just freewriting
Once when I was little I went to summer school where my mom worked. This was during one of the summer before I convinced my parents to let me stay home during the summer, promising I wouldn’t get bored. How would I stay entertained? I had a number of schemes I listed, one of which was to write books during summer.
So I went to summer school with my mother at this place about a mile from my house, called Wyman school. This was in the mid nineties. Wyman was an ESL school, and most of the kids weren’t American born. Plenty of them were refugees. I was friends with this kid named Em-Van, I think he was Vietnamese. He had a scar where his sixth finger was removed. Maybe had also had had webbed hands. I don’t know. Something interesting like that. I don’t remember the scar or anything out of the blue about him. I cannot recall his hands at all.
There was this other kid from Somalia…maybe from Eritrea. Whenever students had to draw something, he would inevitably draw bodies. When they were supposed to draw a picture of home, of a house, his house was a M. C. Escher-like collage of brightly colored faceless bodies, in the shape of a house.
I played kickball in flip-flops out in the schoolyard after snacktime. Snacktime consisted of a donut thing and small plastic cups of orange juice. I was good at kickball, but this kid named Mahari was the best. He would strut up to home plate and everyone in the outfield would start backpedaling. They could never get far enough back, though. Mahari easily belted the ball to the far reaches of the schoolyard, and the outfielders of the opposing team were sent jogging after the ball while Mahari walked the bases.
During the school year, sometimes I would have to go to the high schools where my mother passed out bus passes before school. I would hang out in the back of the classroom with my sister, sometimes without my sister, and play computer games. When I was lucky I got to play the colorful MS DOS version of Tetris, with the 8 bit music. It was great. When I was not so lucky, I had to play solitaire, or hearts, or play with fonts on Microsoft Word. One time, when I was with my sister, I played on Microsoft word for about 45 minutes before it was time to go. That time I also remember the intercom being extremely loud and high-endy. Ear-shattering.
words on page
I am a slow reader. Sometimes I am a fast reader, but it takes a lot of free time for me to accidentally pick up a book and really get into it and stay into it. Then I pick up another and another and then I am a digestion machine, digesting words. One time in High School I was reading like a book every two days, because there was so much down time during classes where I could read. In biology class we would watch relevant movies for the last half of class, usually, and I would read in the dim light during that. I remember reading Seymour Hersch’s My Lai Massacre there. It was a page turner. It had transcripts from the court martial of Lieutenant Calley in there. Testimony from Medina and the rest. What else did I read in High School? A lot of Victor Davis Hanson, who writes history books about war and battles. He is a good writer but unfortunately he is Dick Cheney’s favorite historian, so I have to be embarrassed about him. Who’s your favorite historian? Well, VDH…but it’s a little embarassing cos…
Someone was talking about how the Smithsonian or some other institution was doing all this research trying to figure out the best way to store information over time. CDs? no. DVDs? no. Microfilm? Microfish? no. PAPER!
So sucks for me or other people who like reading only the strangest and most pointless material most of the time. The other sliver of time (when you subtract most-of-the-time from all-the-time) I find things that are useful and well written that I don’t mind digesting. Or are lucky enough to find some time to really take a book slowly.
Otherwise, when I have the time I read Vonnegut, over and over and over, or stupid pulp fanfiction like Star Wars: Young Jedi Knights by Kevin J Anderson. C. S. Lewis’ Space trilogy is good too, and I found at an estate sale, once, a mint-condition boxed set of the paperback trilogy, with fantastic artwork. Then my mom borrowed the first one and broke the binding, but at least she got the information from the pages.
Grad school is definitely hard work, since it is the case that other people among me actually do ravenously read this kind of stuff, and do it all the time. If some of them could, they would sit around and read some of this material day in and day out. It would be the life for them.
If I could have my way, I would watch the Departed and Goodfellas all day long, and maybe Sin City and Criminal Minds the TV show. And Freakazoid and the Office and 30 ROCK. And I would have my old band with me, Commichung, wherever I went, selfish me, and we woudl create music. And I would write novels on the computer and they would actually get published. Reading? I would watch movies then write masterpieces. Impossible right? Meh.
fumbling and sniffing (parlor tricks)
I wonder sometimes about academic work being a bunch of parlor tricks. It sure seems that way to me. But then again, what career isn’t a bunch of parlor tricks. Specialization is honing a very specific set of parlor tricks to do over and over again, perfectly, even embellishing. Like a monkey riding a tricycle. Getting tenure is like a monkey riding a tricycle on top of another monkey riding a tricycle while playing The Star Spangled Banner on a kazoo. Teaching, I don’t think, counts as a parlor trick, because hopefully the teacher is helping and affecting the students, planting seeds of knowledge in young hearts, blah blah blah.
