Junkyard Quotes: Week of 3/14/11

1) “There are no cars on the roads, yet people wait at the pedestrian crossings until green man comes on, to cross the road.”

BBC reporting on what media has called the Japanese people’s “stoic calm.”

2) "She kept her status hidden from me. At the time, there were all sorts of rumours. People in Tokyo said 'Don't marry someone from Hiroshima, you will be contaminated'."

The husband of a Hiroshima survivor, Hiroko Tanaka, who waited 50 years (the article said) before applying for the certificate to prove to the government that she was a survivor of the atom bomb of 1945.

3) “I think we should let them join and just send them to the front lines.”

A co-worker, on gay soldiers. I have too much of an emotional response to this to be coherent, probably.

4) “Over the last 30 years in the United States, how many people have died because of nuclear energy? The answer is none. Zero. Zip. But guess which energy industry has experienced 35 deaths over the last 30 years? Wind. Yup. The wind turbine industry is responsible for more deaths in the United States over the last 30 years than nuclear energy.”

Thanks, Boortz! I’m glad to know that wind is evil and must be stopped. Green kills, people! Green kills people! Totally missing the point about toxic waste and long-term health issues, to name just two concerns people generally have. Silly people! But I loved this response in the comments section the best: “And what's the source of this stat? How did these wind turbines kill 35 people? Probably more people have died in America over the past year from putting up Christmas lights than they have from Islamic terror. Does that mean that Christmas lights are more dangerous?”

In other “missing the point” news…

5) “You don’t believe we were given dominion over animals?”

The response was genuine disbelief when I said “No.” This was in response to me feeling upset over how this co-worker was handling a mouse caught in a trap. We didn’t have time to get into a debate over the origin of species, unfortunately, since he seemed to assume that we're both working from a creationist viewpoint, but it remains a hot topic for me that so many people engage in an either/or debate concerning animal cruelty. But even from that viewpoint: didn't he feel God created all life, and that the point of sacrifice is to impress on sinners the gravity of their sins? That has been my impression, rather than to shrug off the sin as just some more red tape in goat's blood and "Did you see that blood spraying? Awesome!"

Random Freewrite 2: Week of 2/28/11

Desert Sun

The sun is passing over. Again.

Every day, again, the sun sheds its skin

—its scum, really, not unlike soap,

the kind that dials exfoliation up to nine—

on soil and rock.

Parched soil and jagged rock.

It seems to think they can be courted

to forget the misery of its central hour

and remember it kindly in the night.

But suns are pretentious like that.

And the rocks, they say, “Piss off,”

Only they can’t talk.

So every sunset they wait.

They wait for the sun to tilt off course.

One day it will tilt off course

Where the jagged rocks wait

And poke itself in the eye on the way down.

Night is the sweeter season by far.

Night is on their side.

Night hides them away from restless winds.

Well, not really, but it’s the thought that counts.

Night is benign. Moon is gentle.

Unlike the scummy sun, which stretches

And yawns and leisurely lights itself a match at the end of each turn

For a job very well done.

The rocks, they say, “Piss off.”

And soil sheds burnt sand in its eye.

Only the sea acts indifferent,

but it has it easy, being cool.

No, the sun isn’t terribly popular in these parts.

Every day, it laughed off the single-digit salute

and baked its leisure ever on westward.

(I have no idea where this came from. One day I was just watching documentaries on the desert and thinking of how the rocks and sand must feel, if they felt anything, and it started to be a story but I didn't have any real narrative thrust to it, so it became this weird poem thing instead.)

Random Freewrite 1: Week of 2/28/11

This is something I wrote randomly in my notebook while I waited for another class to start. I don't know what I'm trying to say or why, but anyway, this is what I wrote down concerning Japan. I wrote more about truly random subjects, but those might be a little too weird, even for me.

I am American, born Christian in Japan. I am Japanese, grown Buddhist in American. I am not biracial but in the brain, I am abnormally infused with scattered perception and pressed on both ends to drift stagnant if not perfectly straight, but I wobble onward in foreign precession. “You take on where you are,” they say; “you become what you eat.” My diet is riceballs tuna-shelled and soy sugar-licked. Flat-fried patties as inches thick as you like and boiled curling beef in mustard dip. Cucumber salads and summer bowls of white-noodled bliss. Smoking crocks of garden yield and deep fried shrimp in batter fields. I’m not raw, not all through, and I don’t twist my knives in testosterone shows. My best meals are home boiled eggs and meat on rice, white rice, plain and sticky. I’ve never seen a dark-skinned face on a woman in Japanese art. Men are drawn honestly if they’re born the same.

(p.s. I have almost completely written myself to a standstill trying to get a plot for the short story.)

