E.R. Womelsduff

Down with the Theses!

2011-12-19T22:54:00.000-08:00

Some of my blog posts are focused -- these are generally the ones that I wrote first as essays for college classes and later realized were pertinent outside the academic sphere. Many of my posts are not focused. I start with a troubling or intriguing thought and wriggle my way to some sort of conclusion. I’ve realized that this is how I write most everything--poems, short stories, novels, screenplays--pretty much everything that I do not have to begin with a thesis statement.

So I latch on to an idea--say, the world tree, yggdrasill. And I absorb as much information about it as I can. Because I’ve realized that I don’t care about proving something so much as knowing it. I can upcycle that information (and “information” is such a dry word--I really mean that mythology, that story, that fragment of life) into a modern context. I think that’s why shows like Grimm and Once Upon a Time have me so hooked--they are tapping into stories that mesmerize me. Well, Grimm not so much. It’s basically an episodic cop show with some Germanic fairy tale characters thrown in for flavor. And Once is a little hit-or-miss, but when they hit, I’m hooked (I mean honestly, the episodes about Cinderella and Jiminy Cricket were both implausible and boring--but the stuff about Snow White and Prince Charming...that’s gold. Also, what’s up with bringing King Midas into the mix? He was ancient Near Eastern mythology, not Western European, which is where most of the other characters are drawn from--keep it consistent, ABC).

Point is (and yes, I have a point, sort of, somewhere in here), I process by typing. That’s my point? I think that’s my point. And it’s almost to the point where I can’t understand something until I write it down, or say it out loud. I think this is why I get stuck sometimes in social situations -- a certain moment is reached in the conversation and my Chit-Chat / BS core reactor exceeds its potential limit and fritzes out. I’m stuck without warp-drive in the vast vacuum of space with no way to limp back to a coherent sentence. I literally cannot come up with words. My entire vocabulary has been ripped out of me like the bones of a gutted fish. Analogy-overload alert!

This is obviously not one of the focused blogs.

This is my fourth year in college, and my sixteenth year in school, if you don’t count preschool or kindergarten. And after all this time, I’m beginning to realize that I hate thesis statements. I hate pointing baldly at some fact and stating, “This, and nothing else, is what is relevant.” Funny thing is, I like themes. In movies and books, especially. Themes about love or growing up or dying or loss--universal stuff. Theses--they’re so specific, so exclusive. It’s hard to find a thesis that I give a shit about, even harder to find one that I can defend. I think that plays a large part in why I am very uninterested in politics. Everyone’s cramming a thesis down everyone else’s throat and no one really gives a shit about the other person’s thesis.

It’s also funny, because I’m making my “thesis” project right now. The final film of my undergraduate career, the film that’s supposed to stand for everything that I am as a filmmaker. But there’s absolutely no way it stands for everything I am as a filmmaker. I am just beginning to figure out who I am as a filmmaker. And that’s the freaking thing--thesis statements come at the beginning of the essay. They state what the answer is, and then seek to prove that answer. Thesis statements assume that you already know everything there is to know. And I don’t know any 22-year-olds that have much of anything figured out.

So, at least from my perspective, I don’t write films with thesis statements. I don’t write novels that make bold statements about war or religion or politics. I cannot possibly know all there is to know about any of those kinds of topics. What I can do is write a story with a theme. I have no interest in art that is propaganda or social commentary wrapped up in pretty pictures and music. I care about stories. Some people could look at Jay and think that I was trying to “say” something about the educational system, or American poverty, or interracial romance, or whatever. I would say that has nothing to do with Jay. Jay is about Jay. It’s a story about a girl who had to grow up too fast and had to make decisions that she should never have been asked to make.

So I guess my point is that I have no point. I have no conscious agenda. I like to write for the sake of writing. I like to learn for the sake of learning. I hate putting effort into things that I know have no practical value in my life (cough, cough, gen. ed. math, cough, ahem). I am, as my mother before me, a fountain of useless information--because somehow all those tidbits of facts and fictions and stories is all there is. That is life. The moments, the minutiae. Those small, specific things are the difference between a Scooby Doo mystery and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, between Little Miss Sunshine and Toddlers in Tiaras.

And I guess my point is also not that no one should have theses (my apologies for the double-negatives). Maybe if you’re the leading world-expert on hermit crabs, you should have a strong opinion about hermit crabs. It’s just maybe that you shouldn’t be writing screenplays about hermit crabs. Because when you start with an agenda, and you have it in your head that you need this agenda to reach as many people as possible, you are so often so easily tempted to make things (facts, stories, statistics, whatever) fit the agenda. This is why we get movies like Fireproof. This is why we get movies with great comedy or drama ravished by theses (think Happy Feet--loved the set-up and the character and the fuzzy penguin baby and was totally into it until the blatant environmental message smacked me in the face like a wet fish and pulled me completely out of the story).

It doesn’t matter what side you’re coming from, what your point is, or what you’re trying to accomplish--agendas, in my experience, ruin art. People from every political, religious, economical, and ethnic side of any particular issue are guilty of this.

But themes go hand-in-hand with art. They provide a framework for people to coalesce. Themes--myths--whatever you want to call them, they, by their very nature, attract people to the shared commonalities of the human experience.

So as I approach (oh-so-slowly, it seems) the end of my college career, I think I have had enough with writing essays. Even when I began writing my blog back in high school, I did not save my posts under “essays,” I saved them under “musings.” I don’t get to a point until the end, until I’ve worked my way through a train of thought. Theses have their place--I don’t dispute their importance in specific circumstances. But as far as I can see, they have no pertinence in my work. They have no place in my stories.

I will always continue to seek out information, because that’s how I’m wired. But I’ll probably never go on to get additional advanced degrees, because I just don’t care about things in the sort of way that the academic world would have me care. And coming to this conclusion (I do have a point after all) relieves an enormous amount of guilt and pressure that I have been carrying with me since childhood. I’ll continue to try to do well in this last year of school, mostly out of pride, and an ingrained habit of settling for no less than a certain grade. But I am beginning to see that a GPA has almost no bearing on my present or future success. The goal is not a grade (or, the thesis). The goal is the knowing (or, the theme).

And the great thing about themes is that they can always be adapted to new contexts. Thesis tend to get outdated, usurped, or disproven. And I think that’s the difference between a blockbuster and a classic. One is famous and relevant for a day--the other is relevant for an eternity.

Those are the kinds of stories I want to write. Those are the stories in which I want to invest my life.

Vixen 4ever: faith, film, and F-bombs

2011-11-30T21:10:00.001-08:00

It’sfunny to think of connecting one’s film to one’s faith when one’s maincharacter is an ex-Playboy Bunny. I somehow find myself with these characters—forlorn, bloodsucking vampires;foul-mouthed, pregnant teenagers; strategic, manipulative vixens. They appeal to me, these sweet-and-sourgirls. They remind me of who I am. They remind me of what I see ineverybody. They remind me, howeverstrangely, of Jesus—the hybrid deity of passionate anger; the human who ravagedthe courtyards of the compromised temple; the god who suffered little children;the criminal who pleaded with the only one who he knew could spare him. We are never one or the other. We are never good. And we are not Disney villains. We bite and scratch and plot and killfor reasons. And these reasons are the things that compel me: thedichotomy of the average human appeals to my sense of reality and to my senseof fantasy. It appeals to my understandingof God. If we are truly made inhis image, and if we are truly so two-faced (if not four or six orfifty-eight-faced), I can begin to understand how he is the God who ordered theIsraelites to slaughter entire people groups, and the God who spared Isaac; theGod who befriended the tax-collector and condemned the Pharisee; the God whocreated both light and its inherent shadow.

Ina movie with a tough-as-nails/closet romantic producer, an artistic/sell-outdirector, and a lady of the semi-night who understands exactly who she is andwho she is not, I think the film, while vain and fluffy on its surface,actually fits in quite nicely with pregnant teenagers and lonely vampires. Each character has a face they present theworld—the public, their professional peers, the cameras—and a face that theykeep hidden for fear of ridicule. They are, like any real person, complicated by their own warringdesires. Henry, if he really wanted, could work his ass off and get investors andmake the film he really wants to make, but he’s afraid of critical rejection,and I think he’s comfortable maintaining the lifestyle he has. Olivia, as a female producer in a stillheavily-male-dominated industry, has to be as unromantic as any male producerin order to be taken seriously by investors and the media. She can’t act on her own long-helddesire for Henry because it would seriously interfere with the public personashe’s been building for the last ten years. And Ellen, well…Ellen doesn’t hide who she really is. She just doesn’t bother to correctpeople’s assumptions about her. She uses people’s preconceptions to her advantage. She is sly, cunning, and doesn’t needanyone. Although we don’t get toexplore much of why this is, or if she wants more out of her life, there isdefinitely some deeply unpleasant reason why this came to be. These characters excite me because theystand in their own way—they’re just like me, and like everyone I’ve ever met.

Forme, having faith in God manifests itself in creating stories that respect God’s ultimate creation: human beings (and by “ultimate” I mean he madeEVERYTHING else, then when he’d seen us, he stopped, because nothing moreneeded to be done). Movies like Fireproof are, to me, blasphemous. They mock the complexity of the human experience bysimplifying life down to petty Christianisms and squeaky-clean endings. Human beings do not behave in Fireproof ways. We are not fireproof. Weare scarred and dented and chipped and we say terrible things to each other andwe do things that cannot be fixed with Chick-Fil-A and a sermon from awell-meaning secondary character. I don’t deny that Eye of the Beholder is not a profoundly philosophical film. And it has an intentionally “perfect”ending, with the lovers left to their bliss by a slowly-receding camera. But even here we’ve intentionallymarred the perfection by dollying back in, setting up another conflict, anddollying back out, leaving the audience wondering if the star-crossed loverswill really make it after all. Because there’s never a perfect pull-out in real-life. There isn’t a perfect ending, and tosuggest otherwise is to blatantly contradict a lifetime ofexperiences—experiences given by the grace of a complicated and unfathomableGod.

Faith,to me, is acknowledging that most things do not—and will not ever—makesense. Faith is allowing the bowof conflict to remain untied. Faith is about standing up to crappy stories and saying, “I’m not goingto sanitize this for you. I’m notgoing diminish a terrible, beautiful story just to make you feel morecomfortable. I’m not going tocensor my content just because it doesn’t appear in your pop-up Bible.” Faith is about admitting we’re really,really screwed up—not just the murderers and rapists and embezzlers, but the accountantsand kindergarten teachers and yes, the artists. It’s about examining the dirty, gross, hidden, disgustingparts—but then it’s about holding up thecrap side-by-side with the beautiful stained-glass fractures of the people wewanted to be, the people it is still possible, one day in another world, tobecome. Christianese films get itwrong on one end—but porn and shock-effect slashers get it wrong, too. They say “Here’s the depravity,” andthey leave you with nothing more. Faith goes beyond. Itbrings the beauty and the ugly together and acknowledges that the can live sideby side in perfect contradiction, because that’s who we are. That’s who God created us to be. Honoring that contradiction is the bestexpression of faith in God that I know.

Afterthat, the process of incorporating faith into the construction of the film isfairly simple—you do your job, you do it well, and you treat others withrespect and compassion. That’s it. Respect the story, respect yourself,respect your coworkers, and you inherently honor God. Faith is an action, and people can only see it if youpractice it in everything you do. The creed of the Christian filmmakershould be, “I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Conviction of Character, and Ipromise, for the love of God, to not preach at my secular coworkers.” I’lluse a short illustration—I was at the mall with my boyfriend on BlackFriday. We walked past a Luckyjeans store, and he mentioned that he’d been meaning to get a new pair. I convinced him to go in, even thoughhe knew he didn’t want to buy anything that day. We walked in and immediately a sales rep attached herself toPhil like a leech on an open wound. She mentioned—three times—their sales item, asking him what his sizewas, digging through the piles to pull out three colors for him to try on. After he—with a pricelessly bewilderedlook on his face—had them in his hands, she immediately went around and gotthree more pairs of jeans for him to try on as well, enlisting the help of twoother sales reps. He looked to mefor help—and because I thought it was really funny, I just smiled andwatched. The woman pushed him intoa dressing room, and checked on him—I kid you not—at least four times in thespan of about eight minutes. Bythe time we left the store he was so mad I thought he was going to strangle theoverzealous saleswoman. While shewas very well-meaning and eager to help, her very eagerness and helpfulness soalienated Phil that the very sight of her—and by association, the Lucky brand—madehim angry. This, in my estimation,is exactly what movies like Fireproof are doing. They’rewell-intentioned, they’re eager—but they’re having the exact opposite of theirintended effect. The saleswomanmight have convinced her fellow sales associate to buy a pair of jeans—but anew convert like Phil—well, he’s steering clear of that store for a longtime. And it’s the same withmovies. If Christians keep brandingthemselves with movies like Fireproof, they’re only going to sell their idea to the people who’ve alreadybought into it. They’re not doingthemselves—or anyone else—any favors.

SoI make movies about ex-Playboy bunnies. Not because I have a desire to shock the audience or indulge some weird,religious rebellion. I do itbecause characters with not-so-squeaky-clean stories are fertile ground todiscover truth and beauty through pain and tragedy. Taking stories—even comedies—seriously, as a means ofcommunication, as a means of transformation, is my act of worship to a bizarreand fascinating God, who created me in all my complexity, and who gave me theurge and the ability to create films. I am as uncomfortable in corporate worship settings as an atheist onEaster Sunday—but put a pen in my hand, a computer, a camera, and I will wonder,and I will dream, and I will write and when I am done, I have will havesomething that inherently points to a hidden but implied order; a God who isactive and frighteningly present. My God is not a wise baby or aplacid-faced crucifix—my God is a God of anguish and sorrow; my God bled, myGod was tortured; my God pisses me off, and my God is a God who will let mecome to him. My God does not forceconversion at the end of a sword or whack me over the head with a Bible. My God is patient. My God does not demand that I be Fireproof. My Goddoes not expect me to be sanitized and polite and my God will not disown me ifmy beaten-and-battered pregnant teenage main character drops the F-bomb whenshe realizes it’s the last day she has to decide about aborting the baby hermom’s boyfriend impregnated her with. Wouldn’t you say, “Fuck”? Well, I’m sure the Fireproofpeople wouldn’t. And I’m sure the Fireproof people wouldn’t find themselves in such acompromising situation in the first place. But we weren’t all born into fireproof worlds. And sometimes shit hits the fan. And I think it’s okay. I think it’s really okay. I think God is big enough to take thefucked-up moments. Because my Godis faithful to me. And there is no word or deed that I cansay or do that can separate me from him if he wants me. And the story of God has made it apparent that he will go toextreme lengths to guarantee that we are never separated unless Iwill it to be so.

Filmmaking—storytelling—isboth a professional and a highly private calling, if you’ll pardon theword. It is what I want to make mycareer out of, but it is also deeply personal. I cannot separate my idea of God and my idea of story. I cannot separate my idea of craftinggood films and my idea of worship. Worship, by definition, is supposed to come from a place of incrediblejoy, fulfillment, and humility. And there is nothing more humbling that I have experienced than workingon a film. Nor is there anythingmore satisfying, nor anything more joyful than seeing the final product. At the risk of sounding trulyblasphemous, I would even posit that the theater is a sort of church where I goto hear stories about how other people have lived, how they have failed andsucceeded and strived to understand more. And just as there are horrific stories in the Bible, there are alsohorrific stories in film. And onesof beauty. And ones of peace. And ones of hope. We need all of the stories to evenbegin to piece together a picture of the human experience. We need to understand that we are madeup of a billion fractured moments. We need stories. We needcompassion. We need to allow eachother to be messed up. We need toallow for God to allow us to be messed up.

Andthat’s where it all begins.

Onceupon a time…

…something got messed up.

And here’s thestory of how some humans did their very best to fix it. And here’s where they fell short. And here’s where they pulled through. And damned if it isn’t compelling.

Senioritis Bipolaris

2011-11-06T16:42:00.000-08:00

I have a strong urge to get in a car and drive faraway. I don’t want to be in schoolanymore. I am tired of turning inassignments. I am tired of goingto work on campus. I am tired ofbeing a student-worker or a student-writer or a student-filmmaker. I’m tired of being a student, I’m tiredof the academic environment and the pseudo-intellectuals and the drunkenweekends watching smart girls act stupid so they can lip-lock with a muscledstranger. The whole system, thewhole cycle, is insane. It’s ridiculous.

Partially, this is senioritis. And since I’m staying on an extra semester, it’s hittingeven harder, because I know that I’ve got over a year left of school and facinganother entire year of college is incredibly depressing. I’m ready to be done with this.

It’s more than that, though. I’m sitting here and feeling it, but I don’t know how toexplain it. Ironic that at my mostfrustrated moments, words completely fail. Why do I invest in writing when at every critical moment itfalls short?

I know there’s something wrong with me. I think the doctor fell short of thediagnosis – I’m not just depressed, I’m bipolar. The world is brilliant, and then the world ends at the tipof an unsatisfactory interaction. I pole-vault from one extreme to another, wondering as I pass overheadjust what the middle of life feels like.

The longer I sit here, the more the pressure builds. Latin translations due by midnight,Latin midterm Tuesday, 8 am, so much I have to memorize because the conceptsjust aren’t getting through, all the Hebrew reading, my TV pitch Tuesday, 9:45,work Monday, 7:30am, Principals of Language midterm Friday, 11:50am, MediaServices video shoot, Thursday, 4p, to 8pm, First Mondays, Monday 4pm to 10pm,which means I can’t study for Latin, all of this, this schedule, this list ofthings to do, the items to cross off the list but the list just keeps gettinglonger and I feel like Sisyphus watching the rock roll down the mountain againand again.

So I want to get in a car and I want to drive away.

These are the bad days. The days when I sit here and I don’t get out of bed. The days when I hate everything.

Characters Welcome

2011-10-19T22:17:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time in 1977 there wasa little baby cable company called Madison Square Garden Network. The little company grew up into a beautifulnetwork called USA,a division of NBC Universal, and it became the number one cable televisionnetwork five years running. It becamethe number one cable network five years running because it created for itself abrand, a brand that is the love-child of sharp marketing and mature businessphilosophy. And this brand consists of three main components: characters,visual image, and story format. Becauseof this basic branding formula, every aspect of the USA network—fromadvertising to online presence to fascinating staff-writing gambles—is cohesiveand forward-thinking, making it a “’go-to’ network instead of a ‘last resort’network,” as Sandra Berg says in her article for the Writer’s Guild of America,West’s online magazine.

USA

’s sloganis “characters welcome”—the characters (rather than special effects or big namestars) drive the story, and because the characters drive the story, the plotgets to do some incredibly fun off-roading. Each show consists of (generally) one to two main characters who areexceptional at something, but have an endearing, perpetual flaw. For Monk, this manifested itself as analmost-incapacitating obsessive compulsive disorder that was actually the flaw and the exceptional ability: it stuntedhim socially, but it also gave him the ability to detect minutiae that othersmissed, and therefore allowed him to solve the cases no one else could. Monk ended up being a hugely successful showthat owed much, if not most, of its success to the endearing qualities of itsleading man.

TheUSAbrand is also shaped by something called the “blue skies” approach[1]. This is a literal and figurativeterm—literally, they want to show more blue skies, more outdoor sets, and moresaturated, specific color palettes. Burn Notice is branded with animmediately identifiable orange logo, with acid-blue ocean waves in thebackground, colors that scream Miamiand mayhem.

Royal Pains is a deep, royal blue, a blue of leisure and money,embodying in its color the personality of the characters and settinginvolved.

Psych has a lime-green logo,

Monkhas candy-apple red logo,

Covert Affairs ispurple.

The figurative aspect of theblue skies method is that the shows, while grounded in a believable, worldlysetting, are a little too good to be true. No one really believes that there are burned spies roaming Miami looking to help thepoor and oppressed while they search for the identity of the people who burnedthem. But viewers are entirely willingto suspend their disbelief, because it’s a reallyfun show to watch, as well as visually-stimulating.

Thethird part of the brand is the format. All of USA’s shows are (generally) set in an unusual (orunder-television-filmed) location, where a character does something that theywould normally do, but they do it in an unusual setting or circumstance whilesearching for a way to get back into their former setting/circumstance,constantly battling against some sort of direct authority in order to do so.[2] For instance: in White Collar,

a con man consults (and does the occasional government-sanctionedcon) for the FBI after being caught and sent to prison. He is constantly tempted to ditch thestraight-and-narrow life to return to the thrill of the full-blown jobs he usedto run when he was a free man. In Burn Notice, a “burned” spy does specialops work for well-deserving civilians while trying to figure out who burned himand how to become an active spy once more. In Suits,

a high-end lawyertakes under his wing a genius protégé—who’s never been to law school. Both try to avoid getting found out whilepeople from the protégé’s past constantly threaten to accidentally orintentionally expose the both of them.