It’s the paper writing and the publishing and the careering that seems a parlor trick. It isn’t fair that some people think it’s really hard, or don’t like it, and other people see this as the end-all of demonstrating expertise in the humanities (Oh the Humanity! Did you know that guy got fired for freaking out on tape when the Hindenburg went down. He screwed up his parlor trick that day). I would be careful about who I say this thing in front of. The faculty members in my history department all work very hard to be there, to get the tenure some of them have, to write big books, etc. The academic work means a lot to them. I wish all the papers we had to write were presented to us with the disclaimer “think about maybe publishing this…take it seriously…” but when something is assigned that has no good reason to be published, there truly is no point. Parlor trick.
My girlfriend said to me, today, that she is happy being at a college without grades, because grades get in the way of her education. She learned this early. She is very smart. I told her, that, throughout all my high school, college and now graduate school, I have learned to get grades, and little else. I resist learning tooth and claw, work very hard to do as little as possible to get the grade. I resist education because I have been taught to do this. This response to her was partly in jest, as I am constantly working to add laughs to her day and mine. But I do think it is funny that I hate reading, love movies, like potty jokes, sex jokes, stupid TV shows and punk rock, yet am in grad school. The reason? Over the years I have indeed become very good at the parlor tricks.
What I have taken away from my first semester of graduate school is to work on the papers early, get them in early, and do the required work while retaining as little enrichment for myself as possible. The anecdotes and other sexy or gory things I have taken away from the dozens and dozens of assigned books I had to “read” are mostly just fodder for things I will write later. The best history book I had to pick up and fumble around with, during the course of writing a paper, was mostly a collection of popular culture tidbits, interspersed with politics, about early twentieth century Russia. The best history book I can think of writing, and really enjoy writing, would be that: a string of the most exciting, titillating anecdotes from all history, tied together with a theme. I have some ideas along these lines, but will not reveal them yet.
About fumbling with books. I joked with friends last semester about graduate students and how they read. Some of my history professors taught us first-years how to read like a historian: “like an onion,” one said. “Peel away layers” until you get at what there is to get at. They mean, contents, intro, appendix, index, etc. Maybe a chapter or two. I got away with about fourteen pages of reading to lead a class discussion about a 400+ page book. I call that “sniffing” a book. You pick it up, sniff it real good, fumble around with it a little, read the first paragraph of some sections, hone in on some subsections in order to make it seem like you dug deep enough to extract some obscure detailing, and then write the kinds of open-ended questions that get other people talking. Sniffing. When writing papers, it is very time-efficient to look at contents and indexes and get right to the soundbyte that is required as textual evidence or support of an idea. I can’t understand people who read for years and years in order to write a book. (One academic book about trade in the middle ages supposedly read 2,000 books in order to write her book. I hope she was doing that for fun…) What is the point? I forgot what I was doing two hours ago. I couldn’t possibly remember what happened in a book I read a year ago. You could take extensive notes, sure, but then you have to take all that time and effort to do that—take extensive notes. I don’t take any notes. I doodle in class, drawing abstract things and dragons and things that look like vaginas but aren’t. The other problem with taking notes is that if you want to quote things you have to write them down, and you risk misquoting, or plagiarizing if you don’t differentiate between paraphrasing and copying in the notes. And I can’t read my own handwriting anyway. When I take notes, it is just a way of transferring information to my brain via my hand. The scribble is worthless. Some of my friends write all over the books we have to read; they mark them up and write YES! In the margins and underline stuff and highlight stuff. But then you have to keep the books. I don’t want to do that. I want to sell my books when I am done fumbling and sniffing them, and use the money to buy sandwiches and Vietnamese food and plane tickets to L0s Angeles to see my sister. Or envelopes to submit manuscripts. I can’t collect books filled with YES!, though I must say, when I get a used book on Amazon with notes all over it, it can be helpful. I got though Joan Wallach Scott because of the notes the previous owner put in it.
I should add a disclaimer. My aunt, a physics and astronomy professor, and also a very humorous, mystical and wonderful woman, once got very angry at my father when he was semi-serious about naming me or my sister (I cannot remember who) Doctor. Because she worked very very hard at the university of Chicago back in the day to obtain her doctoral degree. And my father was jesting about the worth of that degree, a doctorate. Today, while I was also talking to my girlfriend about resisting education, I mentioned this about my father. Then I got the idea to give my pet an honorary doctorate. Like giving a goldfish an honorary doctorate in marine biology for her invaluable contributions to the field of fishbowl studies. Or the field of plastic kelp studies. Or the study of colored rocks, of plastic pirates or buried treasure. And so on. It’s all a joke to me. Parlor tricks. It came up this morning because a professor of mine was talking to students about this guy he knows who is a cool official biographer of XXXXXXXXXXX awesome band, yet he has a real doctorate from the University of Massachusetts! (Oooh aaaah!). Who cares? Getting that PhD is an exercise in toleration, waiting, boredom, anxiety, tight shoulders, staying awake, and, for me, watching too many movies, fumbling and sniffing. So I was mulling around ideas about the Degree on the Pedastle, the PhD, which seems onomatopoeiac to me. PFfffD! A retort, a brush-off. Santa Claus when he trips on the ice. I was laughing to myself, doing errands, shipping amazon books at the P.O., then buying soup and sandwiches with my girlfriend across the street.
