BIRDS!

To be frank and honest: these essays are boring. The singular essay I was capable of remotely paying attention to was the one about the humming birds. As it stands the essay provides an informational approach to the world of the humming bird. The essay is quite easy to read and plays well into the frame of mind of a layman.

The essays take a general easy going and conversational tone. The humming bird essay contains a story of a friend of the authors who got needled by the humming birds in her apartment area in San Francisco. This story provides a piece of evidence as to how territorial the birds can be.

Humming birds live a life of All-or-Nothing each and every day. They sleep each night in seemingly cryogenic catatonic state, and every morning they either get up or die. They live on the ledge in a fast paced life till they hit the end and drop of the edge; something this packet did in 5 minutes.

"Without death, life would get pretty damn boring pretty damn fast." - Anon

Atlas

Maps to anywhere has proven to be a rather difficult read on the eyes due to small font size and a heavy contrast. out of the many wunderbar stories this piece of literature I have to turn my focus unto The End of Manners just a page before "the house of the future" section. On a separate note I despise the lack of page numbers in this book.

The End of Manners is a small one page, two paragraph piece of work but goes into great detail about its subject. Paragraph one describes a girl, a columnist named Emily Post, and details what she's wearing and what the environment she is in is like. The rain then comes crashing down.

The second paragraph describes a young boy half a continent away described as a rebel. the kid misbehaves and plays with his food, during the time of our window into his life he seems to be metaphorically lifting up into the air. These brief glimpses into these peoples lives pass on, and a reader can feel like they knew them yet didn't at all, an odd feeling of maybe maybe not.

"A house of cards will fall if any piece is removed." - Anon

I got bored and tired and repetitive

This will be a quick review of writing down the bones and my take away from it. I enjoyed that each chapter had a piece of good advice in it. At the end there was usually a good short sentence or two that summed up what should be taken away from each chapter. I particularly like the messages from "trust yourself" and "The Samurai".

"Trust yourself" provided a story on just going with your gut but give the feeling time to stay. The end message was to be patient with your writing  and wait to see if it still holds the same feeling. It is rather good advice and in more than just writing.

"The Samurai" Goldberg gives a story about the analysis of pieces in a group and analyzing what works and what doesn't. What parts should someone take a katana to and cut out, what pieces convey what is needed. One good sentence is worth more than a thousand average sentences.

"We convince ourselves of the illusion because we don't want to handle the reality." - Anon

Fiction Packet. 3?

Well I am out of ideas. At this point I don't know what else I can say about fiction. Each piece is a different story, from a different perspective, with a different outlook. To each their own, classifying fiction to specifics detracts from the original creative purpose. It is like trying to explain to a blind (biologically, from birth) person what a color looks like, describing an abstract concept with abstract terminology keeps it coherent but loses ability in making those not in the know understand.

So far the stories have been about two to three pages each in this packet and they all bore me. I find no connection to any of these characters, though some stories carry a good message, and they lack any significant room to improve or develop. To be brutally honest, if I wanted to read a compilation of stories like this I would have read lesser mythologies or other supernatural stories. Those actually are something I find interesting.

Well if I have to talk about the packet I might as well mention the first two stories, aka the ones I had read before my interest waned. I liked how in the first story the two brothers were portrayed as being deviants, doing what everyone else did not. I feel it helped shed a subtle light on the joy of freedom and individuality. It also struck a chord with me and made me remember my childhood with my brother; Twins- can't separate them. As far as the second story, If one does not think almost entirely in metaphors then this story can come across a little... Weird... I'm done here, I just seem to lack a substantial amount of meat in this weeks response material.

"Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life." - Simone Weil

Fiction. Again.