Butthe branding of the show doesn’t stop when the credits roll. USA is so invested in their slogan“characters first,” that they actually have the stars of their shows representthe company as a whole in television promos. This is expressed perhaps no better than in the cross-show promotions,like the one with Burn Notice’scharacter Michael Donovan sending RoyalPains’ character Hank Lawson a care package, explaining that he knows whatit’s like to lose your job, find yourself in unfamiliar settings, and want toget back to living the life you were used to. It ends with a comical gift basket from Michael to Hank: sunscreen, sunglasses,and a block of C4—“because you never know when you’ll need a stable plasticexplosive.”[3]

And the strategy seems to be working—USA isnot only the #1 cable network, its shows are being viewed in more than 98million American households,[4]and according to the Nielsen ratings on its website, those 98 millionhouseholds can be divvied up thusly: it has most viewers in the 35-54age-range, 44% having attended college, it’s almost evenly split between maleand female viewers, 71% are home-owners, and the average income of a viewer’shousehold income is over $57,000 a year.

And these areimportant numbers to people like advertisers. The characters, therefore, go even further in supporting thenetwork—they even dress up and sweet-talk the companies who want to buyadvertising spots. As the

USA

website says, “USA Network creates an emotional connection with our audience onevery platform—inviting them to take part, and show us their characters, too.”[5] During the May 2011 Upfronts, the stars of White Collar, Burn Notice, and Royal Pains got on stage at LincolnCenter, giving impersonations of real USA executives without advertisers everhaving to hear an actual pitch.[6]

In advertisingitself to the world, USAhas come up with a couple other creative solutions. Rather than compete with dozens of other ads,

USA

bought the rights to every single ad in the Talk of the Town issue of TheNew Yorker, which hit stands thispast May through August, and was also available on the iPad.[7] Speaking of iPad—USA is certainly with the timeswhen it comes to technology. They’vecreated a campaign specifically designed to target iPad users for their newseason premieres. For White Collar specifically, iPad usersplayed a game within the ad banner that set them up as special agents who couldsearch the webpage for clues that would eventually unlock exclusive promos andsneak-peaks. Not only does thisadvertisement target iPad users for the USAnetwork, and in turn specific USAshows, it hooks viewers by making the advertisement interactive—twisting was isessentially a promotional advertisement into a game that viewers actually wantto play and engage with. In short, USA managed tomake the advertising experience enjoyable. That, in itself, is somewhat groundbreaking, and will surely influenceother networks’ advertising formats.

Their onlinepresence takes this idea to a whole new level. On the USA websitethere is something called the Character Arcade,

which features over 50 gamesconstructed around the

USA

shows’ characters and content. Asplayers play the games, they accumulate points. As players post in the message forums or link USA website content to social mediasites, they get points. The players withthe most points get prestige, virtual prizes, and, occasionally, real, tangibleprizes. This “gamification” has driven USA websitevisits from spending an average of 4 minutes to an average of 28 on the site,and increases return visits by 40%.[8] Advertisers, too, can see how incrediblethese numbers are, and are now asking USAto create games around their specific products in the worlds of the

USA

characters.[9]

The USA websitegoes beyond just games, though. Burn Notice now has its own two-volumeonline graphic novel featuring the adventures of Michael Westin.

There are forums for fans to discuss thelatest episodes or where they wish the show would go. There’s an entire Fan Appreciation Day(October 6^th this year). There are surveys, there are causes, there are featurettes andinterviews and schedules and full episodes available for viewing. In short, the

USA

website has almost everything afan could want to find out what they need to know about their favorite shows.

And the USA executives are largely to blame for

USA

’screativity and inherent success. Becauseof the NBC-Universal merger, USApresident Bonnie Hammer left major operating power to new co-presidents JeffWatchel and Chris McCumber, who’ve been with

USA

since 2001. The fact that they’ve promoted from withinwith members who have been around since the integral re-branding of USA seems likea wise and promising move. In fact, itwas Watchel who pushed shows like Burn Notice, Royal Pains,White Collar, and Psych in thefirst place, and McCumber was responsible for the “Characters Welcome” sloganand rebranding.[10]

And while it isthe USA executives that havemade all these decisions that have created USA into the network that it is, itis the decisions that they made regarding their staff writers that—as awriter—intrigues me the most. Like theexecutives Watchel and McCumber, USA shows tendto promote—or pull over—from within. Several of the writers on Burn Noticealso worked on several previous shows together. Also, several of the writers of different USA shows (BurnNotice, White Collar, Suits¸etc.) worked on previous non-USA shows togetherbefore coming to USAand splitting to their respective shows. This seems to indicate a high level of importance placed on previousfriendships, and an appealing sense of professional loyalty.

The other excitingprospect for me, as an aspiring writer, is that, according to their IMDbprofiles, the broad swath of the USA writers have very few writing credits ofany kind—and for many, the USA show they currently write for is the only TVwriting credit they have at all. As a network that I would legitimately hopeto one day work for, this is encouraging, as I have no professional writingexperience on my resume.

USA

seems to want quality writers-in-the-rough rather than no-gamble tried-and-trueveterans.

As USA grows,however, their brand may choose to grow with it. The 1-hour dramedies with quirky charactersin sunny locations has worked fabulously so far—and while they may alwaysremain the bread-and-butter of USA,they’re about to be joined by some tantalizing side dishes. WWE Rawand WWE Tough Enough add a speck ofsports to the otherwise-dramacentric network. Acquired shows like Law and Order:SVU and NCIS give a bit ofvariety to the formulaic programming. Butwith new original programming, co-presidentChris McCumber stated that USAis going to aggressively expand the

USA

formula: “Developedstrategically through our brand lens, this diverse roster represents thenetwork’s introduction of more provocative, innovative original programmingthan ever before.”[11] This expansion includes seven new one-hour dramasand five half-hour sitcoms. Thefollowing are summaries of the show and how they fit into the USA brand:

· SilentPartner (1-hour drama) is about a Floridaattorney and his paralegal—who works with him long-distance from

India

. Two quarky main characters who do a normaljob very well, but do it in unusual circumstances in two very sunnylocations. USA brand: check.

· On We Go(1/2 hour comedy) is about an actor (Nathan Lane) who looks like Nathan Lane, but is not Nathan Lane. He wants to work on Broadway, but has toreturn home to Texasafter his father gets ill. A quarkycharacter doing a normal job but inhibited by unusual circumstances,check. Sunny and under-filmed locale (Texas): check.

· M. Deity(1-hour drama) is a medical drama about a doctor who battles hospitalbureaucracy in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Sunny/underused location (Louisiana):check. Unusual circumstances(post-hurricane bureaucratic mess): check.

· TheSpecial (1-hour drama) is about a homicide detective with hypomania (whichis, according to Wikipedia, where “individuals in a hypomanic state have adecreased need for sleep, are extremely outgoing and competitive, and have agreat deal of energy. However, unlike with full mania, those with hypomanicsystems are fully functioning, and are often actually more productive thanusual”)[12]who doesn’t quite fit in at the precinct. Quarky character, extraordinary ability, unusual circumstances:check. Sunny location (LA): check.

· Big in Japan (1/2hour comedy) is about a boy-band reuniting twenty years after their lastgig. No other details were given aboutthe location or the characters.

· We theJury (1/2 hour comedy) is about a jury team on a high-profile celebritycase for as long as the murder trial goes on. No other details were given, so I can’t say whether it fits the brand,or how the show will live more than a season with the nature of its storyline.

· TGIM(1/2 hour comedy) is about suburbanite parents who are so enslaved by the demandsof their children’s schedules that going to work on Monday actually soundsbetter than staying home. No otherdetails were given.

· TheEnclave (limited series) is a fairly vague: a new job causes a family tomove to a new town where “nothing is what it seems.”

· TheExceptions (1-hour drama) is about the daughter of the mayor of New York City who usesher connections and status to solve cases that would otherwise fall by thewayside. Quirky characters (if you’rethe daughter of the mayor of New York I bet you’d have some quirky qualities)who does a normal thing (investigating) in an unusual setting (she does itunder the radar using status and connection—reminds me a little bit of Castle, actually): check. Not a particularly sunny location, but the restfits the bill.

· Hard Cover(1-hour drama) is about a middle-age-soccer-mom-undercover-operative workingwith a rogue FBI agent. Sunnylocation? No idea. Something usual in an unusual setting? Yes. Quarky? Absolutely.

· Winslow(1-hour drama) is about a private detective (named Jimmy Winslow) who’s ageneral failure: recovering alcohol, massively in-debt, father’s in jail,etc. But he’s got a perfect record atsolving cases. Quarky: yes. Unusual ability in a usual job: check. Again, don’t know the city, but we can hopeit’s set somewhere with lots of sunshine.

· House ofCards (1/2 hour comedy) is about a recentlycollege-graduated young person who gets a job at a greeting card company whiletrying to build a writing career and find love. This reeks of500 Days of Summer, but it fits thebrand.

· RegularEinstein (1-hour drama) is about the Duncanfamily: they consist of three genius siblings and one younger sibling namedEinstein—who is the only one of them that’s not a genius. But he makes a pretty great cop. Sunny? Who knows. Quarky: I wouldcertainly expect it to be, yes. Normal person in unusual circumstances:I don’t think you fit the

USA

brand better than having a normal-IQ kid in a family of geniuses.

It’s hard to tellhow well some of these will fit the USA brand on such limiteddescriptions of the show. Moreinformation may reveal how the shows will fit into the structure of theblue-skies approach, and how well audiences will receive them having come toexpect a certain winning formula from USA in recent years. At the moment, however, USA is stayingstrong, and it’s remained strong thus far because of its slogan “characterswelcome”—and characters first. From theshows to the advertising to the games online, the characters hook audiences,make them fall in love, and keep them coming back for more. With this business philosophy dominatingevery decision USA makes, Ican only predict that they will remain one of the strongest cable networks in America fromhere on out.

Works Cited

21, January. "USA NetworkScores with Gamification on Psych TV Show | VentureBeat." Tech News | Innovation News | MoneyNews | VentureBeat. Web. 05 Oct. 2011..

22, January. "USA Network BlendsAdvertisers into TV Show-based Games | VentureBeat." Tech News | Innovation News | MoneyNews | VentureBeat. Web. 05 Oct. 2011..

30, June. "The End of Demographics:How Marketers Are Going Deeper With Personal Data." Social Media News and Web Tips â“Mashable â“ The Social Media Guide. Web. 05 Oct. 2011..

"Advertise on USA Network |Comcast Spotlight Advertising." ComcastSpotlight | Experience the Power of Comcast Spotlight Advertising. Web. 05Oct. 2011. .

"Breaking News -

USA

Network Names Heather OlanderSenior Vice President, Alternative Programming | TheFutonCritic.com." TheFutonCritic.com - The Web's BestTelevision Resource. Web. 05 Oct. 2011..

Elliot, Stuart. "A Cable PremiereElbows in On Network Turf." NewYork Times. 22 Oct. 2009. Web. 5 Oct. 2011..

Elliott, Stuart. "USA Network'sTwist on 'Upfront' Puts Stars Up Front - NYTimes.com." A Guide to the Media Industry -Media Decoder Blog - NYTimes.com. Web. 05 Oct. 2011..

Hampp, Andrew. "USA NetworkTurns Major Online Player Via Branded Gaming." Advertising Age. Web. 5 Oct.2011..

Haston,, Chris. "Entertainment News:Celebrity Gossip Blogs, Photos, Videos & Stories - USATODAY.com." News, Travel, Weather,Entertainment, Sports, Technology, U.S. &World - USATODAY.com. Web. 05 Oct. 2011..

"Hypomania." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.Web. 05 Oct. 2011. .

"Jeff Wachtel And Chris McCumberNamed USANetwork Co-Presidents – Deadline.com." Hollywood Entertainment Breaking News - NikkiFinke on Deadline.com/hollywood. Web. 05 Oct. 2011..

Levine, D.m. "USA Network Previews New Programs at Lincoln Center Upfront Presentation |Adweek." Adweek. Web.05 Oct. 2011..

"Meet the Writers of USANetwork." Writers Guildof America,West. Web. 05 Oct. 2011..

Ng, Philiana. "'Burn Notice,' 'RoyalPains' Premieres up - Live Feed." TheLatest Entertainment & Hollywood News - The Hollywood Reporter. Web. 05Oct. 2011..

"Nielsen Ratings for Week of Sept. 26- USATODAY.com." News,Travel, Weather, Entertainment, Sports, Technology, U.S. &World - USATODAY.com. Web. 05 Oct. 2011..

Numbers, The. "Brand Transition? — OnWhat’s at Stake for USA Network This Summer « TV Surveillance." TV Surveillance. Web. 05 Oct.2011..

Seidman, Robert. "USA ContinuesAt #1 - Ratings | TVbytheNumbers." TVRatings, TV Nielsen Ratings, Television Show Ratings | TVbytheNumbers.com.Web. 05 Oct. 2011..

"TV Schedules, Cable and SatelliteTelevision and Show Schedules - USANetwork." TelevisionShows, Series, Movies, Sports and Characters - TV Channel - USA Network -Homepage - USA Network.Web. 05 Oct. 2011. .

"USA Network Buys All Advertisementsin The New Yorker’s Special Issue — NYConvergence.com." NYConvergence.com — Digital MediaTechnology in the New York/NewJersey/Connecticut Tri-State Area. Web. 05 Oct. 2011..

"USA Network Drives Tune-in to WhiteCollar with IPad Rich Media - Mobile Marketer - Advertising." Mobile Marketer - The News Leaderin Mobile Marketing, Media and Commerce.Web. 05 Oct. 2011..

"USA Network HOME." Web. 05 Oct.2011. .

"Westen Meets Lawson: Formula asBrand and the Potential of a USANetwork Genre | In Media Res." MediaCommons| a Digital Scholarly Network. Web. 05 Oct. 2011..

"What USA Network Knows About BrandingThat MTV Doesn't." InfluentialMarketing Blog. Web. 05 Oct. 2011..

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/business/media/23adco.htmland

[2] http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2010/07/11/westen-meets-lawson-formula-brand-and-potential-usa-network-genre

[3] http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2010/07/11/westen-meets-lawson-formula-brand-and-potential-usa-network-genre

[4] http://www.rohitbhargava.com/2010/07/what-usa-network-knows-about-branding-that-mtv-doesnt.html

[5] http://www.comcastspotlight.com/network/usa-network

[6] http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/usa-networks-twist-on-upfront-puts-stars-up-front/

[7] http://nyconvergence.com/2011/05/usa-network-buys-all-advertisements-in-the-new-yorkers-special-issue.html

[8] http://venturebeat.com/2011/01/21/usa-network-scores-with-gamification-on-psych-tv-show/

[9] http://venturebeat.com/2010/01/22/usa-network-blends-advertisers-into-its-tv-show-based-games/

[10] http://www.deadline.com/2011/03/jeff-wachtel-and-chris-mccumber-named-usa-network-co-presidents/

[11] http://www.spoilertv.com/2011/05/usa-network-13-new-shows-in-development.html

[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypomania

Kit-Kat Devil

2011-10-13T22:42:00.001-07:00

(no idea where this came from, or what entirely it means --- my inner rapper just burst forth without my approval)

All wound up and no one to punch,

put the kit-kat on the slingshot and watch it go crunch.

Got the devil with his rebels riding shot-gun—

got an itchy trigger finger, wanna pop one.

Like the tension coiled up inside a snake pit,

watch you flash a double-face until I break it.

And the Devil’s name is Joker and he’s ape-shit.

Pow.

Roller-coaster ride without the safety bar,

you’ll go flying, that’s for sure, but you won’t get veryfar,

And the Devil, man he’s laughing ‘cuz his head’s ajar

he’s the Joker and he’s smoking riding shotgun in your car.

And you hide the true intent behind a grey word--

loose the red herring to disguise the mocking bird.

And the smoke is sweet and sick and it is acrid;

let the Devil pass it round until you blast it

til the phoenix burns right down into the ashes

and the mocking bird it mocks you as it crashes

and your aspirations fall apart in flashes.

Pretty Polly wants a cracker cuz she’s addicted to the salt

and you review all of your choices and you realize it’s yourfault

and you stuff the red herring back down in her cage

but the blue bird escaped and the mocking bird’s crazed.

And the Devil, he smiles and you can’t meet his gaze

and the smoke chokes the bird and you wince and you pray

but the birds fall and die, now there’s no way to fly

and the Kit-Kat goes crunch in your face.

In the Name Of

2011-10-13T22:15:00.001-07:00

I think I failed a Latin test this week. Like, straight-up got a 68% on it. Normally, a grade like this would send meinto wretched self-despair, followed quickly by self-pity, followed slowly byself-loathing. As an honors student,I’ve got a certain reputation to maintain. Honors students don’t’ fail—at anything. We become doctors and lawyers and poet laureates. Wechange the world!

Pressure, pressure, pressurepressurepresurersuersue…..

Funny thing is, I am unflabbergasted by this event. This is where I’m finally beginning to seethe results of my study abroad experience. I spent four months in Oxfordeyeball-deep in books and books, the occasional cup of over-sweetened tea, andessays, and books. I did not learn asingle grade on a single essay until the semester was finished. Removed from the stigma of achieving an A, Iwas left with the ability to focus on what the real point was—wait for it, waitfor it….

….learning shit.

So now I’m back in the States and I’m graded on essays andI’m graded on midterms and I’m graded on quizzes and I’m graded on reading andI’m graded on whether I show up for class or not and hell, maybe I’m graded onhygiene and personal grooming. And Ifailed a Latin test.

But you know what? Four weeks ago, I could not glance at a paragraph of Latin and tell youwhat a single word meant unless it had the words “dues ex machine” or “carpediem” in there somewhere. And while Istill may not be able to tell you whether habeo is a first or third conjugationverb, I can probably tell you what tense and person it is, what it means, andwhere it belongs in the sentence. Infact, I can stumble my way through an entire paragraph.

I failed a Latin test. But I’m learning Latin.

Grades are still important to me—I don’t think I’ll ever beable to completely beat that out of my brain. I need to maintain my GPA to remain an honors student, and to continueto receive financial aid and to exert my power and prestige over my lesserminions. But the grades are at least alittle less important. Because Irealized, in the end, I don’t give a shit about numbers. I give a shit about understanding something Ididn’t even know how to understand before.

It’s liberating, to be able to fail in the name ofsucceeding. I’m doing what I set out todo.

I’m learning.

Cue the hopeful music.

insomnia is the love child of ADD and depression

2011-09-24T15:43:00.001-07:00

He says, she says, they say Go away,

come again another day when you’re all. Grown. Up.

Pop tarts, top ten charts, then again you’ve missed themark,

and yes, that’s what she said

when you failed again in bed.

Can’t concentrate or sit still,

unfocus, look at the curtains

check the check you sent to pay the bill

and watch it bounce right back into your face.

This will all be over, but not soon;

that’s the joy of pain,

how long it lasts,

the thrill of understanding you’re about to lose.

So many books and you’re stuck on this page,

tripping over one word, skipping and mixing it up

like some dyslexic kid.

But you can’t sleep. You can’t move.

Sometimes your limbs don’t listen and it proves

that you’re not in control

and that’s the point of impact,

the sonic blast

that puts you back to sleep with your eyes wide open in yourhead.

Cold coffee in the cup,

a fine film on the surface of your tongue;

everything will grow mold if you let it.

And you’ll let it because you can.

Tin Man, RainMan, Sand Man, Blue Man

tinning, raining, sanding, bluing

with an ing they’re always doing

what they’re doing if they’re doing

something more than you are doing

letting mold uphold a habit

breeding fast like wild rabbits

taking home on your calm tongue

and singing of the promised land.

This is what I do, she says.

I look at curtains. Ilie in bed.

I put things up upon my wall,

I take them down, I move them all.

I wander then from place to place;

I look around. I seemy face.

I go to work, I go to school,

I sit on the bottom of the apartment pool.

I see the light through the water’s waves

I see the light, but there’s nothing to feel.

And that’s the point, I guess, she says.

When all is done there’s nothing real.

And if that’s true, there’s nothing to crave.

And if there’s nothing to crave, there’s nothing to do.

So this is what I do, she says.

I look at curtains. Ilie in bed.

You Are What You Eat (and no, this really has nothing to do with food)

2011-07-22T23:53:00.001-07:00

I wonder if psychologists and psychiatrists and psychics ever get tired of knowing why people do the things they do. If it takes too much mystery out of life.

That being said, I wish I could understand more clearly why I do some of the shit I do. Stupid shit. Self-destructive shit. Manipulative shit. You don’t realize how much you emulate what you observe until you start actively sabotaging your own life. Bad stuff in, bad stuff out. You are what you eat. Monkey see, monkey do.

There are some bad habits that are really easy to spot, and therefore easy to deal with (if you accept the mantra “the first step is admitting you have a problem”). Alcoholics, for example. While there may be other shit going on, the problem that’s immediate and identifiable is that they drink too much. Solution: stop drinking. Pretty cut and dried.