Viewing Response: Week of 2/28/11

Since we didn't have any reading assignments this week, I thought I would post in response to the Buffy episode, "The Body." I wanted to focus more on the narrative and structural elements of the episode and how they worked for me rather than responding directly to the content of the episode itself. One of the things that stands out immediately is the use of cuts, how scenes go from one to the next. It works remarkably well as a reflection of the disjointed point of view of someone dealing with loss. There is a certain stop/start to memories, the film in our heads (so to speak), the constant sense that we could have done this or that differently and that might have been the deciding factor between keeping a loved one alive. And beyond that, just the sense of life moving on around us and being caught in this mental lockdown. Everything moves too swiftly, and too slowly, all at once. It's difficult to describe, harder to portray, but "The Body" expressed it perfectly. I thought the episode depicted this feeling most vividly and most honestly when it followed Buffy's first scenes. It was less effective for me when we saw Dawn break down on the floor, because that felt classically cinematic, a bit of unearned melodrama, whereas the very strength of the opening scenes was in the realistic stop/start breaks in Buffy's bewildered point of view. The way the breaks work between, for instance, the dinner scene and the following cut to Joyce's face reminded me of some of the great works of fiction, how the scenes have breaks between descriptive text and dialogue. In the same way, the camera angles and silent shots worked like minimalist writing, giving everything to the viewer/reader in the space around the stillness. It can seem out of place or jarring but that is the point and purpose, I think, and when the overall work is taken into context, the disjointedness becomes as much a part of the emotional glue as the dialogue and descriptions themselves. It is expressing the emotional content in ways other than words. Showing, not telling.

I think this is why I find some television shows deal with grief better than others. I've always considered "The Body" to be one of the very best, whereas the episode dealing with Fred's death (and Cordelia's, to a lesser extent) in Angel were less effective because it was telling me how they felt, rather than showing me how it felt to feel what they felt. (If that makes sense…) In another genre series, I thought Supernatural's "Everybody Loves a Clown," though convoluted by the plot of the week, dealt with grief more realistically than it did with the many deaths (and returns) later in the same season and continuing on throughout the rest of the series. (Perhaps that's the reason why it stopped being effective. Too much of a good thing dilutes it, and too much of a diluted thing makes for a lot of big fat nothing.) From a genre point of view, "The Body" works particularly well because we kept expecting something else to happen, something more, something miraculous or magical or even evil. We didn't expect anyone connected to Buffy to die a normal death. We didn't expect anyone like Buffy to have to deal with losing a loved one, not to an enemy she could fight, but simply to disease. Professor Ellison mentioned it in class, the "horror" of normal life. I think that's why Joyce's death ultimately works better as a reflection of the human experience and lingers deeper in the consciousness than the deaths of Wesley, Fred, Cordelia, John Winchester, Kara, etc. It just happened. That's all. In genre writing, there always seems to be some search for the ulterior motive or nefarious plan behind this or that hero's sidekick or lover or parent dying. If there isn't, it's almost see as a letdown. "The Body" showed that not only are bells and whistles unnecessary, but sometimes they cheapen the impact of the death itself. Buffy fighting the vampire at the end showed that up clearly for me. Fighting bad guys is not where the dramatic impact is for a character story or episode, whether it's genre or not. That's window dressing and should be delegated as such. A lot of shows and novels consistently get that wrong. It's an important lesson to keep in mind when dealing with emotionally weighty topics in writing, whether it's poetry or prose. It calls back another lesson Professor Ellison taught us, how to dial back the language in a poem when the content is immense. Spare writing, like spare directing, can be the difference between rewarding emotional investment and diluting it.

(I'll probably forget all of this the moment I try to write a short story with an actual plot. Argh, plot!)

Junkyard Quotes: Week of 2/28/11

I was reading Walt Whitman this weekend and just marveling at his use of language.

1.

"The sea whisper'd me."

2.

"Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet."

3.

"This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,

This is the common air that bathes the globe."

I can't explain in so many words why I love these three lines but I just do. There's something about them that takes me places in my mind much like abstract photography and an unexpected curve in music.

4.

"Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself.

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

I have tried forever since I first read this line to work it into conversation, but it might be just as well I haven't found a way so far, since I'd probably come across sounding as if I need therapy.

5.

This one I've kept as a junkyard quote long before I knew about junkyard quotes. The phrasing is less unexpected than some of his other phrases but still so beautiful, and the sense of unending is striking.

"Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you."

Classmate Response: Week of 2/28/11

Kacie Whaley: Like, How Very

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This is the poem we workshopped in class and time ran short, so we weren't able to give it as much time as we did the other poems. (I'm so sorry, Kacie!) This is a wonderful poem. One of the things that struck me immediately is how compulsively readable it is and what a conversational vibe it has. It just snaps through from line to line with a natural ease that is very effective and a joy to read. I loved how it feels exactly like the era in which it is set; it's a very good expression of a very specific time and place. Another thing that is done very well is the character's voice and the personalities of all of the subjects. It really feels like we're right there with them, listening and resopnding and becoming a part of this story. It leaves me wanting to read more and more. What could perhaps be edited is the last few lines. The abruptness works through the poem but there at the end, it ends on several abstract images that doesn't give the same living, breathing feel as the rest of it. I don't think these two lines need to be expanded in length, just edited with a different phrase that offers more specific imagery. Great job!