Random Impulse- Fall(poem)

Here is a piece from earlier in the semester that I have been playing with since I seem incapable of writing prose at the moment.

I saunter through the cementary
Seducing bronze children
Waiting for the Sistine to shatter.

The necktie troubador named Nova
Catches me
Freeze, expand, explode.

Still the parade for Jupiter goes on
People lap up the river of dark earth.
No more dizziness, only fall.

Reading Response #15

Chapter 6 of Steering the Craft is a goldmine of utility. To begin, passive voice is something I have to constantly look for in my writing. Whenever I write an essay, I always unwittingly incorporate copious amounts of it. The many years of grade school have nearly ruined how I think when I write. Also, tense of the verb is something I have struggled with in the past, though I feel I am gaining ground on its proper use. The biggest point I continue to struggle with is properly utilizing my shifts between past and present. I really enjoy the idea of my characters having flashbacks, but can't ever seem to get them to flow well. I will post some of the exercises suggested in the chapter tonight to practice changing tense.

Reading Response #14

I found chapter 5 of Steering the Craft helpful in the development of my writing. I really enjoyed the metaphor likening adjectives and adverbs to fatty foods. In my writing, I believe I get carried away with both. I attempt to make my stories more visual by piling on the descriptors and the result is many words with very little being said. Also, my overindulgence of adjectives and adverbs seems to take away the power of each individual descriptor. I think this may be one of the main reasons I am struggling with producing a complete short story. I am finding it hard to balance my plot with my descriptions. Hopefully some of the exercises out of the book will aid me.

Random Impulse- Smurfs

I've been trying to write a Smurf parody for awhile now, just lacking in motivation. Here is where I am at:

Gargamel sits, inebriated and fuming over another failed attempt at securing revenge over the Smurfs. It's been 30 years since Papa Smurf, formerly know as General Bonecrusher of the Army for Spiritual Purity, razed Gargamel's home, raped and crucified his wife, and disemboweled his two children. The sneer of contempt through victory of Bonecrusher's visage is emblazoned on Gargamel's psyche.
"You, you will be allowed to live thanks to my infinite maganimity. Your life will serve as a reminder to all peoples who oppose the will of the one true God."

These words are the last Gargamel recalls before awaking in Castle Lonely. Out of his stupor, he gazes in the mirror at his once handsome profile, now nothing more than a pathetic shell riddled with scars and deformations procured by Bonecrusher's elite fighting force, the Peacemakers.

Random Impulse- Jack

Just some jotting I did the other night playing with words and a deck of cards.

Why is the jack a jack and a king a king? Is the king really greater than the jack or has the jack simply chose to not limit himself by choosing a specialty? Doesn't Jack have greater potential than King? Is he simply unable to choose which crown he desires? What really separates a jack from a king...a queen?

Junkyard- Week 10 and 11

I just discovered that Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is scheduled for a new film adaptation this year. One of my favorites, I decided take the book off the shelf and pick out some favorite quotes. It is a fun book that explores the hippie and LSD movement in America, so if that’s your cup of tea then I suggest picking it up! Even though Wolfe is a journalist and this book is a “nonfiction novel”, he is able to harness his language in a way that allows you to feel and see the chaos described in the book. Here are a few nuggets:

"The cops now know the whole scene, even the costumes, the jesuschrist strung-out hair, Indian beads, Indian headbands, donkey beads, temple bells, amulets, mandalas, god's-eyes, fluorescent vests, unicorn horns, Errol Flynn dueling shirts—but they still don't know about the shoes. The heads have a thing about shoes. The worst are shiny black shoes with shoelaces in them. The hierarchy ascends from there, although practically all lowcut shoes are unhip, from there on up to the boots the heads like, light, fanciful boots. English boots of the mod variety, if that is all they can get, but better something like hand-tooled Mexican boots with Caliente Dude Triple A toes on them. So see the FBI—black—shiny—laced up—FBI shoes—when the FBI finally grabbed Kesey—"

“I make out a schoolbus...glowing orange, green, magenta, lavender, chlorine blue, every fluorescent pastel imaginable in thousands of designs, both large and small, like a cross between Fernand Liger and Dr. Strange, roaring together and vibrating off each other as if somebody had given Hieronymous Bosch fifty buckets of day-glo paint and a 1939 International Harvester schoolbus and told him to go to it.”

"None of us are going to deny what other people are doing. If saying bullshit is somebody's thing, then he says bullshit. If somebody is an ass-kicker, then that's what he's going to do on this trip, kick asses. He's going to do it right out front and nobody is going to have anything to say about it. He can just say, 'I'm sorry I kicked your ass, but I'm not sorry I'm an ass-kicker. That's what I do. I kick people in the ass.' Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about."

“Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: ‘You're either on the bus...or off the bus.’”

“...We are all of us doomed to spend our lives watching a movie of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened atleast 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't.”

"Sometimes we don't even realize what we really care about, because we get so distracted by the symbols."

“’An LSD experience without the LSD’ -that was a laugh. In fact, the heads are pouring in by the hundreds, bombed out of their gourds, hundreds of heads coming out into the absolute open for the first time. It is like the time the Pranksters went to the Beatles concert in full costume, looking so bizarre and so totally smoked that no one could believe they were. Nobody would risk it in public like that. Well the kids are just having an LSD experience without the LSD, that's all, and this is what it looks like. A hulking crazed whirlpool. That's nice.”

“It's like a boulder rolling down a hill - you can watch it and talk about it and scream and say Shit! but you can't stop it. It's just a question of where it's going to go.”

“Agent number one wasn’t the most brilliant cop in the Americas, but time was obviousally running out in old Mexico. It was time to get the Movie going on all projectors. And the bus. The new fantasy was to get on the bus and keep moving; roam through Mexico and give Acid Tests and be on the bus, keeping the Pranksters movie going at top speed at all times.”

“Sandra, the girl from Bucks County, sits in a clump at the foot of the mattress. She is a very pale, tender little teenage clump. A single morsel, gone in one gulp, sitting under the room’s one article of furniture, a bridge lamp, no longer goofing off the radio, just sitting in a teenage clump and listening to Jack tell about the letter:”

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life is cheap and death comes easy; except for some.. the last words