But there are far subtler things we can do to ourselves that pass unnoticed, even as we do them. Snarky thoughts, overactive paranoia, vanity, shame, greed—they fester, and they creep, and they wither whatever they touch.

I’d say I’m an adult now. Well, the world would say I’m an adult now. Twenty-one years old. She can smoke, vote, drink, and go to strip clubs. She’s responsible now. And as an adult, one would think that I would be able to approach my adult relationships (work relationships, family relationships, romantic relationships) with a degree of maturity.

So not the case.

The bad thing about being voracious learners as children, is that we’re children. We don’t know yet how to separate the good information from the bad, the appropriate from the inappropriate, the healthy from the destructive. We observe, we intake, we internalize, and we act according to how we have observed others acting. If we have pitch-perfect role-models, this would be a great system. But we don’t—no one does. And if we happen to love or respect our childhood role models, then it takes a lot of uncomfortable eye-opening to realize that they were not—and are not—perfect. That they made mistakes, and they occasionally fucked up.

Which means we inevitably will, too.

Nowadays I approach any given situation with my arsenal of learned behaviors: I see something and I think, “This is similar to a situation that so-and-so had, and this was their outcome, so I should A) go forward and do as they did, B) retreat, or C) do the opposite of what they did because what they did sucked.”

There is nothing new under the sun, including the way we approach life. Everything we do, we do because we saw someone else do it before us. It helps us to justify our actions, good or bad. Most of the time, this is okay. But sometimes it’s a crutch. And sometimes it’s damn near crippling.

I’m twenty-one. I’m trying to be grown-up. I’m trying to deal with the new, adult responsibilities of my life with some measure of maturity. But all these tricks and habits and insecurities I picked up by watching other people live and make mistakes and be human are incapacitating me in the most inconvenient moments. Simple things suddenly become enormously complicated. I second-guess every action in a way that would have been inconceivable to me as a kid. If I did something bad when I was five, I got punished. Pretty simple system. Now, if I do something bad, I hurt people. Adult mistakes can’t be fixed by a time-out and no dessert after dinner.

The other problem with the system is that as we age, we lose our eagerness to learn. There are statistics about how it’s nearly impossible to learn a foreign language fluently after adolescence. People may memorize information for tests, get trained for new jobs, or even visit totally foreign countries, but they don’t really learn how to be better at being people. So when we’re young we learn a lot, but indiscriminately—and when we’re older, and finally have the capacity to discriminate, we’ve lost our ability to learn.

Yay for being human.

I’m mostly irritated at myself. I can almost see my mistakes in real time, like that proverbial shoulder angel telling me not to do this or that—but I do this or that anyway, because it’s what I know. It’s familiar, it’s comfortable, it’s what I’ve observed—even if it’s ultimately self-destructive. And I can’t seem to break loose from the established pattern.

The sins of the father pass on to even the tenth generation…

Monkey see, monkey do.

Babies. Munchkins. Whatever.

2011-07-16T00:39:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think too much.

I research shit when I’m writing. By “shit” I mean “normally useless bits of information and trivia that are somehow relevant to my story.” Today’s research topic is mitochondrial diseases. All of which are fatal.

Most of which affect children.

My Google searches are generally harmless – I figure out the seasonal gestation of pineapples or the name of a passenger ferry that sunk in the Puget Sound in 1937. I scour Thesaurus.com for the perfect word and settle for “incongruous” when I can’t find it. I Save As fifty pictures and drawings of sirens to give myself a visual reference for the creatures I’m dealing with.

But then sometimes things make me think too much. Like diseases that kill children quickly or slowly or painfully. Genetic mutations that rob them of speech or sight or strength.

Maybe it’s because it’s late at night and it’s dark and lonely. Maybe it’s because I’ve got so many gosh-darn-freaking nephews and nieces now. But the baby-killing diseases are just getting to me tonight.

I’ve never wanted kids. That’s not true. I was ambivalent about having kids until I hit high school. Then I became a nanny and my parents got divorced and the idea of squeezing infants out of my body and making sure they didn’t grow up to be insane or angry or lawyers just seemed like way too much trouble.

But what if I did have a kid? A chubby little cherub with perfect, big eyes and a slobbery little grin. What if I ended up loving that kid more than I’d ever loved anything? And then what if—after I’d gotten all attached and mothery—I found out it had Alexander’s Disease? Its myelin will be destroyed and clumps of Rosenthal fibers will form. It will be mentally retarded, physically handicapped. It will have digestive issues; it will look abnormal. There will be no cure, and it will most likely die by the age of six.

I cannot imagine living six years of my life with a child who taxed me mentally, physically, and emotionally, and whom I knew with absolute certainty would die.

That’s just one disease. There are thousands more. Some are “manageable,” but they still bring with them all the expenses and responsibilities of caring for a chronically sick kid.

I’m psyching myself out. But it makes me wonder how anyone can even contemplate having kids when there are so many variables, so many horrific possibilities, so many ways for the body to betray itself.

I feel angry. Why are we supposed to want something that is guaranteed to make us miserable? Genetic diseases aside, the “mere” raising of the healthiest kid is more than daunting—it’s inconceivable. From day one there are decisions that will affect the rest of the munchkin’s life: breast-milk or formula, do we let our daughter wear pink (do we let our boy wear pink?), private school or public, do we push them to learn five languages and play six instruments or do we let them play in the dirt and eat bugs, organic foods or hot dogs and mac ‘n’ cheese, can they watch TV and play video games or is technology on a lock-down so they can enjoy nature (and if the latter, will their lack of technological savvy prevent them from getting jobs down the road), are they allowed to date in high school (or ever), when can they get a cell phone, when can they truly think for themselves, when is it time to let them screw up, when is it time to let them go?

This is all made much simpler by not having them in the first place.

But we’re genetically predisposed to want to pop them out like Pez candies. They’re going to work the farm and support us in our old age and carry on the family name!

But what if we’re not genetically predisposed to want children? What if we have no burning desire to be pregnant or experience the wonderful, beautiful magic that is giving birth? What if we hate Cheerios and minivans? What if Mommy Jeans give us nightmares?

What if we actually are fulfilled by other things? What if we don’t give a shit if our name lives on? What if we feel really, really pissed off when people pretend to listen when we say we’re perfectly happy without babies, and then clap us on the shoulder, wink, and whisper conspiratorially, “You’ll come around.”

It seems absurd to me that in this day and age, having children is still considered to be an essential right of passage. That one is not complete without one’s progeny gathered around oneself for the annual Christmas card photograph that others will tack on their refrigerators to reassure themselves that their kids are, indeed, cuter than yours.

So yeah, I’m worked up. I’m irritated. And I have been for a long time now. And I will probably continue to be until I’m so old that people will finally give up and say, “Gee whiz, I can’t even hear her biological clock ticking anymore.”

A part of me wishes I wanted them. It’d be simpler. I’d be like “everyone” else. I’d feel like less of a freak for not wanting the things I’m expected—by the laws of nature, apparently—to want.

But the other part of me says hell no, I’m not sorry. I won’t apologize for this. And I don’t care if people can’t grasp my reasons or try to trip me up in my logic. The bottom line is I don’t want to be a mother. I don’t want to have children.

And that is okay.

Beware the Siren

2011-06-27T19:18:00.001-07:00

A nursery-rhyme I wrote for the pilot I'm writing.

The people labor in the day

as sirens dwell beneath the waves.

With humans’ toil and loathsome noise

the siren nothing more enjoys

than to remain apart and still

and daily drink their moonlit fill

and glide through waters cold and dark

and comb their hair as white and stark

as starlight on a dead man’s heart.

For sirens are quite deadly things

and hoard their spoils and pearly strings

and if you catch one in a glance

look quick away, do not advance

and do not listen to her voice

for soon you will not have a choice:

she will steal your heart and soul—

a siren’s song is death’s last knoll.

an old observation

2011-06-06T14:59:00.001-07:00

I wrote this five or six years ago, based off a discarded picture.

It's just the burning end of a cigar.

First it was a cigarette.

I can still see him from the lights of the kitchen

through the paneled glass,

but the burning tobacco seems to illuminate him as a person

the way 60-watt bulbs never could.

He spilled a bit of wine on his shirt earlier,

about the size of a quarter.

It gives him the perpetual look of being freshly shot.

That coupled with the plain white shirt and jeans

make him look like the unfortunate result of a gang clash.

He's probably on his fourth glass of wine.

Smoking and drinking beyond the redemptive reach of the light,

the burning end of my brother-in-law.

keeping tempo

2011-06-05T21:07:00.001-07:00

Fight the light, the spark you spit on

it sputters and dies, hissing

you’re missing the point

that the pain is as real as you make it

and you make it painful because

peace is too mundane, the thrill

is a pull you pour into, pour your bones

and the clones of your clones into,

ghost images of your past self

into this thing called thrill like the

shriek, the drill, the dentist’ warm

rubber gloves grinding out the cavity.

You begin to think you make sense

but the words are only there to keep tempo.

You sense, though, a pattern, a cause

and you pause to sift through

but you move on cuz you know the words

aren’t meant for you.

Pick the pictures off the vanity,

pluck the faces from the page like plums

sticky and sweet and rotten.

The dentist Tsk Tsks and you shrug.

You love these people,

and they fester against your gums

and they fester in your lungs

because you breathe them in and out

dead skin cells, dead thoughts,

carbon monoxide and recycled stories.

Pain pinches and you remember.

You remember why things have worth.

by E.R. Womelsduff

the past three weeks

2011-06-05T00:48:00.001-07:00

It’s 12:03 a.m.

I should be sleeping deeply right about now; caught in phase three of my nightly REM cycle. I got up early, spent all day hauling firewood from the ground to the wheelbarrow to the truck while my pops and his neighbor, Jesus, actually did the chopping, and then I came home and worked for a few hours on m’laptop. By all rights, I should be tuckered out, shleepy, snoozing, growing Zzzzzzzs outta my eyebrows where tiny gnomes toil by night to inflate those Zs with helium. They’ve obviously never read about the Hindenburg.

Sorry. I’m in an odd mood. Anywho,

I’ve kept the writer chained too long and she is restless. So here I sit, once again, in the dark, typing. There’s something a little Miss Haversham about it.

Which is funny, because the past three weeks have been a sort of idyllic bubble of unadulterated happiness. Why? Well…yeah, I’m gonna have to answer “Phil” on that one.

Four months is a long time to be away from someone. And even when I came back to Azusa, there were some rather pressing things to take up everyone’s time: film premieres, last-minute assignments, and oh yeah—graduation. Not for me, but for half my friends, as well as the One Who’s Name is a Species of Crustacean. So even though I was among everyone I wanted to be around—and let’s face it, there was a certain someone at the top of that list—I wasn’t really an active part of anyone’s life. I was just kind of there…waiting for someone to have five seconds to breathe or sleep or eat, let alone just sit and chat. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t, and am not, upset that everyone was busy. It was just weird to be the only one, for a change, who had time on their hands.

Point is, coming back to Seattle with Phil was like my selfish, delicious little reward for enduring four months of separation. We had no responsibilities for the time he was here—no jobs to worry about, no films to work on, no assignments to turn in.

I can’t remember the last time I was this happy. And I knew it had to end. I knew Phil had to go back to California to start working, and I had to stay in Seattle to find a job, and we’d have to be separated yet again. But I didn’t count on how hard it would be to watch him go. I stayed outside the security checkpoint, watching until he’d waved one last time and disappeared around the corner, and then I staggered back to the parking garage and bawled in the car until I ran out of napkins to cry into and my parking ticket was about to pass the hour mark and charge me another three bucks, which I didn’t have, and my car was running on fumes and I was sure it was going to stall on the freeway and the traffic was a nightmare and Phil was gone and he would be gone for another two and a half months and I hated it and it made my stomach hurt to watch him walk away and it was just ridiculous to love somebody this much.

In Oxford, there was nothing to remind me of Phil except Facebook and the one Polaroid I had of the two of us. Seattle was the same, until three weeks ago. We went to so many places and saw so many things, that virtually everything reminds me of him. It’s hard to even sit in my car and not cry because I keep expecting that when I look over, he’ll be sitting there humming along with the radio, or encouraging me as I fail, yet again, to parallel park downtown, or declaring with no warning, while it’s pouring down rain, “Let’s get ice-cream.”

Who eats ice cream in the rain?

We do.

People stain your life. They change the color of things. And when they leave, very little remains unaffected.

Ding Dong the Bad Man's Dead...

2011-05-02T10:03:00.000-07:00

It is less than 24 hours since Osama bin Laden’s death. Perhaps like walking into school that morning when I was in fourth grade and remembering the exact outfit I was wearing and the tone of light that hit the trees as our music teacher told my mother and me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, I will remember what I was wearing and who I was with when I heard the news of Osama bin Laden’s death.

I’m not a Twitterer. I pretty much stick to Gmail, Facebook, and texting (when my phone decides to like me), but even my limited social networking sites were gushing with people’s reactions to the news. For an interesting look at how this affected media sites and statistics, look at this link: http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/02/technology/osama_bin_laden_internet_traffic/

It seemed that the reactions leapfrogged each other. There were shouts of “Go America!” and “We got him!” followed by arguments over who should get the credit (Obama, Bush, or the Marines), followed by “I’m disgusted.”

My own thoughts are confused.

Osama bin Laden is a bad man. If you really want to argue that point, well…then I’m afraid we’re going to have to agree to disagree. Even if you ignore the 9/11 attacks, and even if you ignore the acts of terrorism he has committed in his own country and in other nations across the globe, you can’t ignore the fact that it has been one of his sole missions to spread hatred. Yes, specifically against the West and capitalism and non-Islamic peoples. But again, even if you ignore that the hatred is targeted mainly at the lifestyles of people who live in countries like the United States, the fact that he is trying to cause dissention and fear at all makes him a person who is doing something terrible. There is enough suffering in the world without someone going out and intentionally spreading more fear.

Not only that, but the hatred against western nations has provoked a backlash—a hatred (stemming from fear of) Islamic nations by western peoples. It is ugly the way that people, specifically in the US, view Islam as a religion, and the people who practice it. As a Christian, I of course do not believe or agree with Islam. However, as a Christian, I believe that one of the most important things Jesus ever said was to love your neighbor as yourself. This does not mean agreeing with them. This does mean respecting them, and it is applicable to any controversy in any country in any time.

So I feel comfortable in concluding that Osama bin Laden is a bad man—for the crimes he has committed against various peoples, for the malice and ill-will he has intentionally spread across the globe, and for the resultant repercussion of hatred that was a natural if entirely regrettable response.

For these reasons, I must also conclude that the world is better off without Osama bin Laden in it. And while I will not say I am “glad he’s dead,” since above all I think it makes me sad and sick that he felt it was necessary to do the kinds of things he did, I will say that I am glad that his negative influence on the world is greatly diminished, and that he personally can no longer continue to hurt anyone.

I don’t know what will happen next. I hope only good things come of this. But I think it is important to remember that what makes us human is more our compassion than it is our hatred. I am not sorry that Osama bin Laden was killed, and I thank the soldiers who were there and had to pull the trigger. It is simply my sincerest hope that with his death comes reconciliation with the people groups that have been held in tension, rather than gloating or obscene celebration.

I think that some men need to be killed. But I think the day that it becomes easy to kill a man is the day that we’ve lost something very valuable.

cowardice and consequence

2011-04-21T20:19:00.000-07:00

I have a growing concern about my future.

There’s the obvious stuff – maintaining my GPA, graduating with the degrees I want, getting a job. But pertinent to all of that—and so much more—is a trend I have noticed about how I confront life. And that’s, sadly enough, the problem—I don’t confront life at all.

This semester abroad was difficult. It was wonderful, and was the most academically satisfying experience I have ever had, but it also made me realize how incredibly scared I am of the world. I’m not talking about walking down the street at night scared (half the time I wish I had an excuse to kick some creep’s ass), I mean walking into a restaurant and ordering a meal on my own scared. I know that doesn’t make sense, but it’s nearly paralyzing for me to do anything on my own, or to try and be assertive in any way. On a personal level, it’s just sort of embarrassing. On a professional level, it’s practically suicidal.

I remember working on Jay and coming across a variety of production issues. And my non-confrontational nature would say, “Okay, that’s not gonna work, let’s go to plan B.” As a director, it’s good to be able to concede, to be flexible. To a point. But in a way, it’s a very bad habit. Because the director is supposed to direct things. When we learned that the actress we wanted to play the character of Jay had a schedule from hell, I said, “Okay, if we can’t book her, we can’t book her.” It was Ford who fought and figured out a way to make her schedule work with ours. When it looked like I wasn’t going to be able to afford to go to Oxford, it was Kelly Grenfall and a lady in the financial aid office who fought on my behalf and pulled extra money out of thin air. When I was sick in England and was too frustrated to figure out how to scrape together enough money to see the doctor, it was our academic advisor, Mark Eaton, who paid out of pocket for me to go and took care of the paperwork for the school insurance to reimburse me.

The conclusion that I’m coming to, that saddens me so much, is that my personality is going to be my downfall. I am more concerned that people are happy, that they get along, that they like me and like each other and like life, than I am with getting things done. I hate rocking the boat. I hate being the cause, or caught in the middle, of any sort of conflict. I have conviction about certain things—in concepts and ideas and morals—but I do not have confidence in myself. I constantly look to others for approval, whether that be in my physical appearance or in my writing or in directorial choices. I had someone tell me on set, “Y’know, it’s not very good when you say, ‘I want this,’ but you make it a question.”

I don’t care how many pairs of boots I buy or how many knives I own or how many times I go to the gun range with my dad—at heart, I am one of the least aggressive people I know. I’m a suppressor—if I get mad, I shove it down, if I get offended, I shove it down, if I’m challenged by a superior force, I back down.

How the hell do I think I’m going to survive in a place like L.A.?

That’s what makes me sad. Is that part of me believes I’d be really, really good at this. I’d make a good writer. I could have a great career and be happy with my work and my life and my accomplishments. But a big part of me knows that if I want that, I’m going to have to fight for it. And if I can’t fight for my decisions on a student-run film set, how the hell am I going to fight for a job, or an interview, or a script idea? There’s no way I could be a show-runner. They have to make decisions. And they have to back up those decisions with plans, with results. They have to have balls of steel. I’m just not that girl.

And I hate that I’m not that girl. I really want to be that girl. I want to be able to walk into an interview with full confidence and say, “You’re going to hire me because I am the best person for this job.” Half the time people can’t hear me because I’m muttering or stuttering or my heart is racing so bad my voice gets drowned in adrenaline and I can’t say anything at all in my defense.

Maybe that’s why I liked Oxford so much. Just me and a professor in an office drinking tea and talking about the Voluspa or Piers Plowman. No pressure. Just hundreds of thousands of pounds of words and paper and silence.

I feel like I used to be so outgoing. When I was a kid, I used to ask my parents if I could have the seat on the plane that wasn’t sitting next to them, so I could engage strangers in conversation. I would chat up adults for two hours and write short stories in my little spiral-bound notebook with whoever had the seat next to me. I was so happy and fearless and knew I could do anything I wanted to. When I was eleven, I wrote a screenplay and checked out books from the library on how to be an independent filmmaker, and called businesses and wrote letters asking for funding. It didn’t work, but it didn’t matter, because I knew that someday, I would be a filmmaker, and I would be great at it.

Here I am, ten years later, embarrassed on behalf of my eleven-year-old-self. I feel like if the kid I was could see me now, she wouldn’t recognize me.

I don’t know what happened. I don’t know when I started being such a coward about everything. I don’t understand why I would rather sit in my room for hours on end instead of go outside and do something. I don’t know why confrontation nearly makes me hyperventilate. I don’t understand how I can get so mad sometimes, and say so little.

In addition to the cowardice is the guilt.

Hollywood is all about selling yourself. You have to be able to market yourself as a product in order to get a job. You have to prove that you, as a commodity, are better than all the other products out there. I cannot do that. I cannot look someone in the face and tell them that I am better than everyone out there. I cannot say why I deserve this job (whatever the job may be), because the truth is, I don’t feel like I deserve this job. I don’t feel like I deserve much of anything.

It’s incapacitating. I feel so angry at myself for being this pathetic. And so mad that I can’t predict a better future. I make minimum wage. I have no concept of making more than minimum wage. In LA, you need a car. Buying a car requires “having money.” It also requires insurance, and gas, and maintenance, and repairs for flat tires and busted mufflers and air conditioning that fritzes out. And an apartment. After college, how am I supposed to afford an apartment? How am I supposed to afford one now?

