great, muscled flanks. He felt peaceful.
"Sweet deal, huh?" he said. The wolf yipped like a child imitating a wolf. Then Jerry said, "Go on home, boy," and patted the creature lightly on the side, and the wolf trotted off, no longer crying.
Jerry felt happier, but he also acknowledged a sweet, tender sadness spreading through his breast like a tea stain. He sat down on the banks of the Pyx and wiped some dust on his hands and watched a lone woman, encased in chrome, unable to move, yet balanced in a perfect surfer's position on a translucent board, coast by on the roiling surface of the water.
"Good morning, Brenda!" he yelled.
Brenda could not respond with words, but he felt a sharp pain behind his eyes that meant she had heard him speak. Jerry smiled, no longer sad. He watched that fantastic, frictionless disc of hers propel her downstream: it was said the red arterial structures bobbing inside were the blood vessels of people she had lied to, and who had later destroyed their families: it was said Brenda had been a real beauty on Earth, but had wielded her gift like a Scythian bow. Jerry was half in love with Brenda, like everyone else, but he could never touch or approach her.
Moving on, he veered away from the water towards the city. Even from this distance across the waste he could see the billboards advertising plague unguent, plus the churlish dome of the US Capitol, which had also gone to Hell, and deserved it, as well as ziggurats from the Aztec Empire. The Aztecs and Assyrians got along rather well, although once in a while they flayed each other alive. Then they went and had a beer together.
Jerry pulled a cigarette from his pocket and lit it a tad furtively; his girlfriend disapproved of his smoking, and because she had spies in the region, it was a risk to injure his lungs so close to civilization. Still, he felt he needed one after seeing Brenda.
Jerry smoked Marlboro Skylines, which were city cigarettes, even though he had grown up and even died on a farm. But he lived in a city now, right? Basinski was the biggest of them all -- or not the biggest, for that honor fell to Penderecki -- but it was the most powerful, the seat of government in Hell, and it was a great melting pot of every time, place, region, creed, and culture. Predictably, people maimed and swindled each other without pause, although of course many neighbors were cordial and even gracious in their own ways. Jerry liked to think of himself as one of those.
The ghastly female head erupted from the soil once again and screamed, "Kill yourself!" Jerry stopped in his tracks and beheld the full, incarnadine lips, the painted eyes with their irises burnt amber, and the dark, straight, long hair that ended just above the ground. He had hardly time for a single puff on his Skyline before the head receded once again.
"Jeez," said Jerry, and crushed out his smoke in agitation. He pulled out instead a mint and started to suck on that, hands in his pockets, boots scuffed with the dust of the ever-expanding desert that made up the environs around Basinski. All the time the billboard proclaiming: "Fuck the Hague! Get rid of the plague," with a picture of a white man torching the International Court of Justice while smiling confidently, upright, buber-free. Above the carnage were the words in uppercase white: CLOROX BLEACH.
Jerry shuddered. Before his walk, the sign had just said MARCO RUBIO, which meant he mayor must be angry at him.
Back in town, he stopped by at his friend Lorraine's apartment for some coffee. She buzzed him in, and he climbed the nine flights of rank, claustrophobic stairs, passing children slicing up their arms with sharp can tops, and at least three breathing versions of Kirby, the pink puffball Nintendo character.
"Want a blowjob?" the last Kirby said.
"No thanks," said Jerry.
The Kirby laughed harshly and squatted among its fetid rags and lit a crack pipe. He passed the flame of his lighter in slow, mesmeric figure-eights around the metal bowl's bottom and breathed in with the force of a hurricane, yanking Jerry a foot or so towards him and making the nubs of rock vaporize down the clear glass tube. "You don't look like you have any good powers anyway."
Jerry smiled, encouragingly, he thought. "I know how to milk a cow."
The Kirby reeled back in disgust and spit on the concrete. "Get lost, you fucking pervert."
Jerry shrugged and continued his climb to Floor 9. He found the door open and waiting for him, the smell of coffee filling his heart with delight. Good smells he could have.
