The 505 - Last Assignment

ENL 505 - Stylistics

Reflection On Style Assignment

Style is the way a person engages and reflects the world. This is my understanding as of mid-February 2019.
Or maybe...style is better understood as how one perceives THE world but/then reflects THEIR world. Like digestion, what goes in is NOT what comes out. An “objective” world is sensed but a subjective world reflected. Whittle this down to literary style and we might come to the consensus that literary style is the process by which a writer (and ergo a reader) engages the world and reflects that world in or through the act of writing (and ergo reading).
But, as Ben Yagoda painfully points (alliteration) out: style IS the person. Style is not a person/attitude/culture/genetic/geographic/generation neutral proposition. So you’ll (shift to 2nd person) have to accept that you’ll never be Joshua Ferris or George Saunders or Toni Morrison or Tim Kreider but deep down in places you don’t like to talk about at cocktail parties, you knew this. Oh you knew it all right. You, of all people, rail against the mundacity (neologism [mundane+audacity=mundacity]) of tautological utterings practically day in and day out (“it is what it is”) as the most boring, offensive offerings of words for the sake of words. And there is nothing as tautologous as you not being someone you aren’t. No, what you don’t like about style being the person, is the person you are.
And nothing, NUH-theeng, has changed over the course of 14 weeks of learning about style. Should it have? Maybe (hypophora). What really changed is that I’ve learned, even more concretely, I am more still incapable of change. And this is dreadful. Depressing, truly (anastrophe). So very awful. And so it goes.

Dude: “What was that?”
Bro: “What?”
Dude: “What do you mean what?”
Bro: “What do YOU mean what? From earlier, ‘what.’”

Interlocutor Emeritus: Enough! We all heard it you dopes! It’s obvious. Shannon is waxing on again about facticity. He’s got a complex or some shit.

You are stuck with you and you can’t change. Not a bit. Human all too human as Nietzsche said...but

You. Can. Write about it.

Engage the world and reflect that engagement WITH WORDS on the damn page. String sentences together and have end-focus and throw in some rhetorical figures and learn grammar rules so that you can bend em’ and try the upper, middle, and low styles and use Latinate and be colloquial and imitate the authorial silence of Capote or try your best for some powerful status details a la Didion (a lone, dusty, plastic poinsettia adorned his desk - no pictures of children dressed in Halloween costumes) and don’t you dare argue - instead dramatize, the way Mailer would and don’t forget to try to Tom Wolfe-it and just throw everything against the page and see what sticks...but you’ve got to, must, put SOMETHING on the page.
You know you are special, right? You know that spatio-temporally you are unique in all the universe and yet you are going to NOT write for fear of, fear of what? Criticism? Did I mention that you have a point of view unrepeatable in space/time? I did (hypophora). What are you waiting for?
Style be damned!
Humanity be damned!
Inability cursed, brainpower (or lack thereof) ba!
Forget ALL that.
Do I have to quote that puke-green skinned, Dagobah swamp residing, jangly-toothed Jedi, Yoda and tell you that you must unlearn what you have learned?
Style is the person but your fallacy is thinking only the styles of others matters. Maybe write till you do matter or maybe write because writing matters...to you.

Maybe when we talk about style we are really talking about what matters to you.
I could be wrong and my opinion may not be worth a hill of beans in this crazy world but I do have a question. Tis a simple one:

What matters to you?

Your style is what you care about, what you value, what...matters to you; if you are afraid of what others think about what matters to you, it doesn’t REALLY matter to you and you aren’t done learning your values. No sin there. And good news, you can write about it.

What are you waiting for?
Either way, write. Right?

(Psst! I lied about tautologies. I fucking love tautologies. Not really. But…)

***

Word Count: 716

Please compose a brief (500-750) word reflection on this semester and your understanding of style, fourteen weeks later.

The 505 - Haikubes

12 Sentence Piece from Haikubes in ENL 505

“Fortune tellers are bullshit,” he said.
“They may be,” she retorted, “but I might remind you that your partner disagrees.”
He wasn’t ready for this and it stuck inside his cranium like an al dente noodle.
“Yeah well, suckers are born every minute and suckers partner up every minute.”
“Smart,” she said. “Make a mountain from a molehill and a war from a woe-is-me.”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” he yelled.
“Man, do you hear yourself? Your lips keep smacking, mistake after mistake after mistake. Man, woman, child, your stubbornness knows no bounds. You should accentuate the positives of your girl, eliminate the negatives. That’s what a man does.”

