It has been a very long time. The reason for this being mostly that I forgot the password to log in because I am awesome. I just remembered tonight.
I should have a poem or two up within the week or the beginning of next week.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Overpopulation--Spring 2007
Man, I fucking long for it--
the swimming, the cutting, the cutting free--
the human fences, the forced connections, the
missing--
plodding through cellulite, blood not able to
congeal due to motion, once again, the SWIMMING
The bones.
There will be mass nettings, networks,
fishermen's nets in China made of people,
babies,
animals eaten alive for the gluttony of life--
eating dogs no longer the joke of Korea, but global--
Eating creatures to create space--
for more cellulite, the cheese of it, porous, now
clenched.
The clicking of bones and teeth
clattering like plates on a grandmother's floor,
the linoleum thud--
There will be blood,
viscous, but ever thinning with sweat.
It will flow like water between our thighs and
joints, crevices of skin
between folds of meat and death,
which in this new world are the same.
And life.
There will be no arguments, no conflict.
Only crying and sandwiched flesh and fluids,
the coalesce.
Again, a sort of collective wail and undulation,
a song of corpus.
Life becomes us.
the swimming, the cutting, the cutting free--
the human fences, the forced connections, the
missing--
plodding through cellulite, blood not able to
congeal due to motion, once again, the SWIMMING
The bones.
There will be mass nettings, networks,
fishermen's nets in China made of people,
babies,
animals eaten alive for the gluttony of life--
eating dogs no longer the joke of Korea, but global--
Eating creatures to create space--
for more cellulite, the cheese of it, porous, now
clenched.
The clicking of bones and teeth
clattering like plates on a grandmother's floor,
the linoleum thud--
There will be blood,
viscous, but ever thinning with sweat.
It will flow like water between our thighs and
joints, crevices of skin
between folds of meat and death,
which in this new world are the same.
And life.
There will be no arguments, no conflict.
Only crying and sandwiched flesh and fluids,
the coalesce.
Again, a sort of collective wail and undulation,
a song of corpus.
Life becomes us.
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
An Exercise in Narcissism: Russell on Klosterman--4/4/07
This morning I picked up Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto, a book of essays that's been chilling on my dresser for a couple months collecting dust. I sat at my desk and read the first 30 pages of it, the same thought persisting in my head from the first paragraph of the introduction: I could have written this book.
To some, at first glance, this could be considered a presumptuous, if not downright arrogant, statement. Who am I, of all people, to think I could possibly write a book that is "wickedly funny"1, or perhaps be considered a writer that is "an unparalleled chronicler of the Zeitgeist"2? But the truth of the matter is that the aforementioned review statements are about half right in their accuracy of description. SDACP is, in a word, "funny", and I guess it is also "wicked", but neither term is present within the work as related to one another. In the postmodern sense(Klosterman would love this), SDACP is subversive and "wicked", as they say, only in a particular context. My mother would think this book was hilarious. The implication in that not being that my mother's opinion of literature is of less merit than my own, but she possesses a mindset to which Klosterman unknowingly caters: that of a middle-aged somewhat "hip" lady, who wears shirts with a lot of sequins on them unironically and reads The New Yorker. It's a very specific context, but it does allow for the term "wicked" to be attributed to Klosterman's work. Pseudo-hipsters from Petoskey, MI might feel the same way as my mother, due to some inexplicable similarity of approach to literature.
Of the 90 pages of this book that I have read thus far(I'll probably finish it either in a fit of insomnia sometime tonight or in the midafternoon tomorrow before my voice lesson. Either way I will finish reading it in a mindset the polar opposite of my mother's or a Petoskey hipster's. I will be feeling bitter. Very bitter), Klosterman makes a total of three attempts at Eggersian self-awareness amid a sea of savvy and well-practiced diatribes or ulalations of pop culture. He even goes so far as to reference Eggers directly, quoting A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but the quotation is out of context from his attempts at replication. So the influence is clearly there, but not executed well. Poor Chuck. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.