I stand by the fact that fiction is a platform of the imagination. Every concept and thought, every idea and expression can be found within. It is the ability to make such inexpiable and emotional things into text that makes it so challenging, yet it has the ability to be anything. Unfortunately, the ability to be anything is a double-edged sword with a barbed and spiked handle. There is bad fiction and good fiction (in a sense of grammar and pace), there is fiction that can make you laugh till you are gasping for air and fiction that can shatter your heart to pieces, and some times you have the fiction you love and hate at the same time; A catch-22. Oates' Blackened Eye is a good example.

Oates is undoubtedly a good writer and knows the English language, but the unique lens we get to use as a reader is unique from the general format of books. Fiction stories are complex and most authors will make it a mix of first-person and narration followed in a relatively chronological format, Oates follows a reflective form, as if reading a journal entree, to tell the story. The tone used to make it reflective, the word choice and parentheses (and parenthesis) that all come together and help make the story feel unstintingly finite, and with the story topic being abduction, rape, and abuse it can make the reader very tense.

I find the story to be a perfect example of an I-Love-It-I-Hate-It story. The way it is written is fantastic, the character is developed and personified, the plot is described as the character would/would be able to describe it, and uses the same World-Laws to keep it seemingly real. Yet the topic is dark and troubling, a reader can easily feel their gut twist with what is written and can forget what text is in front of them is fiction.

"An original idea. That can't be too hard. The library must be full of them."-Stephen Fry

Making Fiction

Fiction is a fantastic form of written literature. One moment you can be flying over the expansive planes of (insert world name here) to being a shadow cloaked rouge in the city, possibility is boundless. My personal favorite aspect of fiction is the sheer number of ideas and theories that people come up with, the many creations they scatter about their world. Every part of a story speaks  of the author, what they think and how they view the world. Though out of the concepts that I think are most important, characters tops the list.

A good story has to have good characters, yes it also needs a plot and coherency, but without characters it all amounts to moot. A character needs to be relate-able, the reader needs to feel like they are actually getting to know a real person and for all intents and purposes that is true within the story. People will involve themselves into the story if they can associate and like a character because it is the only window they have into that life, and that is what gets people to like the story: immersion. At the same time you cannot generate a character that is a "Mary Sue", each character will have some role to play and they need to play it well.

Finally there is a small matter at the end to deal with; nothing lasts forever and all good things must come to an end. A story will have an end, what kind is up to the author, but it must have an end. the end should not always be happiness and bliss, sometimes a person dies and needs to die (usually a character you have developed and the audience has become somewhat attached to) to develop a dynamic environment, give it a sense of realism and weight. Ultimately, however, fiction is the expression of the authors ideas; a world created in their head.

"When reading, we don't fall in  love with the characters' appearance. We fall in love with their words, their thoughts, and their hearts. We fall in love with their souls." - Anon

"You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend." - Paul Sweeney

(Couldn't decide which quote to use so I used them both, as they are both so true.)

Fiction

Fiction is something humans have created to represent everything that they do not perceive as "real", yet history is the fiction we write to convince ourselves. Fiction is the first form of complex storytelling, used to generate moral lessons or explain something we could not understand. Fiction has THOUSANDS of sub-genre, each with at least several sub-sub-genre. The vast diversity means that each person is bound to find some they love and some they hate for any of a vast variety of reasons. I like fiction with a good plot and an involving story, if it can make me cry, laugh, smile, and hate; then it is a good story to me. What I have difficulty with are short (really really short) stories, often due to the lack of substance and the sheer majority that speed through the plot.

On that note I am unsure of what i think of Sharon Krinsky's Mystery Stories. Each story is barely a paragraph long but each is said in a way that they are coherent and complete. In the story The Talking Cat it uses small simple sentences yet manages to say exactly what it needs to to progress the story along, it even manages to use a plot devise of mystery as you do not know any of the characters yet when read they seem to be all there. Perhaps I am simply impeded by my dislike of such fiction to make a full analysis and critique but it seems that it is by all definitions still a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

Each story in this section of the packet has this astounding ability to instantly generate relate-able characters and tell something to the reader all in a single paragraph. The concise manner of writing is commendable and I can see a bit of myself in each piece, generated on each character by  my own mind from the lack of description by the author. It is much like taking a manikin and making it a person, it is not that it is now a person but rather that we perceive it as such.

"Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop."
         -The King; Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

City Eclogue

Okay, straight to the point then: I. Don't. Like. It.
Every page has some change to the structure on both a sentence level and a page level. Words are missing, sentences drop off randomly or after a noun without an object. Reading these pages makes me feel kind of sick. It feels like looking at what should be a beauteous landscape or mural, and finding pieces gouged out randomly and in large number. It is missing a sense of completeness and coherency, something to hold it together.

There are a few poems among the dribble that have a wholeness about them. one such poem is Alpine Glow In Magritte Landscapes. It has a center page alignment with a plethora of small stanzas, about one to two lines long each. Though the occasional long space feels off, I remind myself that it is better than missing parts and the space merely acts as an emphasized pause before continuing with the thought in a coherent manner. The vocabulary in the poem generates a sense of vast beauty and minuscule perspective.

When it comes time to write a poem with this book as a reference I might be compelled to do re-writes, to fill in the holes. Perhaps it can tell a story rather than flash memories in rapid fire, clean up the mess in this metaphorical city. However that is only my opinion. I can applaud and respect the work this artist has created, it is a piece of them and more likely makes a whole different kind of sense in their eyes. Their work is published, mine is not; I should work on that before I generate full criticism.


People always make the mistake of thinking art is created for them. But really, art is a private language for sophisticates to congratulate themselves on their superiority to the rest of the world. As my artist’s statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance. - Calvin    (From Calvin&Hobbes by Bill Watterson)

Packet 2.1

Well part of me wishes we had class so I could have some new understanding to write about or a new concept to discuss, then I remember SNOW DAY (or cold day as it were in technicality). Reading farther into the packet proved a bit tedious but was nice for my suddenly free afternoon. A personal favorite in the rest of the packet was The Clock Fallen Into The Sea by Pablo Neruda.

The piece does have an interesting title, but the most intriguing part was that it was lined up next to the Spanish form of the text. It was fun and interesting to match up words and phrases between the two languages. Moving on however I would like to start analyzing what I see before me. In the first stanza he uses the term yellow at the end of the second line to describe many dimensions; in combination and in context with the rest of the stanza it seems to mean something along the lines of age and death, to wither away, to yellow like old paper.

In the fourth stanza he associates time with petals, presumably that of a flower, and states that they fall immensely. This adverb gives the immediate image of a flood of petals, almost clouding out the sky and sun, all about you. Such word choice throughout the poem keep invoking a sense and image of vastness, of being minuscule and insignificant to an unrelenting torrent of the universe. However, I must admit that after finishing it through and through several times, I am not too sure as to what message it wanted to present, or even what I feel it meant as a whole. the end leaves us like a cliffhanger, a sense of vagueness that forces question and second-guessing.

This piece offers itself to those more attuned to abstract analysis, I would love to hear/see what others thought of it.

(on the subject of time:...)

Alice: How long is forever?

White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second.

-Lewis Carol 

Poetry Packet 2

Yay! Sonnets! I always loved Shakespearean sonnets; the pattern flow of speech is addicting and it's hilarious when you try and say them, or read them, in exaggerated accents and voices. Sonnets are also quite admirable and remarkable works of literary art, so few people realize exactly how hard it is to write in Iambic Pentameter. Any person wishing to write one must have an intimate knowledge of their languages vocabulary, to the extent that their brains are legitimate substitutions for both dictionaries and thesauruses.

My favorite pieces from the packet were Shakespeare's sonnet 128 and Muller's sonnet, a parody/remake of Shakespeare's sonnet 130. Sonnet 128 has a few abbreviated and accented words in it and a truly unique choice of vocabulary. For any person who cares and is reading this, I implore you to read sonnet 128, or any others for that matter, as exaggerated as possible; it will be funny, and you will laugh. Shakespeare did some of the queerest things to make an idea fit.