Everything feeds into everything. And I feel like if I don’t do something incredible with my life, there are so many people I am going to let down. I cried on my 20^th birthday because I hadn’t done anything yet. I hadn’t become some sort of prodigy. And that may sound narcissistic, and it is, but I feel like I’ve already been waiting so long to start paying people back. I mean, you just take and take and take from your family and your teachers and your friends until you can support yourself, but it doesn’t ever seem like I’m going to be able to do that. And I hate that it feels like I was being selfish by choosing to major in something that I cared about instead of something that could have made me money right off the bat. What am I going to do with an English major, or a Cinema major? You can’t do anything with those degrees. You don’t get hired in Hollywood because you made a couple student films, and you don’t sell novels because you took a couple writing courses. I hate that I feel like I’ve been wasting my time on things that aren’t going to make a difference, no matter how much I enjoyed the learning.

So many of my friends are graduating in two weeks. And they all seem to have some sort of plan. And I have a plan, of sorts, but they actually seem capable of achieving theirs. They seem incredibly competent. They have spines. They are equipped to tackle Hollywood head-on. I keep waiting for inspiration to strike, for some A-ha! moment to hit me and make me super-confidant in myself and my abilities, but I only get more and more frightened as time passes. I came to college not necessarily bursting with conviction, but at least optimistic. Now I just feel defeated.

Because I don’t know how to be a writer. And I don’t know how to magically make myself everything I need to be to survive. And I don’t know what it means to be a Christian or an artist or a friend or even an academic. As much as I loved Oxford, the main thing it taught me is how stupid I truly am. Every time I turn I around, I see something else about myself that is entirely insufficient. Even all the praise that Jay is getting for its festival success is completely misdirected—Ford is the one who did everything festival-related while working three jobs and producing another film. I may have written and directed the film, but I was a very small part of the reason the film turned out the way it did, and I know, I know I could have done so much better as a director.

This is the first time I’ve had to admit that I’m probably not cut out for this, and that just…it’s crushing.

that kind of girl

2011-04-04T10:01:00.000-07:00

Lyrics inspired by a story I heard today.

Love me if you dare

I’m just that kind of girl.

Fire and flame and fear and everything will blur.

But when the slow song comes on

I’ll only let you hold me til it’s midnight, then I gotta fly away

past the second star to the right while Big Ben rings,

before the spell breaks and we’re normal in our everyday things

in your worn-down shoes and my patchwork prom gown,

in this old and dusty, ancient town.

So love me if you dare,

but know I’ll never stick around.

Love is patient, love is kind, stop the tape and let’s rewind.

Love is hot and love is cold, but darling know you can’t grow old with me

‘Cuz I’m just not that kind of girl.

I’ll only let you so far in

and then you gotta watch me walk away again

Like moonbeams on the road, I grow pale and then grow cold

and when the sun comes, I will fade away

and you’ll learn to forget me,

and you’ll learn to forgive me,

and you’ll learn why I couldn’t stay.

‘Cuz I was tired of these worn-out jeans

and I needed more than these small-town dreams

and I knew you’d never ask for more

than whatever came to your front door.

So I chose to leave you now instead of then

to break your heart a little less.

And I hate it when you say:

Love is patient, love is kind—darling stop talking rainbows and sunshine

because love is hard and love is mean and love will take away everything.

So love me if you dare,

‘cuz I’m just that kind of girl.

spring cleaning / homecoming

2011-03-24T06:40:00.000-07:00

I have the windows open. I’m wearing shorts and a tank top. I just came back from Paris and Oxford is in its own embryonic spring. It’s 60 degrees. I’ve spent the past three full days in bed, sick as a dog. It’s nice to wake up, realize you’ve slept all the way through the night, that you can breathe for once, and that your stomach isn’t killing you.

You know how much it sucks to be sick when the first thing you do upon feeling better is laundry.

I’m washing my sheets, I’m washing my clothes, I have good 90s music playing, I have a Big Bang episode queuing up, I’m drinking water, and I’m in a great mood.

When I was in Paris, I thought, “I could live in Paris.”

A week later, I think I want to take that back. It’s not so much that I miss home as that I have a home to return to. Why would I want to live in Paris? What does Paris have that could possibly make me happier than I already am? Yeah, it’s got the Arc d’Triumph. It’s got the Eiffel Tower and the catacombs and Pere Lachaise and half a dozen other awesome monuments and museums and whatnot. But every city has something that makes it unique. And it’s wonderful to get the opportunity to see those different things. But just because one place is incredibly beautiful doesn’t mean that I need to transplant myself because the new place is somehow “more important” or even cooler just because it’s older or has spiffier buildings.

Seattle is home for me. I suppose if all my friends and family moved away from there, I would eventually lose my deep attachment to it. But for all intents and purposes, it is where I almost always want to be, no matter where I am. I am so excited to actually be able to spend the entire summer there this year. To get to go over anytime I want and see my sister and my niece. To bake. To go to the beach. Go to the shooting range with my dad. Sew for a week straight with my mom. Cruise downtown with Kirsten. Catch up with old high school friends at Karkeek or Golden Gardens or the movie theatre. Sing in the car at the top of my lungs because I’m the one driving for a change. Drink Mountain Dew under the mild Seattle sun and tan in my Target-brand bathing suit and sleep and brew cup after cup of coffee with everyone I know in Seattle, because it’s Seattle, and everyone drinks coffee. Billiards with Piatt and Melissa, tattoo designing, revising Velvet, having the time and space and breath to churn out another feature or fine-tune Disconnect.

I am so excited to come home. I am so excited. How many times can I type that?

Seattle, friends, family. I’ll be there soon. Love from across the Atlantic,

Catacomb

2011-03-17T16:07:00.000-07:00

Look at the bones,

ten hundred femurs mortared with skulls,

The avenue of the dead is dim

and we walk it breathing moist air in

and the ceiling is low and it’s quiet ahead.

You can touch them. Touch their eyes,

their knees, their jaws, their chins.

And we will soon be like them,

stacked up bones in a catacomb,

82 steps downstairs, under the subway and the sewer lines,

under the roots and the pipes and the prayers.

I think of your skin, I try and picture you bare,

but without it you’re dead, for your flesh makes you fair,

and I prefer you with it on, and warm,

and it’s rather cold down here, my dear.

Still and damp and without cheer.

Look at the bones,

ten million femurs, all unknown.

But I know your name,

and that is the difference between you and them,

the difference between life and death,

the difference, my love, between bones and flesh.

Ten million bones in the catacombs,

but I go with you back up to the sun,

for that is where the living belong.

Paris

2011-03-15T15:45:00.000-07:00

Where do I begin? Well. I’m in Paris. That might be a nice place to start.

We left our apartment at 6:30am Saturday, got on a bus to Luton at 7, got to the airport at 9, boarded at 11:55 and arrived in France at 2pm (French time; they’re an hour ahead of England apparently).

Hour bus to the Arc d’Triumph, 4 minute walk north, 3 minutes of 5 flights of stairs, and we were in our apartment for the week. And holy goodness, it’s adorable.

Traveling is a lot different than I thought it would be. When Nicole and I arrived in London and stayed there for a week, we were jet-lagged, exhausted, and virgin international travelers. It was a fun week, but it was stressful, and I wasn’t even the one doing any of the planning. Being in Paris has, so far, been a completely different experience. Besides one hiccup at the Easy Jet check-in counter (where my “carry-on” luggage apparently didn’t count as carry-on and I had to check it for 20 pounds each way [read $65]), getting to France was completely stressless.

Since we’ve been here, there have been no major mishaps (besides being stuck outside our apartment door for 20 minutes because our key wouldn’t work). My futon-bed is comfortable, our espresso maker makes a mean cup of joe in 20 seconds or less, our view is great, our stairs are spiraled, we’re 5 minutes from the Arc d’Triumph, 20 from the Eiffel Tower, and found out we are capable of walking the entire length of the city in a few hours. Today, we had wine, baguettes, cheese, and salami on the grass beneath the Eiffel Tower, then took a nap, then played Bullshit under the Parisian spring sunshine. I was wearing a t-shirt. It was glorious.

Basically, this week has been as close to perfect as a vacation can get. It did cost quite a bit more than I thought it would, so I’m most likely changing my plane ticket back to the US for a week earlier, but I’ll still have 12 days to travel here once our official quasi-secondary-term is over.

In other news, Britainne, Tyler, and I turned in our capstone pitch today. It’s an awesome first-draft-of-a-script and I think it could be really fun to work on, and really funny to watch, which is a change from the doom-and-gloom, everybody-gets-raped-or-abandoned-and-hates-their-lives stories/films that I usually write/work on. A comedy. Who’da thunk?

The other cool thing is, even if we’re not chosen, I’m totally cool working on someone else’s capstone as a production designer or something. It’d be fun to take on a completely different role and get more across-the-board experience. As long as I’m doing something creative, I’m happy.

Speaking of, I’ve been busy designing tattoos for friends this semester. I wanted to do one for myself as well (because how cool would it be to come back from Europe with a custom-designed tattoo as a souvenir?) but no inspiration has been striking for a design of my own. Which is fine, because I have a general rule about tattoos: if I design something, I have to wait 6 months to see if I still really like the design/meaning/symbolism/placement before I’m allowed to get it. Which is sort of why I still only have the one tattoo. But I still like that tattoo, so my rule seems to be doing pretty well so far.

In other news, my niece and nephew turned 1 recently. I bought them both adorable little shirts at Primark for a pound apiece. They’re both getting so big, I hardly recognize them anymore. At least I’ll get to see Amelia when I come home this summer.

I’m jumping around. I just took a shower. I meant mentally jumping around. Physically, I took a shower. Places still to go in Paris: the Bastille, the Louvre, Perlachise, the catacombs, and some sort of café. I just ate a bowl of cereal. It’s 11:41 at night. Mmmmm….

I haven’t taken a shower in two months. It’s been really nice to take a shower here in Paris. In Oxford, I only have a bath, with a shower head thing, which makes washing my hair really difficult. I really like showers.

I also love espresso. Holy con carne, it’s good. I want some now, but I also want to go to bed, and the two are sort of incompatible.

Paris is beautiful. Amen.

Oxford Denouement

2011-03-11T09:50:00.000-08:00

So this is my last tutorial essay ever, and the one that satisfied me the most. My professor puts check marks nexts to points that I hit particularly spot-on, and I counted 37 this time, which is about 30 more than I usually get, so that made me feel super warm and academically fuzzy. He also said that if I ever wanted a recommendation for grad school, he'd be happy to give me one, and a recommendation from an Oxford professor tends to carry a lot of weight, so while I still have no idea if I want to attend grad school, the possibility of getting in is that much more attainable now. Anywho, point is, I really enjoyed writing this essay, which was sort of the perfect way to end the term. Enjoy.

Both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were the leading experts on medieval literature and mythology in their day, and it is that very study of and appreciation for the literature of the Middle Ages which permeated their own later fiction and was a direct source of their works’ international and trans-generational success. Thus an appreciation of medieval literature enhances our understanding of Lewis and Tolkien's fiction specifically because it reveals each author’s deep familiarity with and use of medieval Christian allegory, mythic fantasy elements, and the structure of the heroic adventure. Through C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, we shall see how the allegory, fantasy, and adventure in the novels all owe themselves to the medieval study of literature each author engaged in prior to becoming world-famous novelists.

Like the Gawain poet, both Lewis and Tolkien used a highly entertaining story to explore the promises of Christian doctrine in contrast to the often bleak or hopeless reality of everyday life. Coming out of a devastating world war, it is not unreasonable to say that both authors were looking for a way to reconcile the God and faith they believed in with the atrocities of genocide, bombings, and the pain of death, illness, and injury, and even the despair or guilt of survival. In Tolkien’s Return of the King, Frodo, after coming home from the “war,” he has completed (with the help of Sam and Gollum) the task he set out to do: namely, the final destruction of the Ring. But he is something like a Holocaust survivor, unable to relate to his former life or share in the joys of the people he left behind who have no frame of reference for the things he has seen and lived through.

While many parallels can be drawn between Lewis and Tolkien’s personal experiences of war and their treatment of war in their stories, the more prevalent parallels are found in the allegory that hides under the surface of their fantastical settings. Since allegory was such a prominent literary device in the middle ages, and since both Lewis and Tolkien spent the majority of their lives immersed in the study of medieval literature, it is no wonder that their own fictions are layered through not only with borrowed dragons and dwarves and treasures of the poems, ballads, and lays they knew so well, but with a strong undertone of Christian allegory, however consciously or unconsciously they structured their narratives with it. They also both pulled specific fantasy elements from a wide range of medieval literary sources, as well as structuring their novels after Beowulf and the adventures in Sir Gawain—i.e., in the form of a quest. Beowulf quested for wealth and glory, Gawain for honor and duty, Frodo specifically to destroy the Ring and generally to save the world, and the children in Narnia to save the land and peoples of Narnia. The allegory, the fantasy, and the adventure all reinforce and strengthen one another on a literary level, and feed from and into one another from a wellspring of medieval sources and inspirations.

It is difficult to come across any adult reader of C. S. Lewis who has not heard that Aslan is a Christ-figure. Knowledge of Lewis’ religion and subsequent academic study has made the Christian allusions almost a given. But the depth and breadth of the allegory in even the first book of the Narnia chronicles is far greater than one might think. The difficulty in understanding Lewis’ allegory, however, comes with the meaning of the word allegory itself. Many critics contest that Lewis was comically or irritatingly ignorant of the fact that his own work held allegorical meaning, as he seems to have plainly stated that it did not in various letters and publications. Others have said that his definition of allegory is completely wrong, or at best, too narrow. What is difficult to perceive, and what many critics seem to miss, is that there are multiple levels and types of allegory. Plain allegory makes one thing stand for another. In the Pearl poem, written by the same author as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the narrator has literally lost a pearl. Allegorically, he has “lost” his young daughter (his “pearl”) to death. On the next level of allegory, he has lost that which the pearl (his daughter) represents: innocence, and the faith that abides so naturally at its side. If the pearl/daughter belongs to the narrator, and he has lost it/her, then he has lost his own innocence and faith. So, too, can Lewis’ works be read in multiple layers or steps.

Leonard F. Wheat argues that there are fifty-two allegorical symbols in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe alone (11). While he asserts the fairly common ideas that the Witch is Satan and the Professor is God (and by association, the Witch’s castle is hell and the Professor’s house is the kingdom of heaven on earth [64]), it is also worthwhile to point out that the White Witch can serve the heroic quest archetype of the final foe, and the Professor can serve as the shaman or guide. While Lewis is drawing on fairly direct biblical parallels, he is also drawing on mythic prototypes from all across ancient heroic literature. Luckily Wheat does not slip into a Freud- or Jungian analysis where the wardrobe is symbol for the womb and rebirth or the Witch is seen as some maternal Oedipal figure of repressed sexual desire: “The wardrobe is simply a story device for getting someone from one world to another—like Alice’s rabbit hole, Dorothy’s Kansas tornado, [or] science fiction and fantasy ‘gates’” (67). Lewis did not study Freud or Jung and therefore while symbols of such a kind may be found, they are merely accidental and bear no relevance to Lewis’ intended effect. Other allegorical parallels permeate the text to such an extent that to name them all would take perhaps an entire book (and indeed, Wheat spends dozens of pages doing just that in his book Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: a Multiple Allegory: attacking religious superstition in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Paradise Lost). To summarize the larger allegorical layers across the span of the book:

LWW’s surface story tells the hidden story of a journey by humans (the four children) who are guided by a minister (Mr. Beaver) to Jesus (Aslan), becoming converts to Christianity in the process, and who then struggle through the quagmire of Christian mythology. The struggle includes battles with Satan, sin and redemption, a savior’s death and resurrection, the harrowing of Hell, Revelation’s apocalypse with its Four Horsemen, and finally salvation—life with god (the Professor) in the earthly Kingdom of God. (Wheat 84)

But allegory is not the only thing Lewis incorporated from his study of medieval literature. It is, at its heart, a children’s fantasy book, in the sense that it is a story written for children constructed of fantastical, other-worldly elements. While Aslan may be a symbol for Christ, he is also a talking lion, and, having been one of the children to whom the story was read, it was his talking (as a lion) rather than his allegorical association with Jesus that held me captive as I lay in bed every night listening. While I have not found any direct antecedents for a talking lion in medieval literature (other than, of course, the image of the lion laying down with the lamb in the Bible), there are a host of other magical creatures that Lewis incorporated: fauns and giants and tree spirits and satyrs and centaurs as well as the evil dwarves and wolves and all manner of evil beings. He also gave the Pevensey children mythical gifts: Peter’s sword (reminiscent of any of a dozen mythical swords, not least of which is Arthur’s sword-in-the-stone) and Lucy’s healing cordial (which could have connections back to potions or the draught of poetry that Odin wins from the dwarves in Norse mythology or any such mythical elixir), to name a few. There is also the wardrobe itself, the magical portal between worlds, like the bridge separating Asgard and Midgard, the fairy mounds leading into the world of faerie, or the boundary between countries in The Knight of the Cart which allows people in but does not allow them to leave. And as in all good heroic adventures, the structure of the story itself follows that of Sir Gawain or Beowulf: the children leave their home for a foreign and fantastic land, face dangers and endure battles and hardships, acquire that which they came for, and return home all the richer (and wiser) for having had the adventure.

Also borrowed is the idea of the hero. But both Lewis and Tolkien take the hero a step further than any of their medieval predecessors. Where the Beowulf poet may very well have regarded the hero as noble and praiseworthy, he viewed him as tragically lacking a personal relationship with God. Therefore, no matter how heroic or good a king he was, there was always a sense of sadness surrounding a hero who was so close to the ideal, and yet so far away. Lewis, in setting his tale in (his) modern time, but also in an alternate world, was free to complete the heroic cycle with a Christian aspect without having to remain explicitly Christian. Where the Beowulf poet lamented his inability to guarantee where Beowulf’s soul would end up, Lewis can allow his children to return back to the real world and the professor will full confidence in their final, eventual resting place. And if the children are heroes on one hand, so too is Aslan. He embodies the greatest ideals of the old medieval (and pagan, pre-medieval) hero: martial valor and kingly responsibility. But where Beowulf and even Sir Gawain would die for honor and glory willingly (and Sir Gawain would even die in defense of the physical safety or honor of a lady), Aslan does die willingly and horrifically, and not for a lady or a fellow warrior, but for someone who in no code or law deserves it: for a traitor; someone despicable in heroic, chivalric, and religious terms. If a progression of the ideal hero were said to begin with the unrealized Gilgamesh and his unchecked martial prowess, on through the selfish and yet communal need for wealth and fame in kings like Beowulf, and even through the chivalric ideal of Arthur and his knights, then the hero is, perhaps, “completed” in the “person” of Aslan: wholly good, wise, and, most importantly, selfless; even to the point of death for the least of his people. A far cry from the violent and sexual rampages of the untamed Gilgamesh.

Tolkien was similarly influenced by his medieval studies, although his allegory is far less apparent and perhaps less intentional or abundant. Where Aslan is the obvious Christ-figure in Narnia, the role of Jesus seems to be split amongst several characters, the most obvious of which is Gandalf, as he is dragged down into “hell” (in the mines of Moria) to fight with the demon-esque Balrog. After this death-and-resurrection-esque scene, he returns, transformed, as Gandalf the White, which carries with it some potent Christ imagery. By turns, however, Jesus can be seen in the temptation and sacrifice of Boromir (he nearly takes the ring, resembling the temptation of Christ in the desert, but resists and then gives his life to protect Frodo, resembling Jesus’ sacrificial death), the reluctant kingship of the ranger Aragorn (in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus asked for the cup to be taken from him if possible), and the self-sacrifice of Frodo as he alone carried the weight of the ring, a burden which no one else could possibly fathom, or, indeed, endure (just as Jesus carried the weight of his own divinity and knowledge that he must one day die in an extremely painful manner).

Beyond the polymorphous Christ figures, there are a variety of allegorical references. The Mines of Moria can be seen as a sort of hell, or gateway to hell; Sauron is obviously a Satan-figure; the Hobbits can be the meek of the earth as well, perhaps, as the children that Jesus calls to his side (and if we are to take Gandalf as a Jesus figure, it is no coincidence that he loves spending time with the Hobbits and finds something innocent in them that he cannot find in any other race); the orcs can be seen either as pure demons or as the unnatural offspring of fallen angels (i.e. the Nephalim or giants or the Old Testament) since they are “birthed” from mucous-sacs from the bodies of fallen elves; Mt. Doom can be seen as either another hell or as the Christian idea of the “refining fire” through which men must be purged or destroyed (here Frodo fails and gives in to the temptation of the ring, but Sam is found perpetually stalwart); as well as countless others. In his essay in the book J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle Earth, Charles W. Nelson suggests that each particular race represents one of the seven deadly sins: dwarves stand for greed, men for pride, elves for envy, ents for sloth, hobbits for gluttony, Wormtongue for lechery, and orcs for anger (84), but this reading seems far too simple on one hand and blatant on the other—Tolkien tended toward subtlety in his religious allusions rather than predetermined and obvious object-for-object symbolism (i.e. “men are Pride personified, hobbits are Gluttony).