Which, to get back to my previous statement, is a reason why I could have written this book, an issue I never really addressed in this first paragraph as I got distracted dissecting reviews from noted publications which will never have a chance to misspell my name because no manuscript of mine will ever so much as come into contact with the scratchy maroon carpeting beneath the mail slot of their office door. I, too, as a child of the postmodern era, am loudly influenced by numerous writers before me, even notably Dave Eggers, and I, too, fail at emulating them in my own words. I could also have written this book because, I don't know if you kids have been paying attention or not, but I use way too many words. I use way to many words all the time, in an effort to intellectualize the vacuousness of my life and the way I live my life, and, more evident here, the way I write about my life. Klosterman does the same thing. And his aim is the same: the last lines of his introduction are: "In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever 'in and of itself.'" A statement I agree with. Although the quotation is not the best example of Klosterman's wordiness, it is applicable to what I am going to say next: Klosterman and I write about the same shit. We think about the same shit. We talk, incessantly, about the same shit. So although I may not have the incisive intellectual delivery Klosterman has, or the excellent timing(let's be honest, some of the things I write and say can sound downright autistic), we both care about the same things, are obsessed with ideas of unity and connection, are constantly on a quest for opportunities to connect the mundane with the gory or extravagant. I could have written this fucking book. I could have been a contender. I could have...been doing my goddamned homework instead of rambling on about a book I haven't even finished yet.
1. Quoth The Philadelphia Inquirer
2. Quoth the Philadelphia City Paper
To some, at first glance, this could be considered a presumptuous, if not downright arrogant, statement. Who am I, of all people, to think I could possibly write a book that is "wickedly funny"1, or perhaps be considered a writer that is "an unparalleled chronicler of the Zeitgeist"2? But the truth of the matter is that the aforementioned review statements are about half right in their accuracy of description. SDACP is, in a word, "funny", and I guess it is also "wicked", but neither term is present within the work as related to one another. In the postmodern sense(Klosterman would love this), SDACP is subversive and "wicked", as they say, only in a particular context. My mother would think this book was hilarious. The implication in that not being that my mother's opinion of literature is of less merit than my own, but she possesses a mindset to which Klosterman unknowingly caters: that of a middle-aged somewhat "hip" lady, who wears shirts with a lot of sequins on them unironically and reads The New Yorker. It's a very specific context, but it does allow for the term "wicked" to be attributed to Klosterman's work. Pseudo-hipsters from Petoskey, MI might feel the same way as my mother, due to some inexplicable similarity of approach to literature.
Of the 90 pages of this book that I have read thus far(I'll probably finish it either in a fit of insomnia sometime tonight or in the midafternoon tomorrow before my voice lesson. Either way I will finish reading it in a mindset the polar opposite of my mother's or a Petoskey hipster's. I will be feeling bitter. Very bitter), Klosterman makes a total of three attempts at Eggersian self-awareness amid a sea of savvy and well-practiced diatribes or ulalations of pop culture. He even goes so far as to reference Eggers directly, quoting A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but the quotation is out of context from his attempts at replication. So the influence is clearly there, but not executed well. Poor Chuck. Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.
Which, to get back to my previous statement, is a reason why I could have written this book, an issue I never really addressed in this first paragraph as I got distracted dissecting reviews from noted publications which will never have a chance to misspell my name because no manuscript of mine will ever so much as come into contact with the scratchy maroon carpeting beneath the mail slot of their office door. I, too, as a child of the postmodern era, am loudly influenced by numerous writers before me, even notably Dave Eggers, and I, too, fail at emulating them in my own words. I could also have written this book because, I don't know if you kids have been paying attention or not, but I use way too many words. I use way to many words all the time, in an effort to intellectualize the vacuousness of my life and the way I live my life, and, more evident here, the way I write about my life. Klosterman does the same thing. And his aim is the same: the last lines of his introduction are: "In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever 'in and of itself.'" A statement I agree with. Although the quotation is not the best example of Klosterman's wordiness, it is applicable to what I am going to say next: Klosterman and I write about the same shit. We think about the same shit. We talk, incessantly, about the same shit. So although I may not have the incisive intellectual delivery Klosterman has, or the excellent timing(let's be honest, some of the things I write and say can sound downright autistic), we both care about the same things, are obsessed with ideas of unity and connection, are constantly on a quest for opportunities to connect the mundane with the gory or extravagant. I could have written this fucking book. I could have been a contender. I could have...been doing my goddamned homework instead of rambling on about a book I haven't even finished yet.