But my father did not name any of us kids Doctor, which is good. It kept him in good with my aunt, who would have disowned him if he had named one of us that. She suffered and had a hard life with the PhD. She went to Africa and learned a lot about herself and other people. She took slides. She met a younger man and had a relationship with him. He did not know what he wanted to do with his life, and neither did she. She helped him, guided him, and guided herself in the process. She climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and took off all her clothes. Then, she got malaria real bad. When she came home she had visions of the roof opening up and creatures coming inside her house. The walls would change color. She was on medication and this was bad for her body. She lost her bushy hair, which became thinner than ever, but she still pulled it up in a tight bun and held it in place with many carved wooden hairpins. Sometimes she would hear voices. Once, she spent few weeks at a monastery and contemplated death for a while. She could hear the sound of her soul existing in the universe. I bet that sound probably made her happy. She left the monastery when she was comfortable with death. One time she bought a crazy monster hand puppet at a thrift store and used it to teach her students. She made it talk in a funny voice, had it lecture on astronomy and ask open ended questions.
She married a poet and finally I have shown him my writing, tho he has not responded in a while. He gave me some career advice but now I wish I had shown him a later draft of the stuff I sent him. Oh well. He read a short story and said it was good.
So my aunt worked hard and it made her life mystical and prodigious. My life is hokey pokey so far. I am middle class and caucasian and ambitious and I don’t procrastinate, etc. These kinds of things are social and cultural and economic advantages in the U.S.A. I feel the advantages. I appreciate them. So far I can only say that I agree with Kilgore Trout’s–by extension, Kurt Vonnegut’s–idea that “life is difficult, and it can hurt a lot, but that does not necessarily mean it is serious.” He said that somewhere in Breakfast of Champions, which, read by Stanley Tucci, is the greatest book on tape ever recorded… (Hah! Tied with KV’s Mother Night, which is pure poetry from beginning to end, and also very well read.) I should be an academic about Kurt Vonnegut, because that is the only body of work, oeuvre or work, if you will (don’t…), that I am in any way an expert in.
What was I talking about?
A little bitta background.
Hi. I am a graduate student in history. I am a creative writer at heart, though I haven’t written anything really really good yet. Here’s the story. When I was ten years old I filled up hardback journals with horrible science fiction novels about fuzzy characters with ray guns called Gallahad and Geyahab. They plagiarized their way through a very Star Wars universe, killing and killing and killing. There was no sex.
I wrote in periods, feverishly. In between the periods of writing I did not write at all. The first period was between the age of nine and twelve, when I filled about six or seven of those cheap, navy blue journals with the fuzzy murderers. Somewhere in there I also wrote a pirate epic called Cutthroat, which was a birthday present for my mom, and a spiral-bound notebook epic about a weasel and a snake called Lohovan. It was much less violent, still asexual, and was so detailed that it never got anywhere. The next period of feverish writing came in high school, between the age of sixteen and eighteen, and I wrote two sci-fi novellas and a novel of about sixty thousand words. The novel had four plotlines that intersected and danced and all came together in the end, off the shores of Lake Baikal in Russia, about which I know nothing, but I am also good at geography, and I like the name. The next novella is decent, and still considered by my loving parents to be the piece of imagination that will make me millions someday. It is called Moksha and it is about an epic war between Heaven and Hell. The last novella is set in a future dystopia, and is crap. I also wrote short stories and some poems, and most of those are crap.
If it seems to you at this point that my writing style is childish and simple, for a lover of writing, I hope you are aware that the style choice is deliberate, as deliberate as the choice to italicize deliberate. If you understand that I am making a deliberate choice but think writing style still sucks, I’m sorry. Go away. Stop reading. I am trying to work in a style that is cleaner, simple, perhaps even childish. I tend towards long sentences, semicolon sequences, alliteration, and too much character voice, so writing this is an exercise I need.