While the allegorical allusions are slightly more difficult to point to with any definite conclusion, the mythical elements are far easier to trace back to their sources. Stuart D. Lee and Elizabeth Solopova highlight many of the origins of Tolkien’s fantasy creatures and objects in The Keys of Middle-Earth: Discovering Medieval Literature Through the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien. His dwarves hail back to the Voluspa (60), many of the names—including that of Gandalf (meaning “staff elf”)—come from old Nordic genealogies (65), and even the idea that names can “reflect the personality of their bearers” comes from Old English poetry (51) and are present in the title and adjacent personality of nearly every character in Lord of the Rings. They also point out that Tolkien pulls material from Sir Orfeo (the Elves at Rivendell), The Ruin (Legolas’ “Lament of the Stones”), The Fight at Finnsburg (The Fight at Balin’s Tomb), the Pearl (The Crossing of Nimrodel), Beowulf (Boromir’s Death and the Rohirrim), Maxims II (Treebeard’s List), The Battle of Maldon and Homily on the Maccabees (the Death of Theodon and the Arrival of the Mumakil), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (the Landscape of Mordor), and finally, The Seafarer (the Final Journey [Lee, Solopova; table of contents]), and these only scratch the surface of the corpus of literature Tolkien had available to him to fashion his Middle-earth (Midgard, perhaps?). They even suggest that Tolkien “presents us with a mythology that could explain why our medieval ancestors believed in elves, dwarves and dragons (to pick but a few examples)” (10).

Where much of the Christian allegory rides fairly close to the surface in Lewis’ work, Tolkien’s is a bit harder to find. And it is possibly for very good reason. Like his predecessors, Tolkien wanted to tell both a captivating story and a story that dealt with the intricacies of the Christian faith. As George Clarks says:

Following his creative predecessor [the Beowulf poet], Tolkien set LR in what can be seen as a time before the Incarnation, possibly even in the time of the patriarchs, yet the wiser characters in LR, as in Beowulf and some of the sagas, are aware of the presence of a force they cannot name (40).

Especially coming out of the Second World War, “The hero and the heroism Tolkien sought were meant to justify the ways of a hidden God to a world that felt the power of evil” (Clark 39). But to justify that hidden God, Tolkien could not use the inadequate hero of medieval myth. Like Lewis, the structure of his stories mimicked the heroic adventure of the literary Middle Ages. While The Hobbit is fairly light-hearted, with the heroes actively seeking adventure and volunteering for the quest of gold and fame (highly similar to tales like Beowulf, and, by association, similar to that type of hero), the Lord of the Rings trilogy features a host of reluctant heroes, a quest of destruction (of the ring) rather than acquisition, and a defensive rather than offensive battle strategy. And for these altered circumstances, an altered hero is required. As Clark says, “Tolkien knew and loved the literature that preserved the heroic ethos of the old Germanic world, but he could not accept the heroic vision of man’s fate or the traditional heroes represented in those literatures. His fantasy fiction rewrites heroic literature and the hero” (40).

Just as the allegorical role of Christ can be found in the multiple figures of Gandalf, Aragorn, and Frodo, so too can the role of hero be distributed among them. But if we are to look for the new, idealized hero—Tolkien’s Middle-Earth equivalent to Aslan—then we might be better to look beyond the three obvious protagonists to a much-overlooked Hobbit by the name of Samwise Gamgee. If Aslan is wholly good, wholly wise, and wholly selfless, then Sam is his closest Middle-Earth parallel. Gandalf, Aragorn, Elrond, and Galadriel—while authoritative, magically and/or martially powerful, and wise—all recognize the inescapable fact that they are not selfless enough to endure the temptation the ring offers them, powerful as they are. They are not Aslans, though they appear to be at first glance. Neither, entirely, is Frodo. He comes very close, but it must be remembered that it is Sam, not Frodo, who never once entertains the idea of using the ring for his own purposes. It is Sam who is stalwart, faithful, and selfless to the bitter end. While the Beowulfs and Gawains and Gandalfs have wonderful, fame-accruing battles and quests, it is Sam who quietly plods on through miserable, dull footpaths, cooking meals, gathering water, and keeping Frodo safe and fed and warm. He is not handsome or articulate or exceptional in any way except for his extreme loyalty and humility. But if the ideal hero is Aslan, and if Aslan is allegorically Christ, then Sam is, in an odd way, perhaps both the closest Jesus parallel as well as the most “ideal” hero in the trilogy. While Jesus in many ways lived an exciting life performing miracles and traveling and speaking to large crowds, he was neither attractive nor politically or martially powerful. He did not fight in battles or accrue self-glory or wealth. He constantly put himself in a subservient position to the least of the people around him. These are all qualities Sam carries with him from beginning to end. Aslan does not change from beginning to end: he is as he is, as is Jesus. In many ways, Sam, too, remains essentially himself from the start of the quest to its conclusion.

While it is true that “Tolkien sought a true hero motivated by a heroic ideal consistent with his own religious and moral ideals…he could not rid himself of his desire for the glorious heroes of old” (39) as George Clark says in J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle Earth. And while Tolkien did have those types of medievally-inspired heroes throughout his tale (even Frodo gets to fight every now and then), he also included a hero who was “better” than they; a hero absent of ambition. And it was this hero who was instrumental in getting the ring-bearer to Mt. Doom. Without Sam, Frodo would have failed. Without Sam, Middle-Earth would have fallen. In the end, Frodo could not overcome the temptation of the ring, and Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, and Aragorn, while valiant and willing to face death, are not the ones who turn the tide of battle.

But while Tolkien needed a new hero to complement his bevy of traditional heroes, he did not, in the end, abandon the medieval sources in his quest for Christian revision. As Solopova and Lee point out, even the fact that Frodo fails in the end, is a throwback to Gawain failing in his quest (27). Both of them very nearly succeed and only make small transgressions (or, in Frodo’s case, a larger transgression, but only at the end of a very long time of not giving in to temptation). Both of them are punished slightly for it—Gawain with a nick on the neck and Frodo with a missing finger—and both return to their homes disquieted and unable to adopt their former peace of mind. At the end of the quest, Frodo, Gawain, and even the narrator of the Pearl continue on knowing that good has triumphed over evil, but at immeasurable personal cost. Gawain says that he would rather die than live with the shame, the Pearl narrator laments that he cannot be with his pearl (i.e. dead and in heaven), and Frodo goes off into the Undying Lands (a sort of afterlife).

In both Lord of the Rings and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, there is a sense of bittersweet victory. The heroes have been changed by the quest, forever. And having loved and fought for Narnia, having realized a dark truth at Mt. Doom, life can never be the same, for better or for worse. If the children in Lewis’ story are allegorically supposed to return to the Professor’s house as Christians, it is not to a completely happy, idyllic life that they return. If anything, now fully understanding the truth of their religion (the truth of Aslan, the truth of Narnia and good and evil and sin and betrayal and war), they are bound to that knowledge, and bound to the responsibility that comes with it, and with the completion of that knowledge is the understanding that they cannot return either to Narnia or to their life before Narnia. Frodo, having come face-to-face with his own fallibility and inherent darkness, cannot simply life live in the same innocent, care-free manner that he once enjoyed.

Thus, as Christians and as students of medieval literature, both Lewis and Tolkien chose to structure and model their stories from the medieval sources they had available to them, and thus it is through an understanding of those sources that we come to a better understanding of the works of two of the most influential fiction writers of the modern age.

Works Cited

Evans, Jonathan, Roger C. Schlobin, and Charles W. Nelson. J.R.R. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Views of Middle-earth. Ed. George Clark and Daniel Timmons. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000. Print.

Lee, Stuart D., and Elizabeth Solopova. The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print.

Powell, Barry B. Classical Myth. New York [u.a.: Pearson Longman, 2009. Print.

Wheat, Leonard F. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials--a Multiple Allegory: Attacking Religious Superstition in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Paradise Lost. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2008. Print.

Infection

2011-02-28T03:48:00.001-08:00

Most of the time, despite the worries and the uncertainties that any person has to live with on a daily basis, life is still pretty good.

There are certain things, though, that infect me, giving physical symptoms to emotional viruses. I don’t know if this is peculiar to me or if everyone experiences it, but regardless, it frickin’ sucks. No, I’m not talking about depression. I’m talking about tension; the kind of quarrels that wind you up like too-tuned guitar strings on the verge of snapping.

Except they’re not fights, they’re far more subtle than that. It’s nuance, it’s inflection, it’s the angle of someone’s smile and the pitch of their voice. It’s understanding what someone really means underneath what they’re saying. It’s intrigue, it’s the politics of friendship and the currency of every workplace.

It’s in the moments when I realize how malicious people really are that I think I actually hate life. Depression is manageable in the end because it comes from me; at the heart of things, I control it. This is another matter. This is being at mercy of someone else’s mood.

I can talk to almost anyone and not get truly offended by almost anything they have to say (unless, of course, it is your average cat-caller or “hey-girl”er and then I just want to punch them in the face). But the thing I cannot abide is blatant disrespect. There is no room in my patience for rudeness, arrogance, or intentional viciousness. The world is shitty enough without people making other people feel crappy just because they have the power to do so.

Gossip is a tricky line to tread. Sometimes something happens and you need to talk with someone else about it to get perspective on the situation. Sometimes you just want the juicy details. Wholehearted back-stabbing or bashing is another thing that does not make it on my List of Things I Will be Patient With.

I love art. I love what it can do, I love that in order to grow you have to be given rules, and sometimes the best thing that can happen is to realize that there are better rules. I hate artists who think they’re God’s gift to humankind. That sort of egocentric narcissism, for me, negates whatever work of art they did because I cannot separate what was done from who did the doing. Self-adoration and deification also do not make my list.

I guess what I’m angry about is that humility seems to have just disappeared. Not everywhere, not in all people, but for this moment, at least, it’s just gone. Whatever happened to grace, giving people the space and the breath to be human? When did we start expecting perfection from the very start, and when did we start insulting those who can’t meet our own inhuman standards?

I’m frustrated. It’s about time we all grew up and stopped using childish manipulations to get the upper hand. Not everything in life is a competition. Not everything has to be won. Not everything has to be fought for. Being an adult is knowing when to let someone else be better than you. Being an adult is not demanding control every moment of the day. Let’s throw some fucking empathy in the mix, people, and see where we end up.

blue pill

2011-02-20T15:30:00.000-08:00

Ah dread! they cry, Ah dread! The exclamation points

are getting to your head. Calm down, here, take

a pill instead. No use in rants and raves;

relax, we’re all granted the same chance

to lie in the same grave. Oh, did you mean

to save yourself? Oh how wonderful! How quaint!

Watch those exclamation marks. No one’s

as saintly as they seem; not priests or popes

or children’s dreams. Take the pill, take the blue pill please,

and fall back into your pink pea pod

and radiate your heat, and bleed. Alice,

she is our goddess, our progenitor,

and we sacrificed her to the Red Queen.

She screamed and screamed, what a truly true queen,

worthy of our courtly love and our courtly sighs

and miens.

How lean you look, no don’t respond—I promise

you’ll feel numb anon if you do as the Romans did

and get the groove of the emperor on. The red? No, no,

the blue. The Red Queen’s dead, we

sacrificed her, too.

What does it do? Ah, your questions do amuse,

what does it not? is the better to ask, and no reply better

than that of the Mad Hatter. This latter is a matter

of no importance; I deal in Do-Re-Mes and parlour tricks, too;

the hats were a thing of the pre-pill past so enough about me,

let’s talk about you. I really do urge you to try the blue.

Give me your vision and I’ll make it come true.

How? I speak Machine and they are quite keen

to keep us entertained. They twitch and jar and

tweak and scar the surface of our brains until our

very fantasies are naught but gray cerebral stains.

I told you the blue will make you numb,

it takes away the pain of all your exclamation points—

so sharp your thoughts and agonies! I fear you must refrain.

Quick, queer friend, I urge you now to wash away your name—

much better anonymity in the faceless, rageless rave

where the lights will never cease to rove and the dancers never change.

And the music always beats in time and the dream is

sweet and sick and strange. But better, oh yes better,

than your deranged exclamations. All your frustrations,

your fears and your foibles, the flirtations that flopped

and the ovations that never came, the sensations you summoned

that limped past lame. Imagine what the blue can do for you:

no more applications for unreachable aspirations,

no emotional amputations, no weak

and pitiful compensations, no more dull and insipid

conversations.

Just eternal relaxation, no highs or lows or deviations.

No more exclamation marks. No more sparks or frustrating

false-starts.

Take the blue, friend, take the blue. Just know that

it will take you, too.

I have biscuits. I have tea. That should be more than enough.

2011-02-20T13:27:00.000-08:00

I would begin by saying that I have some urgent information to convey to you, but the complete truth is I am stalling. The poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight awaits me downstairs in a book with a split spine and my eyes get twitchy whenever I read the words “priceless pearl” too many times.

What to say, then, to fill the time? I’ve given in to a few indulgences. For a month and a half I did not buy a single item that I would bring back with me to America. Every purchase consisted of something I would either eat or drink. Last week, then, in the spirit of pure youthful rebelliousness, I ventured into the Mythical Primark and bought a wonderful pair of boots for eight pounds and scurried home in my sinful glee.

Today, I rewarded myself again (Primark is fast becoming the haunt of my earthly temptations) and bought a pair of olive cowboy boots for three pounds (I mean dear sweet Lord in heaven, it would practically be a travesty not to buy them; I can’t buy a cup of coffee for that cheap) as well as two waist belts for a total of a seven pound purchase. A meal at your average Oxford restaurant will cost at least eight pounds. I felt justified.

Is it silly that I want to go to a ball? The tickets are outrageously (and understandably) priced, so it hasn’t even crossed my mind as a possibility. Like Cinderella I sit at home huddled in my cold room reading epic poetry and wishing some fairy godmother would bestow me with a spun-glass gown and some Gucci heels. And then I think of the Starving Children and the Diseased and Impoverished and feel guilty. I have biscuits. I have tea. That should be more than enough.

But a ball would be lovely. Except that the dream would be incomplete as I left my better half at home. Even if I could afford it, it seems somehow less grand to go alone when there is someone you would very much wish to bring.

I am squirmy. Part of it is my eyesight. It is becoming increasingly difficult to just sit down and read anything, and part of it has to do with the removed and exuberant lingual style of the texts I have set for myself: The Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, The Prose Edda, Arthurian romances, etc. etc. Not exactly like whipping through a nice Janet Evanovich. I’m sure there are moments of humor in the Romance of the Rose, but, well…it is a very lot of description of trees and things, and I’m afraid the dramatic tension has been lost in translation of time. The other part of it is the sight itself—I honestly think I need glasses. And reading 10-15 books a week is sort of aggravating the blurriness.

The other edge to the squirminess is this mild yet pervasive discontent. Things are worrying me. Capstone, graduation requirements, applications to community colleges and the transferring of units, petitions for catalogue replacements, housing for senior year, financials, going to Paris for a week and not knowing how to speak French, my career, my goals, my dreams, the sudden disturbance of the vision for my life. Shampoo.

I am always wanting to be somewhere that I am not. I feel like this is a problem.

When I’m in Seattle, I want to be in LA. When I’m in LA I want to be in Oxford. When I’m in Oxford I want to be in Tucson. If I’m doing one thing, I’d rather be doing another, and if I’m doing another I’d rather be doing the thing which I am not doing because I am doing the other thing. It is perhaps not so bad as that, but it is like a constant low-grade headache; a slight but ever-present tension. I have been here before. Nothing under the sun is new.

It is disturbing to think that I am 21. The thin edge of the knife is growing closer and I feel so unprepared to balance on its edge. How will I go about finding my own apartment after college, let alone paying for it? How do you set up utilities? Is it polite to ask contacts for a job? Am I willing to work five years in a position I hate in the hopes I will be granted a position I love? Am I really good at what I do or would I simply be embarrassing myself to show up for an interview in Hollywood with one second-place short story in an undergraduate writing competition and a reel that certainly mumbles, “Don’t look at me, I was made in college with a $15 budget and a director without a spine.”

I am 21. My mother was married and had a child by the time she was my age. Let alone feeling unprepared, I feel unwilling to step into the Great Beyond of Adulthood. When I close eras in my life, I have trained myself to forget them. And it frightens me beyond words to know that in leaving childhood officially behind, I will be surrendering forever some of my best stories. My melodrama shows through and yet I don’t exaggerate. Memories are a problem for me. They slip so easily behind locked neurons, dissolving like the little mermaid into sea foam, into gray matter.

J. M. Barrie never grew up. He was brilliant, and he was incomplete. This is the tension of Peter Pan—knowing so explicitly one side of joy, and being so completely barred from all knowledge of the other. I straddle the line and I cannot decide and it is maddening to fully understand that this is not a both/and situation.

So I sit here in Oxford and I write my essays and I read my books and all the while the tension is mounting towards some fatal decision. Either way, a part of me dies. The adult murders the child with interest accruement and DMV lines and clipping coupons. The child cannot fathom the adult, denies its existence, and banishes it to the Shadow-Cave. If we do not believe something exists, it ceases to. Clap for the fairies, all ye Children At Heart, for you are clapping for your younger buried selves.

I feel things too fully, I think. My joys are out of proportion and my sorrows are illogical. She is not balanced, they might say. Sensory and emotional overstimulation. This is why I hide in my room. This is the appeal of hermitage.

In the end, what does a girl like me have to say? Far too little, and yet with so many words. I fear I could never be an existentialist.

This started with shoes and evolved into…excessive thinking. I ask myself these questions knowing elucidation is elusive, that is the point. I will not grasp these things. I will not understand.

Silence is kind. It neither condemns nor praises.

Goodnight, cyberspace.

—Neither Here Nor There

Pagans in Heaven

2011-02-10T04:30:00.000-08:00

Questions keep popping into my head, quasi-theses. At the moment I am re-reading Beowulf for my primary tutorial and devouring conflicting secondary texts on its meaning, especially concerning whether it was primarily a pagan text, a Christian text, or something of a hybrid.

In Roberta Frank’s essay “The Beowulf Poet’s Sense of History,” she says, “Wiglaf’s contention that the fallen Beowulf shall for a long time ‘abide in the Lord’s keeping’…suggests a Boethian philosophy of salvation, of individuals ascending by reason alone to a knowledge of one God” (176).

Which brings to mind a question I’ve had since I four years old: how is it fair that people who’ve never heard of Jesus/Christianity automatically go to hell, regardless whether they were good or bad by human standards?

“In the Alfredian Orosius, as in the fifth-century original, God is shown to have always guided the world, even in pagan times” (176).

I am a Christian. I make no bones about that. If there is such a thing as a “good” Christian, I would unabashedly not place myself in that category. Church, for the most part, irritates me, I don’t feel comfortable praying, I’ve never gone on a mission trip, I don’t hand out tracts or sing in the choir, I don’t read a devotional or memorize scripture, and I’m in this perpetual tug-of-war between being frustrated with God and bored with him.

That being said, I claim my religion, and I claim it with the full knowledge that I don’t understand it completely. And since I am such a professedly bad Christian, I may as well ask the paradoxical questions that we are taught in Sunday School to answer with a vague “it’s all a matter of faith.”

So. What about all those good, pagan people?

Let me refine that question. What about all those people who live in exact parallel to the ethics or conduct of Christianity, but do not explicitly know the name Yaweh or Jesus? “…individuals ascending by reason alone to a knowledge of one God.” Is it possible to have a relationship with God without ever calling him by name? I don’t mean this in a sort of “the trees are divine, the rocks are divine, the river’s divine, let’s all commune with one another” way. I mean if there is one God, and if he really created the universe, and if he really was around before Christianity took root, then he must have dealt with the “issue” of righteous pagans before Christians dealt with the issue of righteous pagans. So what did he do with them when they died? Furthermore, what constitutes righteousness? What is the soul? Is there a soul?

Going back to the text (and no, I don’t mean the Bible), Beowulf is described as a great man, not only in martial arts, but in character.

Then the king in his great-heartedness unclasped

the collar of gold from his neck and gave it

to the young thane, telling him to use

it and the war-shirt and gilded helmet well.

“You are the last of us, the only one left

of the Waegmundings. Fate swept us away,

sent my whole brave highborn clan

to their final doom. Now I must follow them.”

That was the warrior’s last word.

He had no more to confide. The furious heat

of the pyre would assail him. His soul fled from his breast

to its destined place among the steadfast ones.