Muller's sonnet is an interesting re-write of Shakespeare's sonnet 130. Analyzing it, it is the same thing; same ideas, same order, just with different vocabulary, the author went through the original and changed words and phrases to more modern forms and metaphor allowing for better understanding; "If Liquid Paper is white, her racks are institutional beige." is a lot easier for the average person to understand than "If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;". Muller also make a point to write in a sense of comedy and lightheartedness in an obvious manner.

At this point I'm running low on thoughts of what to write so... Done 'n' Out!

"Comedy is tragedy upon someone else." - Anon

First Packet.

What a lovely start to the term, poetry has always been a favorite of mine. The sheer complexity that can be found in a simple stanza is actually rather astounding. The affinity for the metaphorical and figurative language, this causes a small jump in an interpretive difficulty curve but once such abstract concepts are understood and utilized well, the whole scope of meaning broadens to horizons. One, as an individual, is bound to interpret in slightly different ways and some could even spend an hour working on only a small portion in attempts to understand what the author wanted to say.

In fact my small group on Tuesday spent the majority of allotted time just discussing the first stanza of Geology of Water. We first explored the authors use of vocabulary in a singular form; i.e. "what does striated mean? Why did he chose that word over others?", "What could he mean by saying indigo, a color, is blind?", etc. We then looked at the vocabulary as it worked in the whole of the stanza, finding the author used a lot of colors to describe an object, one we deduced to be an ocean, blind indigo being the deep bottom where there is little to no light, or sea that met the requirement in line 7 of the first stanza: "to nudge the continents apart."

Another piece I enjoyed was Hinako Abe: The Scent of Verbena. I rarely see poems that try to alter their word placement, margins, and spacing to generate a larger ascetic picture. Unfortunately the, as I perceived it, hourglass shape did make it a strain on my eyes to read. It talked of a journey a person was making, climbing a mountain with another making their way to "the man made lake at the mountain summit." This is most likely a metaphor, that much is certain, it is a better question to ask of what it is a metaphor of. from my perspective i see the mountain as the innate and natural obstacle that is life itself, immovable, and the lake is man's self made idea of success and happiness.

But alas it's naught but my own interpretation, not the right one or the only one. poetry has always been fascinating, doing so much with/in so little. I really do look forward to to the other works in this class. I will also take this time to say that from now on at the end of each post I will put a quote, idiom, or wise words of such as I feel is fitting for the subjects I find in the week's literature.

"Words only have as much power as you give them." - Anon.

First

Well, this is a blog for my creative writing course. This is the most interactive I have ever been on the internet so I guess this will be a shot in the dark. When it comes to writing I have not yet developed an exact preference to any form, when it comes to school assignments and research papers I have a habit of using a large and mostly scientific vocabulary and maintain an almost robotic tone through out the entire paper. I also tend to take things from a neutral standpoint making it rather difficult to actively work with emotional topics.

Personally I have a growing preference towards fiction, I find that I deal with reality enough and enjoy the escape the fantasy realms provide. It is relatively easy for me to write poetry, the expression found in most is usually unique and moving and provides an outlet for all to express the abstract concepts of their emotions. What I have written however has rarely exceeded 2 pages due to the ideas in my head flying off before I can write everything down, if anything at all. With the work load of college these types of work have been reduced to little short snippets of wise words an life lessons or advice, the philosophy makes it fun none the less.

I decided to take this course because I felt it would provide an outlet away from the generic papers that seem so dull these days, provide something new to work with. I really enjoy the creativity, concepts, theories, and ideas found in the fiction I so often read and thought learning to write as such would be a good experience as such being able to get ideas to stay around would be something I would like to learn. Variety is the spice of life and consistency is the starch. I hope this will be a fun class.