“What a man does?” he yelled. Do me a favor, look up ‘man’ in the dictionary.”

The 505 - Joan Didion

ENL 505 Stylistics

Joan Didion Assignment

The Morlans ate “chip chop” on Wonder Bread seven days a week but mixed peanut butter with ice cream every night. The Gordons believed in jesus after Dickie died young and so went to the church near Mud Run creek, twice a week to find meaning after the meaningless. The Potts family had industrial-strength antennae on their roof to speak with truckers via CB every night -to the dismay of any family nearby trying to watch one of the three television channels. The Kings tried to run an inchoate flooring business from their house but they would have had just as much failure running any kind of business from their house, what with umpteen kids in various stages of diaper, Zeppelin concert t-shirt, and tube top littering their front steps. The Scott kids, all six of them stuffed like human sardines into a two bedroom home, played Pee Wee football for the Hazelwood Bears, Little League baseball for the Athletics or Tigers, slung sauerkraut covered “bratwurst” at Der Dog Haus in Rolling Acres Mall, while their parents turned up the Mamas & The Papas, Creedence, and Jackson Browne 8-track tapes and drank Kessler whiskey stowed under the leaky kitchen sink.
            All those families lived in nondescript houses situated no less than fifty yards from a Central Avenue bridge that carried Oldsmobile Cutlass Supremes, Chevy Novas, Pontiac Thunderbirds, and every other octane nourished animal that roared East/West on four lanes of Interstate 76 across Northeast Ohio. Those living near the bridge had trouble sleeping when they spent the night elsewhere because of the profound lack of a voluminous static whir from three thousand revolutions per minute, along with the melatonin inducing murmur of 18-wheelers pulling low gear to make the inclined on-ramp from nearby State Street. The underside of the bridge blasted hazing-style graffiti to join the perpetual wind and perpetually reverberated drone of Firestone and Goodyear tires traversing cement and tar beneath tons and tons of steel, minute after minute.
            Still, in summer they barbecued Acme hot dogs and burgers on cheap grills from K-Mart as they drank Busch beer or Pepsi cola on makeshift patios of mismatched bricks in backyards that featured forlorn bathtubs and fishponds. Still, the kids played Red Rover or Kick-The-Can, caught lightning bugs and put them in green-blue tinted Ball-Mason jars, and built forts atop the Scott’s hill. In winter, they still shoveled their walks and the kids had snowball fights and went sled riding as the vehicular hum poured over all of it, season after season, like noisy smog. Still, they all got along with the business of living by the bridge.

Not everything got on with the business of living by the bridge. The decisions and thought processes that land a family fifty yards from an interstate bridge are the same kind of decisions and thought processes that land puppies in houses fifty yards from an interstate bridge; even though the cost of a spay or neuter ensures that “Poochie” and “McGregor” and “Laverne” and “Woody” will become susceptible to estrus and all it entails. The decisions and thought processes that land a family fifty yards from an interstate bridge means that “dogs shouldn’t be leashed” and need to “run free” and “be dogs.” So those cute little pups were loved and adored and grew up as “street smart” as canines can be, for they tagged along in a time when kids walked the earth -to Lawson’s for a game of Pac-Man or the 98 Drive-Thru for mom’s Pall Mall cigarettes. Estrus and all it entails however, doesn’t care for street smarts; it is blind to stop signs or crosswalks or “right of way.” So those doggies followed their heat even when it took them directly onto vertiginous I-76 from under the fenceless Central Avenue Bridge. The hounds had unfettered access - sixty feet from Central Avenue to the highway median grass - to vehicles roaring by at 80 miles an hour.
So did the kids.

***

Word Count: 663

Write: For this assignment, take a brief piece (500-750) you have written and revise/ write in the style of the featured author. In other words, revise so as to mimic the style

of the featured author. You can, as well, compose a brand new piece in this style.