(lines 2809-2820)

Well it appears that Beowulf was “great-hearted,” he had a soul, and he was destined (by fate? by god? Both are mentioned throughout the text as influencing the lives of men) to go to his place among the “steadfast ones.” An unknown author in an essay entitled “Beowulf vs Sir Gawain” that I found online (my academic standards are just marvelous, aren’t they?) queries, “[Beowulf’s] soul goes to be with ‘the steadfast ones’; I wonder if ‘steadfast’ means ‘obedient to the heroic code.’ Is there a hint here of a pre-Christian idea of salvation?” (http://www.echeat.com/essay.php?t=26043)

Even the Beowulf poet himself plainly states, “The truth is clear: Almighty God rules over mankind and always has.” (lines 700-702; italics added)

The identity of these steadfast ones could point, I feel, very easily to a pagan afterlife—a place with gods or other brave warriors in some Valhalla-esque party of the dead; the “steadfast” being those who were, simply, steadfast in life, courageous, and therefore immortalized either in reality in a hall of the dead, or merely literarily in name. However, the Beowulf poet could also very easily be hinting at Beowulf’s soul going to the place where Christian souls go. This would be blasphemous, of course, but isn’t Beowulf praised as being a model of one who fills the old heroic code—which, not incidentally, is curiously parallel to the Old Testament code?

The whole point of Christianity as opposed to Judaism is that Jesus came to alleviate the need for sacrifice, since he as god was the only human who met the criteria for the kind of sacrifice needed to cover the sins of the world. In that is the explicit sense that one cannot then “gain” or “earn” one’s way to heaven. You cannot sacrifice enough because you are not god and man. Only Jesus was capable. The point, then, is that Beowulf could not have been heroic enough or kingly enough to get a special pass to heaven.

But is his heroism the ultimate marker of his character? Time and again he is described in heroic as well as moral terms:

“that hale veteran, a good man” (lines 25542, 2543)

“So now, Beowulf, I adopt you in my heart as a dear son. Nourish and maintain this new connection, you noblest of men” (lines 945-948)

“They said that of all the kings upon earth he was the man most gracious and fair-minded, kindest to his people” (lines 3180-3182)

etc. etc.

He was not merely a good warrior. He was a good man. He kept peace in his land for over fifty years. He dealt fairly with friend and foe. He was noble, not only in birthright, but in character. As all men do, he succumbs to old age, and then to death at the hands of the dragon. As his soul, the soul of a good man, leaves his body, it goes…where?

The Beowulf poet tells us:

Much as he wanted to, there was no way

he could preserve his lord’s life on earth

or alter in the least the Almighty’s will.

What God judged right would rule what happened

to every man, as it does to this day.

(lines 2855-2859; italics added)

This sounds to me like God can accept pagans into his heaven if he wants to. It reminds me of the verses in the Bible about self-proclaimed Christians who reach heaven’s gates and are turned away. They “followed” God, but God saw through them into their hearts. I can only imagine, then, that there is the possibility that those who never heard the word Christian could, upon their deaths, be judged pure. The following lines hint at the type of life, death, and afterlife given to the famous hero:

Beowulf the king

had indeed met with a marvelous death

(lines 3036-3037)

Famous for his deeds

a warrior may be, but it remains a mystery

where his life will end, when he may no longer

dwell in the mead-hall among his own.

So it was with Beowulf, when he faced the cruelty

and cunning of the mound-guard [the dragon who killed him]. He himself was ignorant

of how his departure from the world would happen.

(lines 3062-3068)

Let a bier be made

and got ready quickly when we come out

and then let us bring the body of our lord,

the man we loved, to where he will lodge

for a long time in the care of the Almighty.

(lines 3105-3109)

I make no conclusions, but I can’t help but speculate. If I am not allowed to speculate, there is no point in maintaining my alliance with this religion. I look back at my four-year-old self, so distraught over the fates of people hidden in mountains and valleys unexplored, and think perhaps God understands righteousness in a way we do not. It has been stated over and again that God does not “need” Christians to save the world. He’s already done that. And maybe some people who have never met him in the traditional sense still know him. And maybe I will be the one turned away for my sarcasm and bitterness and they will be the ones accepted for their faith in the nameless god they worshipped.

The word “Yahweh” is said to mean spirit or breath. Well the wind can travel wherever it wants, and whisper in the hearts of men. When it is windy here, I stay inside and turn my music on. Like Peter Pan at the window it waits while I move on, “maturing.” Eventually, like the little boy it will fly away, and then it will be too late to call him back.

I draw no conclusions.

But I do wonder.

Sunset in Oxford

2011-02-08T08:26:00.001-08:00

This far north the post-coital glow of the sun is gold

as it pulls back and sighs,

thin clouds like cigarette trails and the contented

smile of the hills.

The morning is cold blue,

and full-fogged with dreams of leafless trees.

The girls at this address are gold, the boys are blue;

consequence of the direction we live,

which half of the house we choose,

which time of light invades our rooms

(even at night I have an amber moon).

Gold sinks behind the smile and

we say “Goodbye, until tomorrow.”

The Cackling of Crows

2011-02-06T15:47:00.001-08:00

We use our bones to bash each other,

the daughter’s shape to condemn the mother,

the boy to the brother, the father,

o damned patriarchy,

they rail.

Tap, tap, tapping nails into each other’s eyes

so nobody can see.

This is the freedom we’ve been granted,

to be equally disenchanted.

The arguments are for arguments’ sake,

the excuse to feel impassioned

in the passionless world, the sinless stake

in the end of the word: morality.

It is archaic, useless. Mortality,

banish that as well. We are infinite. We will return.

I don’t know about the rest,

but I only want one shot at this.

Second chances, tertiary lives, like photocopies,

a thin déjà vu. Sooner than we expect,

we run out of superglue to fix the fractures in our vision.

I only want one shot at this.

I want my bones to stay in place

when I am done with them.

Let my lips lie silent if they dare to argue.

I know what I am.

Oranges Rant

2011-02-06T06:04:00.000-08:00

Okay I’m in the library and I’m working but I’m so worked up that I can’t continue to work until I work this out.

I just read Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winters. It was good, I enjoyed it. But beyond the text itself is a quagmire of frustrations. The book is about a young woman who is training to be a missionary/preacher but falls in love and has a sexual relationship with another young woman whom she converted. To put it bluntly, under its humor, it’s a religion-bashing book, specifically Pentecostal Christianity, which, in the text itself, was okay. As a Christian, I was never at any point so offended that I couldn’t read any further. It is told from the perspective of an insider, someone who grew up in that environment, and it is by turns funny and sad and I actually relate on some level to many of the church experiences described.

The problem comes with the author herself, and her critics.

I read the introduction because I’m that kind of person, and I almost wish I hadn’t. She claimed without apology that she was making a breakthrough in literature, that she was boldly going where no author has gone before, that she was reinventing the novel and saving her readers from the soul-sucking mundanity of bad art. This just put me off. She reminds me of Kubrick. I respect the work he’s done, but he was an arrogant, self-centered bastard as far as I can tell, and I can’t bring myself to respect him outside of his body of work. It’s a difficult line to balance, and a frustrating one.

I am beginning to feel similarly about Jeanette Winters. And her drooling fans fan the flames of my ire. In his horribly misspelled and grammatically nauseating little booklet So Far So Linear: responses to the work of Jeanette Winterson, Christopher Pressler states:

“One of the strongest ingredients in Winterson’s novels and interviews is how self-made, self-created she is. She has never sought her biological mother. Winterson projects herself as a kind of genetic zero with no parents, no gene source. She is her own conspiracy theory, her own experiment, her own meteorite” (4).

Well all right. Cool. Good for her, she’s an island. Yay.

Another critic, Sonia Front, says that:

“I discuss Winterson’s repudiation of the male discourse which colonizes the female body and the way she reenvisages the erotic routes on the body in non-phallic terms.”

So it’s all about sex. And being angry. As far as I can tell, both the book and the critics are not trying to prove that homosexuality is better, they are trying to get even with the heterosexually dominant past. In the book, which is pseudo-autobiographical, “Jeanette” the character has sex with her 16-year-old friend Melanie, and then when Melanie is taken away/chooses to leave after they are found out, Jeanette has sex with a much older woman from her town and narrates, “I hated it. I hated it and I couldn’t stop.” (That is a rough quotation, the book is not in front of me at the moment) Later, she has sex with a girl she converted in her church.

Whether homosexuality is the issue or not, none of this stuff seems to have very much to do with love. Her relationships are described primarily in terms of the physical, and none of them last, whether by choice or force. She is, in my reading of the story, as promiscuous and destructive as a lesbian as any heterosexual teenage girl who sleeps around with boys. Throw some Christianity in there and you’ve got a hot-bed of getting back at the world in literary form.

I must say, again, that I actually did enjoy the book. On its own terms, apart from its creator and its critics, it was thought-provoking. But the way it is being manipulated for various agendas is kind of disgusting. I keep seeing in my mind a mob worked into a frenzy, and it is an ugly image. All of these essays have to do with the erotic, eroticization of food, eroticization of language, eroticization of religion. Eroticism without love, though… Who really cares if you’re being erotic with a man or a woman, then? The point is to get something out of them, to take something, some satisfaction. I’m just sad reading through all these angry essays because it seems like everyone is missing the point.

Luckily, my essay has to do with pseudo-autobiography, not sexuality, so I will to try reign in my displeasure in order to focus on the relevant aspects. And while sexuality may be relevant to her story, it is not inherently relevant to all stories, or all historiographic metaficitons. So, that is my Oranges rant.

I'm Back.

2011-02-06T02:53:00.000-08:00

I took yesterday off. I mean, it was a Saturday, so you’d think that would be normal, but it’s Oxford, and people are either drinking or in the library. As for me, though, the week was so inexplicably upsetting that I couldn’t just dive back into work. So I slept til noon, caught up on some…perhaps not-entirely-legal UK-low-res episodes of Castle, didn’t get out of my pajamas until 6pm, read a novel (that was actually for my tutorial, but it’s a novel, so it didn’t feel like work) while drinking frozen pear cider, and then Skyped with Phil for two hours which was therapeutic. I miss him so much sometimes.

At the moment I’m listening to Set Fire to the Third Bar by Snow Patrol and it’s got this haunting quality that makes me want to put the volume all the way up and let a slideshow of associated memories play across the backs of my eyelids.

It is good to be back. Despite the fact that it was super hard to get up this morning (I went to bed at 2am), the lethargy is gone. I can look at the essay topics for this week and the stacks of books and think, “Okay. This may not be fun, exactly, but it will be very interesting.”

And if I need a break, I work on a tattoo. Lucy’s tree or Kelsey’s peace or Ryan’s music or Melissa’s sunrise. I’m actually trying to come up with something for myself to get while I’m here in Oxford (I found this really cool artist who owns her own studio; I’m interviewing her for a possible screenplay concept), but so far everything I come up with turns into something else that’s either not a tattoo, or not a tattoo for me. It’s nice, though, after having sat still for so long that I can no longer feel my lower extremities and my eyes want to pop out of my head, to go sit at my desk and pull out my sketchbook and fiddle with this design and then that design, cycling through them as the inspirations strike.

The one thing that’s putting a slight furrow in my brow is my driver’s license. I can’t find it. I’m able to use my International Student ID card to buy alcohol, but I kinda just want my license to, y’know, have. So I can drive. My license expires in October anyway, though, so maybe when I get back in April I’ll just apply for a California license. That’s a big step, though. That’s a commitment to really, actually live in LA after I graduate. I don’t want to live in LA. I want to work, but I don’t like LA. I have a grudging respect for its sort of downtrodden, grubby urban beauty, but it has yet to claim a place in my heart. Perhaps with time.

Oh! And one of my problems has been solved. I think I mentioned that the last day we stayed in London I lost my camera somewhere, probably in the hostel. I didn’t realize it until we got to Oxford. Luckily, my chip was still in the card reader in my laptop, but the camera itself was gone forever. This, naturally, upset me quite a bit. I told Phil about it because that’s the sort of thing you tell your boyfriend even though they can’t do anything about it. After that, I resigned myself to being camera-less in Europe and sometimes snagged Nicole’s to take a snapshot of whatever design I was working on, but other than that knew I wouldn’t have any pictures of my stay here.

Lo and behold, on Monday a delivery-man came to our door. Mike signed for the package and brought it up to my room. I sliced open the tape with my Leatherman and stared at the camera inside. It never occurred to me that Phil would send me his old camera. I didn’t even know he had an old camera. But there it was, an early-generation Canon Powershot with 4 rechargeable batteries and a battery charger and, well, I have a camera now and I am quite, quite happy, which is such a ridiculous understatement. The batteries are really old and won’t re-charge, so I have to go find batteries, but psh, I can handle that.

This is especially convenient since I’m spending almost a week in Paris this March. I think it should be illegal to go to Paris without a camera. That’s just…wrong.

Speaking of traveling, when it comes time for the term to end and I’ve got 20 days in Europe, I think I’m going to avoid planes as much as possible. I keep hearing about these trains that travel from country to country and go through gorgeous mountain ranges and valleys and I feel like that would be one of the best ways to see things, from the window of a train.

The first couple weeks here, in London and Oxford, I had so much time on my hand (and so little internet) that I got a lot of writing done. But with tutorials and wanting to occasionally sleep, even if I do have the time, I’m so tired that writing more words on the page, even ones that will only be evaluated by me, seems way too hard. So I hope that while we’re in Paris and while I’m sitting on a train winding through Germany, I can find the peace of mind to work on a few things.

Speaking of working, I should get to the library. It’s a Sunday morning and part of me thinks I should find a church. But I haven’t gone to church in years, and it feels weird to go just because I’m in Oxford. Perhaps the issues I have with it won’t be present in Europe. I don’t know. There’s a place down the street from me, not even a ten-minute walk. I should try and go next Sunday. Today, I’m going to the library. That’s a sort of sacred place. Primark isn't, though, and I'm stopping in there first to buy a pair of shoes. I've wanted to buy shoes since I got here because they have the most adorable roughed-up European boots and I'm trying to be careful with my money but apparently Primark has shoes for 7 pounds, which is insane. I only spend about 14 pounds on food per week, but that's because I shop at Aldi's and make sure that each item is under a pound. Like the sketchbook, I think I'm going to splurge on a pair of 7 pound shoes. Shoes lighten the soul.

I am glad to be back.

it fades

2011-02-03T10:34:00.000-08:00

The sun is lasting longer. At 5:30 there was still a vague blue blush to the southwest. That’s comforting.

This week was bad.

I can’t remember the last time it hit me this hard. It was like being clotheslined by an emotional coma. And it affects everything. What I eat, or don’t eat, how much I sleep or don’t sleep, whether the hundreds of thousands of words on the page or the screen make sense or not, whether I have the energy to drag myself into the city and back and into the city and back. It affects my academic work in a brutal way. I had to write my professor an e-mail apologizing for how shitty my essay was this week. I just couldn’t care. It wasn’t important. Nothing’s important when I’m like this, not work or food or God or friends. The only thing I “want” to do is figure out new ways to self-destruct. See how far the bitterness will take me this time. See how long it will take the bitterness to fade away on an overwhelming wave of apathy.

I almost got up and left from my tutorial today. She was obviously frustrated with the quality of my work and I just kept thinking, “This isn’t worth my time. This isn’t worth her time.”

I ended up staying, barely, and it was actually a really good meeting. I walked home and there was still light in the sky. I think I’m on the tail-end of this. God, I hope so. Everyone has their demons, and mine’s called Manic-Depressive. She twists every good thing I have, she makes me lash out at people I love, she makes me acknowledge that this is all coming from inside me, that whatever this is starts and ends with me. She’s the mask I wore for years when I welcomed the blankness. She was my dead eyes. She was the flinch when people hugged me.

I thought she was gone. Or weakened. I thought I could control her, I thought the Welbutrin had her on a leash and this past week has made it very clear to me that she was simply biding her time, waiting in the back of my head until I was tired and isolated and fearful. I know, because that’s what I would do, because I am her. The chemical imbalance is the excuse, it’s always up to me to fully embrace the symptoms or not. And because they feel so good, so terrible, I always let them flood back in.

Some people choose drugs, some people choose sex, some people choose crime or politics or charity or parenthood, anything to drown out that gaping sense of loss, from the moment you grow up, the sense that there is something missing that we call God and we cannot have it back, not ever. Not while we’re alive at any rate. My vice claimed me, this lack of serotonin, and I have relished the addiction, this high of being so, so low.

It’s embarrassing on one level. Until I remember that this is not unique to me. Everyone has their little tricks, the white lies they tell their conscience, small or large; everyone murmurs hopelessly, “Father, let this cup pass from me….”

This is my brand of being human. This is my burden and my escape in equal measure. I’m ashamed of it and I hate it and yet it’s so deeply a part of the last half of my life that I can’t imagine being me without it.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make. As far as this episode goes, I think the fog is lifting. All I can conclude is that I am relieved.

it's back

2011-02-01T12:13:00.000-08:00

Damn the restless shadow,

trips on the backs of heels, this hot, fidgety air

pushing up on the underside of skin,

stomach gorged with sourceless anger.

God, this burning at the back of the throat,

this expletive always on the edge of freedom.

Senseless, it courses in every limb like RLS,

malevolent. It is a thing that feeds,

leech-like, on the white blood cells,

on immunity.

It siphons, slightly, through fingertips,

into keys.

This is the Wrath of God in the esophagus,

so barely reigned. This is the hell of the mind,

this is the rabid dog’s fury. Powerful,

and then nothing,

drained, can’t even sit up straight, can’t sigh,

can’t cry, can’t pray.

It lays there leaden at the center of gravity,

weighing down the bones.

It is this shadow. It is my shadow. How I resent it,

how I cherish it. How twisted is this love,

this dark addiction. How heavy are the chains.

I am too far north. There is not enough sun,

no light overhead to restrict the darkness

to a puddle at my feet.

No, it stretches long, across the street. It follows,

biting at my heels, the Hounds of Hell

this is hell, I think.

A taste of hell.

sisyphus

2011-01-30T09:16:00.001-08:00

Transitory, I come ironically to it again,

this theme.

Always on the way to someplace else, never who I was nor who I’ll be,

there is no such thing as me.

Struggle against the weight of this thin air,

look in the mirror and try and name the person looking back.

Emily. A million of them, if you turn the mirror back on itself,

if you open the phone book.

I understand now, Stillman. That words are not enough. Emily

is not an accurate descriptor. There is not a word for me as I am.

There is not a word for anyone.

I go to the library. I read until the hunger makes the words twitch on the page. I don’t want to come back, so I try and push past my stomach. But I turn to the next chapter and realize the last is blank in my mind. This is useless.

Pack up. Put on coats and coats. Pop in music. Walk. Zone. Arrive home, fingers burning. Climb to the third floor and set down everything that weighs anything. Tremble back to the first floor. Prepare food and ascend again. Consume.

Sit still for a few seconds. The clouds move. Huh.

Lethargy beckons. You remember this. The bored dark. The gentle ache. The inability to think let alone function. Stare at the wallpaper. The pattern doesn’t make sense. This yellow wallpaper that you will rip from the wall and wrap about you like a cloak when you finally go crazy. Or have you done that already?

This song has played before, from Before. It doesn’t make sense. Go for the moon. Go for the moon.

This is familiar. And so tempting to return. It alone understands that there are no words. It alone is cold and comforting because it takes the words away. God, it was horrible, you remember that, but it felt so much easier than this uphill happiness. I am Sisyphus, and why don’t we just stop? The rock is not going to make it up.

Full circle, like the Norse. I am Ymir, hacked to pieces, and the world will drown in our blood. The World Tree will bear the weight until it rots, until Ragnarök breaks it into kindling and Sutr comes to fan the flames. The pain is not in the destruction, it’s in the coming back to life. Doomed to come full circle. Like the Norse.

They had to fit themselves in history. They had to make room for Odin somewhere next to Jesus. Too many gods in the kitchen, so someone’s gotta go, some history has to be rewritten. Where am I, the non-denominational, in the pantheon? What songs are mine? Hymns or screams or whispers? They’re all the same, I think, in the end. We all ask. We all receive. Sometimes it makes sense.

A million books. Five million?

Let’s burn them all and see if we can make it on our own,

let’s see if we can come up with one insight,

one original thought. Let’s see what we can do without our authors

holding our hands.

And then there’s this: if the book is burned, does the truth remain?

Do we need the book? Are we really all divine?

If not, then the books aren’t going to help anyway.

This is why we write things in our skin. The words can’t be burned away

without burning away ourselves. Higher than a marriage vow,

these pictures set in flesh. You cannot divorce your own skin.

Selfish, that’s the word for this. Yeah, I know. I am not unaware.

But when the circle comes back to Hel, I feel the distance

up to Asgard.

And it is simply too far to even consider a return journey.

Hel’s hall is rank, but it is here

and I am tired.

And this all starts again, at the end,

the beginning,

because I’m not who I was nor who I’ve yet to be,

because there is no me,

no word for just one Emily.

Metafiction Family

2011-01-25T11:50:00.000-08:00

I am doing an essay on Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, which both entices and disturbs me. For the essay, my friend Pete Lee turned me on to an interview Auster did with The Paris Review. Reading it, I feel like I have kin in the world, in the sense of the intimate bond of two strangers who have found relief in knowing others of their own kind exist. Of course, Paul Auster has no idea who I am. But I may come to think of him as a frightening and favorite quasi-fictional uncle, existing somewhere as a Name.