The latest period of writing happened in college at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, where a lovely woman named Maud Kelly told me to write something new for her class. What I had done, for the first fiction workshop in her class, was bring in the first chapter of Moksha, and it was very well received, but she knew I had more in me. So I finished a ten page narrative essay about my girlfriend breaking up with me while I was abroad in Germany, and very lonely. I made up the happy ending, but told some of the people who workshopped the story that it was real. I have no idea why I did that, I was probably embarrassed about being lonely when I should have been partying and living the dream as a study abroad student in the land Beer.
Anyway, so I finished this narrative fiction piece and it went well, and the encouragement Maud Kelly gave me led to my submitting the piece to a whole bunch of literary journals as-is. I sent to about twelve and got eleven neat rejection letters. Don’t think that the last one was an acceptance, the journal just did not respond. All rejections. So then I wrote some more things. Nothing very fancy. I was also writing about sixty or seventy pages of finals papers at the same time. One night, the next semester, when I was in a class called Flash Fiction with another lovely person named Michael Nye, I could not get to sleep. I got up, and hammered out this short story called Rest Stop in three hours, between 1:00 AM and 3:30 AM. I submitted it to the Wednesday Club Prize in Short Fiction, and it won. Well, it co-won. The co-winner was a friend from Maud Kelly’s class, and his story was about alcoholism. I got $100 and that encouraged me to keep writing. And also Michael Nye read my story that won and he thought it was a “very nice piece,” especially liking the detail of showing time by the shifting of an outhouse shadow. I had my characters, a boy and a woman, moving to stay in the shade of the outhouse as the sun crept across the sky. After I won that prize, I submitted that story everywhere and it also got a lot of rejections and no acceptances. Anyhow, I kept getting good ideas and kept writing. I also revised the story about Germany and submitted it. Eventually it got accepted twice, while all my other stories floundered and failed.
In college, I started off as an English major but switched around so much that I had to scrape together a “liberal studies” degree if I wanted to graduate in four years. I also had to take summer classes and bust my ass during that fourth year. My advisor for getting into grad school was an historian, so he pushed me in that direction, though that is where I wanted to head at that point. Kind of like the rejection letters for stories, I got 12 graduate school rejections, and one acceptance. That one acceptance had funding. I was lucky. When I graduated college, I went on a writing frenzy, writing a bunch of short stories, a 72,000-word novel in a month, and yet another sci-fi novella. After getting lots of rejections, both for the novel and the novella, I decided that A) the novel needs revising big time, and B) I am not smart enough or well read enough to write science fiction. At least not the way I have been writing it. The concept was good, but I learned the long lineage of the concept only after I wrote and submitted it. I have another idea for a sci-fi story, and I will write and submit it, but I will remain skeptical.
I came to grad school printing off manuscripts and sending huge stacks of submissions at the post office. I think a lot about writing in frenzies. I certainly think what I write is good when I am writing it, or I would have just stopped writing. The constant ebb and flow of doubt and confidence has made it so that I am at the moment a creative writer trapped in graduate school. I am still good at history graduate school, though I am bad at reading. My friends faster and they all form more mature thoughts about the reading. Mostly what I can gain from readings are juicy anecdotes, sex, if it is there to be found, or something gory, or a big battle.
Lately I have been excited about the show Criminal Minds, and when I watch an episode I look on wikipedia for articles about serial killers and arsonists and rapists and the like. I think what I will do next, aside from a sprinkling of submissions and working on some nonfiction academic publishing, is wait for the summer. I was saying for a while that I would travel around Europe, then write my masters thesis over the next summer, but what I think might happen is that I will travel Europe, then come back to grad school and write fiction instead. If the ideas pile up, and muse comes for one, and it only takes one, then I will start the avalanche that will get me writing like L. Ron Hubbard supposedly did when he was young. I read on wikipedia, yesterday, that A. E. van Vogt said Hubbard wrote like a maniac, twenty minutes at a time, without looking up or slowing his hands. I also read there that he would write “like a million words a year.” In 2009 I think I must have written, papers included, 150-175,000 words. I want to write a million words in a year, I know I can do it. It is only eleven pages a day. When I was writing the latest novel, which was about a lawyer tracking down a rich client’s legacy, I wrote around twenty pages on good days. One day I wrote thirty-five.
I mentioned wikipedia a lot. I like the site. To me, it is the greatest book ever written. Most authors. A testament to the collective consciousness of the entire world. Free to use. Free to contribute to. Who cares what the truth really is when a million people agree it is one way? I make fun of my father building truths by piling assumptions and logic one-on-top-of-the-other to form a jungle gym-like structure of reality. But he is right when he dismisses the chiding. What is the difference? Reality is just a consensus anyway.
I have to read a book and write four pages about it and then read another book, so that is my writer bio for today.
Pisquonoit meets Suu-Jail 