"You want some biscotti?" called Lorraine from the kitchen. She was a hideous white grub the size of a small horse, and her face was brown, hard, with restless mouthparts. She never wanted for a boyfriend, and even now had at least three suitors constantly texting her or DMing her nudes.
"I'd sure love some," said Jerry, and sat at the table in front of the TV, which was playing a rerun of Seinfeld, the episode in which Jerry ritualistically disembowels Kramer with a butcher's knife while George chokes himself with a bike chain and gets off to it, sexually. Elaine tries to decide if she should be herself on a date or pretend she's a florist.
Lorraine set two steaming mugs of coffee down, as well as a plate of chocolate-dipped biscotti. The two of them munched and drank in silence for a few minutes before the whine of an airplane drew them out of their own reveries.
"You think I should dump Greg?" Lorraine asked.
"Do you like Greg?"
Lorraine rolled her eyes, of which she had several. The bristles alongside her thick, tubular body wriggled in indecision. "Well ... "
Jerry spread his free palm out to his side and raised his eyebrows. "Isn't that your answer?"
"Sure, but you can't just decide like that, right? It's so boring."
Jerry dipped his snack into his drink and wicked it out before it could get too soggy and crumble into the mug. He was an expert at letting it soak up the maximum amount of fluid without compromising the structural integrity of the Italian double-baked bread dessert.
"Life can be boring. Sometimes boring's good."
Lorraine sighed in mock-exasperation and leaned back in her seat. "God, you're so white. I love you but you're like fucking Steppenwolf's neighbor."
"How's he doing, by the way?" said Jerry.
"Oh ... " Convulsing her smooth, translucent segments. "Just wandering around, lamenting in German. He thinks he knows someone who can smuggle him into Purgatory."
Jerry creased his brow and lit another cigarette, not afraid of spies here. "Who'd want to go to Limbo?"
Lorraine stared at him, deadpan, which was easy with a face that could really only clack its pincered jaws, and they both broke into long, porous laughter.
"Well, I better be going," said Jerry, dusting his pants and easing himself upright. Even standing, he was barely taller than Lorraine while she was sitting down.
Lorraine fixed him with her compound eyes and smiled, or performed what Jerry thought was a smile. Non-prehensile mouth appendages could be surprisingly emotive once you got to know someone.
January 23, 2016
Arc de No-Trump
Say what your book is in 1 word!
Response: Anger, Stuttering, Frustration, Dismissal of Exercise as Horseshit, Citing Ineffable Artistry.
Response to response: Breathe. Literally begin breathing and attending to your breath like a wannabe Buddhist. Not being able to concisely pitch your book is bad.
Exercise: Write a list of single words. After each one, ask if that's really what your book is about, or if you can go deeper.
E.g., This post: Helping. Structure. Practice. Release. Connection. Sales. Fame. Delusion. Clarity. Confusion.
This post is about confusion! Not being able to explain what your book is in a word means you're confused about what it means, which is a regular event in human life, but one you can effect change, however miniscule and ephemeral (literary words), upon.
Practice writing 1-word summaries, asking yourself if you can go deeper each time. Don't drive yourself nuts, but go a little nuts doing it, get a little uncomfortable, because fiction (and non-fiction) should make you uncomfortable in a healthy way.
If you don't like it, SMiLE, little lightfish.
Response: Anger, Stuttering, Frustration, Dismissal of Exercise as Horseshit, Citing Ineffable Artistry.
Response to response: Breathe. Literally begin breathing and attending to your breath like a wannabe Buddhist. Not being able to concisely pitch your book is bad.
Exercise: Write a list of single words. After each one, ask if that's really what your book is about, or if you can go deeper.
E.g., This post: Helping. Structure. Practice. Release. Connection. Sales. Fame. Delusion. Clarity. Confusion.
This post is about confusion! Not being able to explain what your book is in a word means you're confused about what it means, which is a regular event in human life, but one you can effect change, however miniscule and ephemeral (literary words), upon.
Practice writing 1-word summaries, asking yourself if you can go deeper each time. Don't drive yourself nuts, but go a little nuts doing it, get a little uncomfortable, because fiction (and non-fiction) should make you uncomfortable in a healthy way.
If you don't like it, SMiLE, little lightfish.