Here are excerpts from the interview that particularly struck me as resonant with my own life as I see it or as I wish it to be.

I can’t imagine anyone becoming a writer who wasn’t a voracious reader as an adolescent. A true reader understands that books are a world unto themselves—and that that world is richer and more interesting than any one we’ve traveled in before. I think that’s what turns young men and women into writers—the happiness you discover living in books. You haven’t been around long enough to have much to write about yet, but a moment comes when you realize that’s what you were born to do.

But at one time or another, I tried to write like each one of the novelists I was reading. Everything influences you when you’re young and you keep changing your ideas every few months. It’s a bit like trying on new hats. You don’t have a style of your own yet, so you unconsciously imitate the writers you admire.

I think it [being "reborn" from a poet to a novelist] happened at the moment when I understood that I didn’t care anymore, when I stopped caring about making Literature. I know it sounds strange, but from that point on writing became a different kind of experience for me and when I finally got going again after wallowing in the doldrums for about a year, the words came out as prose. The only thing that mattered was saying the thing that needed to be said. Without regard to preestablished conventions, without worrying about what it sounded like

Screenwriting is a more restricted form than novel-writing. It has its strengths and weaknesses, the things it can do and the things it can’t do. The question of time, for example, works differently in books and films. In a novel, you can collapse a long stretch of time into a single sentence: Every morning for twenty years, I walked down to the corner newsstand and bought a copy of The Daily Bugle. It’s impossible to do that in a film. You can show a man walking down the street to buy a newspaper on one particular day, but not every day for twenty years. Films take place in the present. Even when you use flashbacks, the past is always rendered as another incarnation of the present.

I look at those stories as a kind of ars poetica—but without theory, without any philosophical baggage. So many strange things have happened to me in my life, so many unexpected and improbable events, I’m no longer certain that I know what reality is anymore. All I can do is talk about the mechanics of reality, to gather evidence about what goes on in the world and try to record it as faithfully as I can. I’ve used that approach in my novels. It’s not a method so much as an act of faith: to present things as they really happen, not as they’re supposed to happen or as we’d like them to happen. Novels are fictions, of course, and therefore they tell lies (in the strictest sense of the term), but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world. Taken together, the little stories inThe Red Notebook present a kind of position paper on how I see the world. The bare-bones truth about the unpredictability of experience. There’s not a shred of the imaginary in them. There can’t be. You make a pact with yourself to tell the truth and you’d rather cut off your right arm than break that promise. Interestingly enough, the literary model I had in mind when I wrote those pieces was the joke. The joke is the purest, most essential form of storytelling. Every word has to count.

I think I had several motives. The most important one was curiosity. I wanted to find out if other people had lived through the same sorts of experiences that I had. Was I some kind of freak or was reality truly as strange and incomprehensible as I thought it was? I’m happy to report that I’m not alone. It’s a madhouse out there.

I’ve spent most of my adult life sitting alone in a room, writing books. I’m perfectly happy there, but when I got involved in film work in the mid-nineties, I rediscovered the pleasures of working with other people. It probably goes back to having played on so many sports teams as a kid. I liked being part of a small group, a group with a purpose, in which each person contributes to a common goal. Winning a basketball game or making a film—there’s really very little difference. That was probably the best part of working in the movies for me. The sense of solidarity, the jokes we told each other, the friendships I made.

The media presents us with little else but celebrities, gossip, and scandal, and the way we depict ourselves on television and in the movies has become so distorted, so debased, that real life has been forgotten. What we’re given are violent shocks and dim-witted escapist fantasies, and the driving force behind it all is money. People are treated like morons.

By giving so-called ordinary people a chance to share their stories with an audience, I wanted to prove that there’s no such thing as an ordinary person. We all have intense inner lives, we all burn with ferocious passions, we’ve all lived through memorable experiences of one kind or another.

I’d never had any interest in working in an office or holding down a steady, white-collar job. I found the idea extremely distasteful. I gravitated toward more humble kinds of work, and that gave me a chance to spend time with people who weren’t like me. People who hadn’t gone to college; people who hadn’t read a lot of books. In this country, we tend to underestimate the intelligence of working-class people. Based on my own experience, I found most of them to be just as smart as the people who run the world. They simply aren’t as ambitious—that’s all. But their talk is a lot funnier. Everywhere I went, I had to struggle to keep up with them. I’d spent too much time with my nose buried in books and most of my coworkers could talk circles around me.

I’m well into my fifties now and things change for you as you get older. Time begins slipping away, and simple arithmetic tells you there are more years behind you than ahead of you—many more. Your body starts breaking down, you have aches and pains that weren’t there before, and little by little the people you love begin to die. By the age of fifty, most of us are haunted by ghosts. They live inside us and we spend as much time talking to the dead as to the living. It’s hard for a young person to understand this. It’s not that a twenty year old doesn’t know he’s going to die, but it’s the loss of others that so profoundly affects an older person—and you can’t know what that accumulation of losses is going to do to you until you experience it yourself. Life is so short, so fragile, so mystifying. After all, how many people do we actually love in the course of a lifetime? Just a few, a tiny few. When most of them are gone, the map of your inner world changes. As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.

Each book I’ve written has started off with what I’d call a buzz in the head. A certain kind of music or rhythm, a tone. Most of the effort involved in writing a novel for me is trying to remain faithful to that buzz, that rhythm. It’s a highly intuitive business. You can’t justify it or defend it rationally, but you know when you’ve struck a wrong note, and you’re usually pretty certain when you’ve hit the right one.

Every book begins with the first sentence and then I push on until I’ve reached the last. Always in sequence, a paragraph at a time. I have a sense of the trajectory of the story— and often have the last sentence as well as the first before I begin—but everything keeps changing as I go along. No book I’ve published has ever turned out as I thought it would. Characters and episodes disappear; other characters and episodes develop as I go along. You find the book in the process of doing it. That’s the adventure of the job. If it were all mapped out in advance, it wouldn’t be very interesting.

Writing has always been like that for me. Slowly blundering my way toward consciousness.

Every writer needs a trusted reader—someone who has sympathy for what you’re doing and wants the work to be as good as it can possibly be. But you have to be honest. That’s the fundamental requirement. No lies, no false pats on the back, no praise for something you don’t believe deserves it.

Contrary to what many people want to believe, the novel is in good shape these days, as healthy and vigorous as it’s ever been. It’s an inexhaustible form, and no matter what the pessimists say, it’s never going to die. Because a novel is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy. The reader and the writer make the book together. No other art can do that. No other art can capture the essential inwardness of human life.

Each book is a new book. I’ve never written it before and I have to teach myself how to write it as I go along. The fact that I’ve written books in the past seems to play no part in it. I always feel like a beginner and I’m continually running into the same difficulties, the same blocks, the same despairs. You make so many mistakes as a writer, cross out so many bad sentences and ideas, discard so many worthless pages, that finally what you learn is how stupid you are. It’s a humbling occupation.

It’s difficult for me to look at myself from the outside. I simply don’t have the mental equipment to do it, at least where my work is concerned. It’s for other people to make judgments about what I’ve done, and I wouldn’t want to presume to have an answer to that question. I wish I could, but I still haven’t mastered the trick of being in two places at the same time.

--Paul Auster

full interview can be found at http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/121/the-art-of-fiction-no-178-paul-auster

This is Oxford

2011-01-24T06:54:00.001-08:00

Quick to pale

the Oxford neophyte

and quick to learn:

read all day

drink all night.

The academics are the vampires

sucking meaning from dry books

to sustain their existence,

prowling dark aisles;

specters who have lost the sun.

In the Beginning

2011-01-21T06:50:00.000-08:00

So I turned in my first tutorial essay, nervous as all hell. Finished it last night, celebrated at a little party down the street, came back, got four hours of sleep, woke up early, revised it, couldn't print it, tutor printed it instead, went to meet him, read it out loud (which was strangely enjoyable), and...

Success.

I didn't entirely cover everything that I could have, but what I did was "very well-written" and "thorough." Which is more than I was hoping for on this first tutorial attempt. Here for your bored-out-of-my-mind amusement, is 2000 words on the essential characteristics of creation narratives, specifically Genesis, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and Ovid's Metamorphoses.

In the Beginning

“In the Beginning the strife of the chaos of the universe was finally resolved by a god, a natural force of a higher kind, who separated the earth from heaven, and thus he who saw the Deep, the country’s foundation, was wise in all matters.” Using this forced amalgamation of mythical beginnings, we are introduced to the creation of the world through three separate narratives from three separate cultures and ages: Genesis, purportedly written after the Exodus by Moses, a Hebrew from Egypt; The Epic of Gilgamesh, concerning a Mesopotamian king named Gilgamesh who may or may not have been a historical figure and who may or may not have lived around 2600 BCE (Armstrong 72) and whose story was gathered orally across time in much the same way as The Odyssey or Beowulf —not attributed to one author, but rather to one people group; and lastly, the Metamorphoses by Ovid, a Roman writer banished by Emperor Augustus to live among the barbarians of the cold north.

What each contains is an account of the creation of the world. However, because each story is unique to a specific people group and place, the purpose of each text is completely different—and yet paradoxically serves a universal purpose, even to this day. Looked at collectively, a picture of the nature of human life begins to emerge from these far-flung stories—which, despite the differences in detail (i.e. the name Noah as opposed to Uta-napishti or Deucalion) points to a rather hopeful notion: that from the very beginning man has tried to describe his own life as an individual, as a community-member, and as a creature subservient to Fate or the god(s) whom they serve, as well as to death (a “law” that Gilgamesh in particular tries desperately to break).

If we separate the texts, we divine their specific cultural functions. Genesis was intended to instruct, Metamorphoses was to entertain, and Gilgamesh was to examine. Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Torah[1], does not have one hero, as most epics require, but many. Like Gilgamesh, its aim is to explore humanity as a whole rather than to extol the heroic qualities of a single protagonist. However, unlike Gilgamesh, it had a certain instructional purpose built into it: “This is what happens when you kill your brother, this is what happens when you pass your wife off as your sister, this is what happens when you are corrupted completely.” The implication is do not do the things that will cause these consequences, and, inversely, do the things which will cause God to look favorably upon you, for there are rewards for such actions.

Gilgamesh is philosophical more than it is instructional. The consequences for disobeying the gods seems slight and of secondary importance to investigating the manners of men and what qualities are required for leadership: the things a man must do to become civilized and fit for living peaceably with his neighbor. It calls to mind a science experiment examining cause and effect: “Let us see what happens when Gilgamesh meets a man who can match him in strength, let us see what happens when his best friend and brother dies, let us see what happens when he is denied immortality.” While there are “morals” to be taken away by the reader, it is more important to observe the journey of Gilgamesh, and to understand the general behaviors of mankind (and how man learned to function as he does).

Metamorphoses is not a myth in the pure sense. Its writer intended to collect the myths of his culture’s literary history much in the same way that the Grimm brothers collected Germanic folktales and then reinterpreted them to suit their own designs. Ovid seems to be both interpreter (“translating” many of the stories into the context of his own era—labeling, for instance, the highest levels of heaven as the Roman equivalent: the Palatine) and critic, where the line between homage and mockery is sometimes extremely thin. It has even been labeled metafiction, self-aware, and much speculation has been offered as to how clever Ovid was—or was not—in his treatment of heroes and villains and morals.

Like all ancient texts, these three books were interpreted by later authors and historians. The events of Genesis were taken as indisputable fact by the Medieval church, Gilgamesh was thought to be nothing more than a poem about death (George xiii), and Metamorphoses was made into Christian allegory by early clerics (Brown 12). It is their unique cultural purpose, however, that is most useful in reading the stories as they were meant to be understood when they were first told. In short, they are myths. And if we are to believe Karen Armstrong’s definition of myth’s purpose in her book A Short History of Myth, it is not a medium essentially archaic. “Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it” (3). The “modern” Wild West stories are an example of a specific culture novelizing its birth, just as the Hebrews, Mesopotamians, and virtually ever other people group has done since the invention of storytelling.

The contents of the thing called “myth” usually, according to Karen Armstrong, contain elements of death, immortality, sacrifice, ritual, and divinity—this last a concept that was viewed quite differently in the ancient world. “When [ancient] people spoke of the divine, they were usually talking about an aspect of the mundane” (5) because there was no great distinction between the realm of heaven and the realm of earth as they were both made of the same basic material. And as such, myths explain things that happened both very specifically (i.e. Gilgamesh went through mountains and over seas to speak with the only immortal human on earth concerning how he might also attain immortality) as well as things that are universal or common occurrences (for example, the modern cosmetics industry is a testament that women—and men—want the same unattainable things that Gilgamesh wanted thousand of years ago—their fountain of youth just happens to be Mary Kay and cosmetic surgery).

Looking at Genesis, we find what many people still believe to be the “only” creation account. It describes a universe created by a benign (and singular) god who formed everything out of absolutely nothing. In Metamorphoses, the world was created by a single god, but his name—to Ovid at least—is completely unimportant.

This strife [of the Chaos of the universe] was finally resolved by a god, a natural force of a higher kind, who separated the earth from heaven, and the waters from the earth, and set the clear air apart from the cloudy atmosphere…. In this way, the god, whichever of the gods it was, set the chaotic mass in order, and, after dividing it up, arranged it in its constituent parts” (Innes 32-33).

This section sounds extremely similar to the Genesis account, but the differences, though slight, point to a drastic disparity in cultural values. The Jewish text stresses the intentional design of a loving creator—one who, after inventing specific items like the air, the sea, or the sun, declared (brooking no argument) that it was good. The almost blasé account of the god in Metamorphoses clearly states that even the god who shaped the entire universe was far less interesting and worthy of extrapolation than the new breed which inhabited that universe—namely, humans. If even the gods were afraid of Fate, which, in Metamorphoses, demanded the “the massive structure of the universe [to] collapse in ruins” (38), then it put the gods on a fairly even playing field with men in terms of vulnerability. Genesis also predicted a cataclysmic end to the universe, but, again, an individual could be spared if he was righteous in the eyes of God (a moral prerequisite, not the product of cold Fate).

Thus the creation account in Genesis was strictly religious, while the creation account in Metamorphoses was almost humanist, interested solely in man and his condition. Indeed, Ovid writes “So the earth, which had been rough and formless, was moulded into the shape of man, a creature till then unknown” (33, italics added). It wasn’t until man was created that the earth was complete, a rather egocentric way of viewing history and man’s place in it. Although one can’t help but wonder if Ovid was perhaps mocking humanity rather than elevating it.

Gilgamesh was similarly interested in the topic of man’s position in the world. In his introduction to The Epic of Gilgamesh, Andrew George says that, “[I]ndeed, even for the ancients, the story of Gilgamesh was more about what it is to be a man than what it is to serve the gods.” While Alexander Heidl states in The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels that, “The gods assemble and pass on life and death. And from their decrees there is no escape,” Mary Innes (speaking of Metamorphoses) counters that, “for the most part gods and men are treated in the same way, as actors in a universal drama, where Destiny is the only over-riding force” (15). Today, gods and destiny do not control man—but the laws of science do. Children are taught at an early age that gravity fixes them to the ground, that rainbows are the product of a certain refraction of light, that the air is nothing more than two hydrogen molecules coupled with an oxygen molecule, and that momentum makes the world go round. The inescapable decrees of the gods have been transferred in our modern age to the inescapable demands of physics. We are no less bound than we were before, we just call our gods by a different name.

But whether the god(s) or Destiny (or the theory of relativity) are at the helm, death is the common ground of all things, for “the earth is the great cemetery of all that dwell below the skies” (Heidel 143). In Genesis, man is promised a decadent afterlife, on the condition that he be righteous and obey God. In the world of Gilgamesh, there is a sort of afterlife, but in truth a man’s life on earth is his paradise (12). The natural conclusion that Gilgamesh and the reader must reach is, crudely, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” Or, to impart a slightly deeper moral: “By achieving great things, let your name be immortal in place of your body.” And we have been trying ever since to do just that—from Achilles choosing everlasting glory over certain safety to Christopher Columbus embarking on a dangerous journey to claim new land and astronauts braving death to claim the surface of the moon, we have since the beginning sought to put our stamp on the things we leave behind, be they walls or statues or philosophies. Death, we learned, was inescapable, but immortality could still be vicariously achieved.

Before the concept of death could be invented, life (and birth) must needs precede it. In Genesis and Metamorphoses, mankind was created pure, without wickedness or evil. And in both, mankind fell into terrible violence. In Gilgamesh, man was born wicked, made from the blood of a violent, rebel god Kingu (Heidel 138), and therefore irredeemable from his very inception. In all three stories, the god(s) find that mankind has become so corrupt (Genesis) and violent (Metamorphoses) that they must as an entire breed be destroyed. Since the act of man’s destruction was a precursor to the events of Gilgamesh, the text gives no other reason than “the gods decided to send the Deluge” (Innes 88).

And indeed, the Deluge comes. Each story describes the preservation of one family by the god(s) who forewarn them of the earth’s destruction, instructing them to build a boat in which to save themselves and specific land animals. Other similarities abound in surprising number and detail.

Whether a story had one hero or many, one god or many gods, a paradisial afterlife or a vague, shadowy realm of posthumous existence, on a broad scale, the essential characteristics of these creation stories seems to encompass the creation of the world, the creation of man, instructions on how to live, examinations of man’s behavior, and fascination with death, the afterlife, and immortality. They were all concerned with the Truth, rather than historical fact, and they used storytelling to illuminate to their particular culture life as they knew it to be. And because they each consider universal themes and are linked by parallel plot points (i.e. the Flood), they can still be read today and appreciated as an in-depth look not solely at ancient man, but at humanity across the ages.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Karen. A Short History of Myth. Edinburgh [u.a.: Canongate, 2005. Print.

Brown, Sarah Annes. Ovid: Myth and Metamorphosis. Bristol: Bristol Classical, 2004. Print.

George, Andrew, trans. The Epic of Gilgamesh. London: Penguin Classics, 2000. Print.

Heidel, Alexander. The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1949. Print.

Ochs, Carol. Our Lives as Torah: Finding God in Our Own Stories. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001. Print.

Ovid, and Mary M. Innes. The Metamorphoses of Ovid. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1955. Print.

[1] In her book Our Lives as Torah, Carol Ochs explains that, “[b]y providing examples of fundamental categories such as holy, trial, and covenant, the Torah helps us understand the text of our own lives, and, in turn, our lives help us understand the Torah” (2). Even today, the stories in Genesis (as well as the other books of the Pentateuch) are used to instruct a specific people group on how to carry out their daily existence.

Where We Put Our Names

2011-01-19T05:09:00.001-08:00

These libraries

these placards inscribed SAMUEL BOCHART—DIED 1667

high up on the wall where only the wandering eyes

of the procrastinator will chance to glance it over.

These halls with portraits hung—

such prestige, these dusty lips

and faces pale with time. Such dry wrists.

Your frames are pouting.

Perhaps one will remember Kaleb Freke

and go so far as to learn his history,

but on the whole Peter Courayer will be forgotten

or shamed to Wikipedia.

You failed to achieve what only Achilles

and some few others grasped for—eternal love

in the form of a Name.

I think my love is much more momentary, but ah

how much sweeter it is to hear it whispered

than to read it on a plaque

high up on the parapets.

by E.R. Womelsduff

The Sand, The Sound

2011-01-18T09:43:00.000-08:00


First of all, let me apologize for the formatting.  I can't seem to fix it, so please bear with words that suddenly break in two.

It occurred to me today that I’ve always craved a bit ofwhat I’ve always had.  To backtrack (and gosh, my fingers are oddly numb even though they’re not cold anymore): I have always longed for places like England,places with trees and castles and a thousand years of literature and druids andspells and the mystique seeping like fog from the very moors.
And I am here.  I have arrived, finally, in Tolkien’s backyard (and, literally, in Lewis’—which is nowmostly a row of block brick houses) and it is filled with castles and trees andbooks and history.  

But the strange thing is that it is also filled with trashand busses muscling their way through pedestrians in crowded streets and drunk sand homeless and every sort of unalluring bit about modern life that I’ve always known in America.  The sun was shining in Oxford today, and indeed, it was beautiful to see the ancient stones lit up, basking in the pale and temporary warmth.  But as I was walking home, I felt a strange nostalgia for the desert, for that burnt-white sky and the jagged upheavals of mountain ranges and the ruthless nature of the still-wild stretches of emptyland.  


To put it another way, you could not have a Western in South Kensington.

I’ve always had a sort of snobbish thought that America was somehow less beautiful than Europe—England, specifically, because its books brought my imagination to fill it with only perfect things—that it was in its entirety somehow dull.  But the beauty here is an arrogant thing, calling attention to itself, boasting in its hills and its history, as if it had some claim to all that is timeless.  But the stones here are cold, and the water is muddy.  I wear on my left wrist a copper bracelet, an ore native to my Arizonan birthplace.  It retains heat, and when my hands are cold, I press it against my skin and feel a flush of heat creep outward.  What English metal could do that?