1. Quoth The Philadelphia Inquirer
2. Quoth the Philadelphia City Paper
Sunday, March 18, 2007
And in the meantime-Fall 2006
And in the meantime, I write!
As in my spare-time
(the time spent making spare tires out of sheets of clean white paper and fresh napkins from
restaurant silverware),
waiting for so many things I cannot even
enumerate!
I also have these words that dribble out like Japanese candies,
Pre-packaged in entropy and lightness, and colorful
So light, so lustrous inside
But so heavy in the execution!
As in my spare-time
(the time spent making spare tires out of sheets of clean white paper and fresh napkins from
restaurant silverware),
waiting for so many things I cannot even
enumerate!
I also have these words that dribble out like Japanese candies,
Pre-packaged in entropy and lightness, and colorful
So light, so lustrous inside
But so heavy in the execution!
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Not About Africa-September 2006
There is a reason that life is long
And days are short
(like bursts of thunder in a drought)
and it is so.
Like airports sit in ruts,
Street-ridged leas with water and trees, sometimes
Basins spreading
Holes grow larger every year
And I am talking to my temptress, Rwanda
With a name like thick air and a land like
It is not my place to describe things that I can never understand
As they will change
And I will not.
Because there is reason in illusion the way that there is
languid in thick
And the shit-smeared walls of Darfur
Don’t exist
As I can’t see them
I just believe that we should be logical about things.
If the senses tingle but don’t fixate,
Existent.
If the senses are not loose, but seized up, like an atheist in indignation
(Always)
then,
not.
But there is passion in painted pictures of fruit, and
Flowers bloom in photographs because
That is what they are intended to do,
Regardless of art.
(and meaning)
(is not)
a solution.
This one time I wrote a poem about color and it was more real than red
(is).
And this one time my father read me a story about reason and I ignored
(it).
And gimmicks are a means to true love
(which waits).
And I am tired of waiting.
And days are short
(like bursts of thunder in a drought)
and it is so.
Like airports sit in ruts,
Street-ridged leas with water and trees, sometimes
Basins spreading
Holes grow larger every year
And I am talking to my temptress, Rwanda
With a name like thick air and a land like
It is not my place to describe things that I can never understand
As they will change
And I will not.
Because there is reason in illusion the way that there is
languid in thick
And the shit-smeared walls of Darfur
Don’t exist
As I can’t see them
I just believe that we should be logical about things.
If the senses tingle but don’t fixate,
Existent.
If the senses are not loose, but seized up, like an atheist in indignation
(Always)
then,
not.
But there is passion in painted pictures of fruit, and
Flowers bloom in photographs because
That is what they are intended to do,
Regardless of art.
(and meaning)
(is not)
a solution.
This one time I wrote a poem about color and it was more real than red
(is).
And this one time my father read me a story about reason and I ignored
(it).
And gimmicks are a means to true love
(which waits).
And I am tired of waiting.
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
001
This blog will mostly be used for posting my writing. That probably means there will be a lot of poetry, some bits and pieces of short stories(which will most likely never be finished), essays maybe, scene ideas blah blah blah. I'll probably start off by posting some of my older stuff, just because I like the idea of having all my work easily accessible via the interweb and maybe I'll even get some feedback! The latter might be a bit lofty a goal, though. We'll see. I just thought it was time for me to separate my "real" writing from my Livejournal. I'll still be keeping the livejournal, I just plan on using it on more of a social level: keeping up with friends, judging my friends' feelings, posting in the occasional political and television show community, and stealing film stills for use as desktop images. Emo no more!
So, there it is. The Writing Blog of Eleanor. Get excited?
So, there it is. The Writing Blog of Eleanor. Get excited?
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