And even on the other end of things, have I not said that the lake, whose name I will no longer post because I am afraid too many people will hear it and wish to go there, in the mountains isparadise?  Its trees are more grand, and just as old as any here.  Its peaks would have inspired Tolkien perhaps more than his own rolling hills.


My point, I suppose, is that I have discovered a quality to the places I know intimately that was hidden before under a layer of grimy predisposition.  The place where I am  from could not be special.  The place where I am from could hold no mystery, no sense of awe.  
And yet, I look back at the desert, at the Sound, and I think, “How incredible.”  There is as much story in what I left behind as there is in the place I have come to.  


Perhaps more.  Perhaps these hills have been wrung out of stories. Perhaps the next Tolkien is sitting in a little cabin in the woods or in a low ranch house glorying in the sun and the sadness and the narration in the rocks themselves, revealed as the wind scours clean the stratifications of their history.


I wax poetic yet again. But it is a fine feeling indeed to realize that where you started from rivals in beauty the places you have yet to go.  Not to discourage one from travel or exploration, but to find pride in what you have always known and only now realize you love deeply.



Emily

*All photos are my own except the one of the Grand Canyon, which I stole from my dad's facebook profile.  :)

A Pint of Hard Apple Cider

2011-01-17T17:08:00.000-08:00

I bought my first alcohol since coming to England. Balley Castle Irish Cream and a pint of hard apple cider. The formerI mixed with a coffee liquer someone left at our house, and milk, and I swear it was like drinking an alcoholic milkshake, but in a good way. Have yet to try the latter. Felt much accomplished.

I also finished a project. Yesterday, actually, but, well, actually technically very, very early this morning. And by “finish” I mean it has a starting place and it goes somewhere and it ends. There’s a lot of fleshing out and smoothing down and polishing work, but there’s still an enormous sense of satisfaction one gets when one stares at one’s laptop and thinks, “Holy Canoli, I just wrote a book.”

Well, novella, in this case, but the sense of triumph is no less fulfilling.

I also went to the Bodleian Library and read books about J.M. Barrie, the boys that inspired him, and, of course, the gradual creation of a story whose place in my heart is forever fixed, and only in competition with two others: Beauty and the Beast and The Princess Bride. This story is, of course, Peter Pan, the inspiration for Amelia & the Piper, which is the previously-rejoiced-upon and completed novella. It is very different than my normal style because I was consciously trying to imitate J.M. Barrie’s writing, because both what he wrote and how he wrote it almost always choke me up, and it seems to have had a similar effect on both the audience it was first introduced to long ago as well as audiences now, and a piece of literature that can do that is well worth mimicking—not in an attempt to beat it at its own game, but in a sense, to pay homage, acknowledging immediately that the attempt must fail because something like that cannot be done twice. And although my story is a much shallower thing, it still gives me joy, and that makes it above all else worthwhile.

I am also becoming exciting about several other projects, most notably a possible graphic novel-in-the-making (one I would write the story/script for, not illustrate) called Soleil about a superhero who knows she will shortly die. Also, a novel that I first started when I was struck with a scene in my study hall during my senior year of high school. I wrote the entire first chapter in that 45 minute block and have done little with it since. Now, I am working through an outline and weaving—so far—four connected and yet completely distinct storylines together, much in the same way that Tolkien told about Gandalf, Aragorn, and Frodo in different places at the same time under the framework of a much larger story. This is by far the most ambitious work I have embarked upon, which is perhaps why it has lain dormant for so long. I still have yet to figure out the villain, however. Right now it is a faceless, nameless, and bodilles presence to the north, and it is a catalyst for change, but other than that I have no idea what the Great Enemy of my ensemble is. I feel that once I figure that out, actually writing this thing will be like filling in a Mad Libs—enjoyable and quick.

What is not quick is a particularly aggravating little story that I have completely rewritten at least three times. Being a novel, that’s a frustratingly large amount of words. It was the first novel I ever seriously attempted, and I started it when I was twelve. I got the idea for one of the last scenes in the book, and then built a story around it. This was back when I was afraid to say “shit” and refused to let my parents read it because one of the characters used that most foul language once. The three main characters have always stayed the same, but the premise is elusive. I think I’ve got it pinned down and then it reeks of melodrama, or worse—teen romance, and I am back to square one. I think I really need to go through boot camp—and I literally mean boot camp—before I can write that story. I’m far too sentimental with it and thus it cannot decide if it wants to be a Tom Clancy novel or a Stephanie Plum. And the mutant child that would produce has not turned out to be a pretty thing.

I also revised a short story called The Fort which is about three young girls who are trying very hard to act older than they are—and what happens when they actually receive the attention they’ve been craving. I submitted it to a little no-name literarary magazine, and now I wait. I kind of like it. I like the narrator’s voice and I like the way it suddenly gets extremely dark. I struggled with the ending for about a year, and I think I finally wrote one that does the rest of the tale justice.

Speaking of endings, I’ve got another short story with an ending I absolutely loathe, but a story that makes me giggle. That’s the How to Become a Filmmaker one, and if I could just find a less fatalistic dénouement, then it would be a wonderful little piece. As is, it reeks of giving up.

And gosh, the list goes on. Lynnwood Atlanteans is a fun read but has no plot and therefore no end, Disconnect can’t decide which genre it is let alone what sort of voice is should have, The Queen of Spades is an awesome premise that rides on so much backstory and acute foreshadowing and thinking about things that will happen in seasons yet to come that I can’t even think about working on it because those kinds of things are normally worked out by an entire team of writers, not one little, busy college nitwit who can’t write endings. And then there’s Velvet and it’s sequel Jersey. Before I can work on Jersey again, I’ve got to cut about 75 pages from Velvet, if not more, and actually create some drama outside the tortured internal monologue of the narrator and—my weakness shows itself again—make it more than a sappy teen romance with a pint of blood thrown in. It has substance, but it’s smothered under sighs and “he was unnaturally beautiful”s. Gag me with a spoon. What’s worse is, I wrote it.

I love my darlings, but sometimes I realize how truly bad they are.

And then—someone stop me—there’s the surrealist story, Underwater, that can’t decide if it’s a novel or a poem and to make matters worse, it is written in the present tense, in, what, second person? What is it when the story goes, “You sit there, wondering what on earth I am saying.” I guess that’s first person, then, but it’s such a confusing perspective that even I don’t know what I’m writing about. I think I’ll have to make it a short. Otherwise I’ll go mad writing it.

The last three I hardly dare mention. Arden is a novel I’ve barely gotten into about a girl who’s “superpower” is to fall unconscious and temporarily inhabit the bodies of people who are about to die or commit suicide. It’s a morbid little book and I don’t know what to do with it, because it’s supposed to be about overcoming loneliness and establishing identity (the fact that she doesn’t who she is supposed to be is mirrored in the fact that she inhabits everone else’s bodies and even thoughts and is incapable of escaping them). I feel I shall some day finish it, but I do not have enough stored-up hope to tackle it, for I fear it will wear me down.

And then there’s The Baptist¸ on the complete opposite end of the scale. It’s a stage play and a religious comedy about a young man who’s older, dying mother is a staunch Southern Baptist and the woman he is dating is a staunch Modern Non-Denominational and he loves them both but they can’t stand each other. I’ve written maybe half an act and it tickles me, but I honestly don’t think I know enough about Southern Baptists to finish the piece. I should take the Sunset Limited down through New Mexico and Texas all the way to Louisiana and just visit as many church services as I can. What a colorful trip that would be.

And Sirens. That’s another I can’t decide the form for. I started in an airport and said it was to be a television series something akin to The Vampire Diaries, except, of course, dealing with sirens. But I wrote maybe 30 or 40 pages and I don’t think it would really work as a television drama, expensive underwater sequences withstanding. It might turn into a feature. It’s another case of not really knowing where I want it to go. Great premise, great imagery, no plot. There’s something about a war brewing, but I need to let my brain work it out a while longer.

And then, the one thing for which I have neither a title, a genre, a length, or an idea: my capstone script. Everything I have thought of so far has been wonderful, but unusable, because it would tell at least an hour and a half to tell the story I want to tell, and it cannot be condensed into a 15-minute short. As this is the most urgent project, it disturbs me that I have so little inspiration for it. I had an idea for a music video, and I actually wrote a specific script for a specific song that I like, but I wouldn’t want that to be my main senior film project. If anything, I’d film that in fall while I was preparing for the “real” film in spring. But I have no “real” film because I have no “real” idea of what the heck I’m doing.

Curse you, Michael Smith. If you hadn’t encouraged me, I would still be an unknown and wonderfully hobbit-like screenwriting major. Now I have to submit things and direct things and put in effort because I now know I can and so I must and it’s most aggravating.

All filmmakers are drug addicts and masochists. Addicted to that which reduces one to one’s most primal being and inflicts the greatest possible pain. And we return to it like bees to nectar, or perhaps like flies to electric zappers, knowing we will be shocked and flying doggedly for the mesmerizing light anyway.

Pish-posh, my analogies grow tired, just like their author. I am off to sleep now. Good heavens, it’s 1 in the morning. I keep intending to go to bed at the insane hour of eleven, and never manage to actually settle down until morning.

Mm, I shall have tea with breakfast. I just went shopping at Aldi’s and bought cereals and these delectable little whipped vanilla yoghurts with cherry sauce at the bottom and eggs and bread and garlic baguettes and frozen chicken breasts, 2 for 80pence! And if it weren’t worrisome to drink before noon, I would try some of that Irish Cream in my coffee when I wake up. But that seems like a bad trend, so I’ll stick with the tea.

I would just like to take this moment to thank Jesus for Microsoft Word. I do believe it is one of my dearest companions. Ball-point pens come in a close second in my heart. And behind them, Phil. Haha! Just kidding. Of course Phil comes before ball-point pens….

……..

Right. So I’m going to sleep now. Good night, dear waking world. Have grand adventures while I dream. Or eat chocolate. Either option is sound.

- E.R.

Disclaimer: only the Velvet picture is my own creation, the rest I stole from Google.

The Lethargy Inherent to the Absence of Rules

2011-01-16T05:14:00.000-08:00

I am restless.

Gotta start out with those nice declarative statements. In the very far distance behind layers of trees I see someone swinging like a human pendulum on what I assume is a tire swing. Steadily back and forth. Content.

I am itching to do something, but cannot focus. I made breakfast. I toured IMDb. I checked both my e-mails and facebook. I looked at my list of things to do and things I want to do and can find no motivation to start or complete any of them. I haven’t even showered yet.

Currently, I am looking out my window at the bright clouds and the dark trees and feeling angsty about nothing in particular, and that is the worst sort because it cannot be pinned down, and therefore cannot be remedied.

It is becoming increasingly aggravating that when I am awake, everyone I want to converse with is asleep. I am disproportionately irritated this morning, and even the fact that I am irritated irritates me. This is a cyclical restlessness, and it compounds interest every time I pass “Go” and fail to collect $200.

Even my analogies are irritating me.

At the rise of the far hill, behind a large power line, the sun is backlighting the clouds. The gray mass around it moves steadily eastward, away from the far ocean’s windy influence, and the scene, sans power line, seems like a scene from an epic movie: the dawn breaking over the hill of battle. Mel Gibson should be riding up any moment yelling, “Freedom!”

Maybe I’ll make more coffee. Or sketch something. I do love my new sketchbook. Or read Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Except, damn, I haven’t got it yet. I could read Genesis, like I am supposed to. Or start on my essay, except I am supposed to read Metamorphosis and Genesis before I can compare and contrast their essential creation account characteristics. So that’s out.

I could work on Amelia and the Piper or continue to form the outline for Rave or read Kaleb Tuttle’s script 6 Chambers which I started earlier this morning and got distracted from by the need for coffee, or I could read the next two chapters of the book my brother is writing, or I could lament, yet again, the loss of my camera, which is grown heavier by the day as I keep seeing things that I wish I could take with me, things I know I will forget. I could move so my left leg is no longer trapped under my right and therefore falling asleep.

There. Done. Success.

I think the problem is that my time here is so structureless. Besides the two tutorial meetings per week, plus the 1-hour faith and learning colloquiam, every other hour of the day is my own to do with as I will, and that is simply too much freedom. Without restriction of time or place, without rules, I am helpless. I must have them in order to produce anything. What a weird conundrum.

And the rules I am trying to set for myself are failing miserably. Three mornings in a row, I have set my alarm to get me up before 9am. Three mornings in a row I have turned my alarm off and opted for sleep, knowing that there was always more time to work.

Gosh, I’m whiny. Maybe if I get out of my pajamas, I will feel more obligated to work. Remaining in them gives me a visual excuse for lethargy.

Okay. Step one: shower. Or rather, bath, since I don’t have a shower. Step two: clothing. Step three: more coffee. Step four: search for books I need online. Step five: real work of some kind.

Good plan.

This One's to Silver Linings

2011-01-14T11:51:00.000-08:00

I’ve felt like a tourist up until today. As much as I’ve tried to acclimate myself to thinking of Oxford as “my town” for the term, I have mostly just felt like an uncomfortable long-term visitor. Today, however, I went out alone for the first time.

First, I went to a cash machine (ATM). It didn’t work, and then I figured it out, and that was the first small triumph of the day. Then I went to the lower reading room at the Radcliffe Camera and they had the books I ordered. Second triumph. I finished one of the books. Third triumph. I delivered my rent money. Fourth triumph. I arrived at my tutor’s office early and got incredibly excited about what I am going to be learning this semester. Fifth triumph. And then I went to a wonderful little hole-in-the-wall art store and bought myself a hard-bound sketchbook and charcoal pencil, and both the “unnecessary” purchase itself, plus the item of purchase, made me feel almost giddy with independence.

I walked everywhere and back again without once getting lost. I am recognizing streets and can orient myself knowing which way is north or south or east or west at any given time. My legs are getting more used to the distances. I’m evolving.

I came home, I made dinner, I drew a sketch in my sketchbook, and now I am going to make a new cup of tea and continue to work on a novel that is quickly becoming very easy to write, which always means that I am on to something good.

All in all, I am in a very good place right now, and after some very frustrating financial pickles (which many of you helped me out with quite generously despite my protestations), I finally can rest easy knowing that I can maybe even buy a hot chocolate on the way home from St. Cats if it’s especially cold.

It also helps that I skyped with Phil for the first time since I’ve been in England. It was hard not to hear his voice for two weeks (I don’t have a phone while I’m over here) or see his face.

I suppose this is what it feels like to “settle in.” And it is quite a nice feeling. I think my daily routine is going to look a little something like this:

Make a cup of tea then bring it back upstairs and drink it in bed.
Work on the Writing Project of the Day.
Go the Bodleian and read for a few hours.
Meet my tutor if it’s a tutorial day.
Go home.
Cook dinner.
Read more.
Make tea.
Do a sketch.
End with more work on the Writing Project of the Day.

This may seem unbearably boring to some, but it is a sort of creative utopia for me. I get adequate sleep, adequate nutrition, and adequate time to sit and putter about with books. What more could I want? Even the fact that the people I love most are not with me forces me to fill my time with creative pursuits. I don’t have a TV, I don’t have Netflix Instant Play or Hulu or Pandora. I have the music I brought with me and Microsoft Word and lots of time.

I’ve always believed that the more restrictions one has, the more creative one is forced to become, especially after Michael Smith introduced me to the film The 5 Obstructions. With very, very little to distract me, my mind is free from the demanding chatter of concern and fatigue and over-commitment. I am capable of devoting my attention to one thing, and it amazes me that I was ever able to get work done before.

So this one’s to settling in. And for finding the silver lining on things like separation, the unknown, and untested independence.

Dead Man's Port

2011-01-13T04:54:00.000-08:00

I had dreams last night. And I don’t know whether it was the dreams or reality, but I swear there were a dozen tiny earthquakes. I’d turn over in my sleep and hear things rattling softly in my room. There’s a train that goes by about a quarter mile away, maybe that’s what did it. But I’ve never noticed it before….

In my dream, the one I remember specifically anyway, I was in a car, driving with someone somewhere through the Arizona desert, or something very like it. And we were stopped a T-intersection. And down in front of us plopped an entire bundle of climbing line and a carabiner, and on top of that, a T-shirt and a steady stream of dust and pebbles.

The driver and I looked up. Above us—and scarily, not that far above us, maybe a couple hundred feet—a man in one of those gliding parachutes was hanging from something—a plane or helicopter, I couldn’t quite see it—and looked as if he was caught. It also looked like he wasn’t even buckled in, just hanging by the arms from the straps. I somehow knew he was going to die.

We kept driving and he freed himself from the vehicle from which he was hanging and started gliding to and fro. But there were water cyclones, bunched in 3s (I tend to dream about tornadoes…I’m sure there’s some Freudian thing going on there), and he got sucked into the gravitational pull (gravitational is not the word I’m looking for—it’s like when you’re standing too close to a train when it goes by and instead of the air knocking you backwards, it pulls you in) and was whipped around it a few times.

He broke free only to be immediately sucked into another vortex, and this time his luck ran out. The water collapsed his parachute. He fell 200 feet to the desert floor and landed legs out. He just sat there for a long moment, like a crash test dummy, and I knew his organs must be turned to jelly, strained around his ribs and hip bones like jell-o through a fork. As we drove away, he slowly slumped over, and I never saw him again.

This was just a 5 minute section of what felt like a 10 hour dream. But it was so disturbing that it stuck with me, even a half hour after I’ve woken up. I think other things happened, more aligned with an adventure than the witnessing of a traumatic freak accident in the sky, but I can’t remember much of it, which is sad, because I felt like something fascinating happened that, in the dream, made me forget the death I’d witnessed.

Maybe it was the port. The very little I had last night at the Formal Dinner (which is quite possibly the most formal dinner I’ve ever been to—we were served and had nameplates and had to stand at certain times and eat with different forks and drink from different little tiny glasses) was enough to convince me that I never have any desire to try it again. I cannot tell if it was “bad” port or “good” port, but it was “nauseating” port, and every time we toasted and took a sip, I couldn’t keep the grimace off my face. Think “cough syrup meets maple syrup meets Everclear.”

Our Programme Instructor and one of our two academic advisers (who may well be my tutor this term), as well as one of the two JCR presidents, all wore tuxedoes. It was quite fun that they owned and regularly wore such things, and that they were wearing them last night strictly for our benefit.

I had been fully intending to take a cab home last night, not because I (or anyone) had gotten “smashed” off the toasting port (as I was told by Monday’s group of revelers that we would), but because I didn’t want to walk home with my heels after having already walked there in them. This would have been a fine idea, but because we had all gotten so chummy during dinner, we all—and by all, I mean 40 of us—decided to go out to a pub afterward to continue in our newfound camaraderie. We walked from St. Catherine’s to the King’s Arms (which was full) to Chequers (which was closed) to The Grapes (I can’t remember why we didn’t stop there) to The Four Candles, which was open, but hot and crowded. We were so close to the street that led to my house that I ended up just walking home instead of staying, and the funny thing is that if I had just decided to walk straight home from our dinner, I probably would have walked at least a half mile less. I was almost crying by the time I opened my front door my feet hurt so bad. But then I crawled into my incredibly comfy bed and skyped with Phil and all was right with the world again, until I saw someone die in a dream.

I have an idea for a book. I almost don’t want to say anything else because I can’t tell if the idea is brilliant or stupid, and I want to do more research with the Bodleian librarians before I can tell if there really is even a story. But I have an inkling that there is an entire novel hidden in this idea, and it excites me.

Also, I randomly outlined an entire movie idea a few days back. It’s a superhero story, but as I was writing it, I kept thinking of it as a graphic novel. I’ve never tried to draw a graphic novel before, and I’m afraid I draw rather slowly anyway, so I might not be the best person to illustrate it, but I think the story is visually stimulating enough that it would make a good comic. It would definitely work as a screenplay as well, but I’m sort of in love with the 2-dimensional plane being its birthplace.

Well, I am going to finish this delicious cup of coffee, and then continue to stay in bed and write. That sort of seems like the perfect way to spend today.

Why Can't We Just Have Sex?

2011-01-12T02:55:00.001-08:00

No, I am not asking that question, Natalie Portman is in her new movie No Strings Attached.

This is a small blurb to add to the idea I posed in my earlier post "Hang Ups." To sum:

Modern men and women are supposed to be able to have casual sex, to have sex with any and everyone, and to view monogamy, marriage, and gender difference as "quaint" if not downright psychotic. However, even Hollywood is catching on to the fact that despite our best efforts, we can't help wanting a little bit more.

Watch the following trailer and tell me what you think:

http://www.imdb.com/rg/VIDEO_PLAY/LINK//video/imdb/vi1902549273/