Featured author: Joan Didion (specifically The White Album, more specifically the use of “inchoate” and “vertiginous”)

The 505 - Truman Capote

ENL 505 - Stylistics

Truman Capote Assignment

A man hurried around to the back of the house. He was mumbling loudly, incoherently. It was probably a Sunday because the old man was home and not working -van in the driveway.
“Jack, Jack, they did it, they’re coming for me!” he yelled as he pounded the back door. He was skinny for a grown man and had a bump the size of a marble sticking out from his temple that looked like it could be popped with a needle. The old man stopped him rushing in from the back door and forced him to sit out on the deck. The man screamed in fear but worry wore his face for some other reason. The kids dared not go out onto the deck but one of them sat beneath an open window and listened from the parents’ bedroom.
“They stuck a radio in my ass and they know my thoughts Jack!”
The old man just rubbed his chin stubble like he usually did, as if nothing much had changed.
The child listened from the bedroom as the man raved on and on while the old man nodded here and there. The things the man said scared the child. His breathless sped-up talking about being captured and overtaken and transported made the child believe it. But the old man just listened, a rub of the chin, a nod.
They went out behind the garage and the child could no longer hear them. The child thought he’d heard the man say something about looking in his ass as they walked out there. Must have been out there five minutes or longer.
“You gotta take me to the hospital Jack! They gotta take it out!” His shirt was off now and he was screaming, sounding more panicked than before. He was grotesquely skinny; his ribs and clavicles wanted to break the skin and the mid-day sun drenched him with sweat.
With every scream and curse word, the child became more afraid. The man would stand up and point a relentless finger at his father then sit back down as quickly then yell and blame again so the child worried the man was going to go after his father. But the old man just sat quietly, didn’t even say anything, just listened. Then the man looked off to the left and had a conversation as if someone else was there asking him questions.
The boy listened and fidgeted his fingers in and out of his mouth and waited; he couldn’t understand why his father wouldn’t take him away or make him go away. Why wasn’t his father afraid? He was on the verge of tears when his mother discovered him and shooed him from the room. “Don’t worry about it,” she’d said.
The man’s screaming and ramblings came through the open windows of the house. The older brothers just watched tv. In the boy’s head the words rattled like pennies shaking in a tin can: coming for me, know my thoughts, captured, Jack!
“What’s Dad gonna do?” he asked. Neither brother paid him any mind. Mom had retreated to the kitchen to drink vodka from a coffee cup and read a romance novel. No one was there to answer his questions or explain how the radio in the man’s ass helped them hear his thoughts. A radio produces sound. From the tiny living room he watched his mother flip the pages and take out her dentures from time to time as the wails and hollers from the deck bounced off the grubby house next door, through the futile, torn window screen, right into his ear.

What’s Dad gonna do?

***

Word Count: 606

Write: For this assignment, take a brief piece (500-750) you have written and revise/ write in the style of the featured author. In other words, revise so as to mimic the style

of the featured author. You can, as well, compose a brand new piece in this style.

Featured author: Truman Capote

The 505 - Norman Mailer

ENL 505 - Stylistics
Norman Mailer Assignment

It was just a college relationship in the big scheme of things. A million begin and end every day. But a big scheme of things needs details to matter at all.

Shannon was drunk again but Patty was just as drunk. Mitchell was the third wheel for a while but he loved to drink. Shannon and Patty rode their bicycle of booze all the way to the end of a night that involved stumbling, fighting with calls of “fucking whore” and “fucking asshole,” and the kind of gutless attempt at sex that can only be committed by people so desperate for some version of love or attention or mattering that they are willing to drunkenly fumble around till one pukes out a window and the other urinates the bed.

One time, Carrie, Patty’s roommate, flat out told Shannon that Patty was lying to him, that she’d been calling Josh all summer long and talking to him. Shannon had drank more than a few beers and so told Carrie that he was going to break up with Patty. He drove Carrie home and after he parked, they talked from the front seat of his car about Patty - the kind of person she was, and how it hurt them both. Carrie looked at Shannon and wanted to take a petty revenge on Patty by fucking Shannon, right there in the car if need be. Shannon let it go because he knew, just hours after saying he would break up with Patty, that he couldn’t do it. Even when Patty admitted talking to Josh, through his tears and the anguish in his heart, he couldn’t do it. Patty never even got mad at Carrie because she knew the relationship would never be in danger, Shannon being the way he is. Besides, Patty had to take friends any way she could get them, even backstabbing ones, on account of her fears.

Another time Patty slapped Shannon so hard on his face she left a purple-black bruise like a jellyfish covering his cheek. Patty had played high school softball and tried out for OU but said something about the coach playing favorites or being committed to the scholarships. She had a good arm, so it hurt. But there was nothing he would do, Shannon being the way he was, other than suffer it.

The heavy drinking and fights were almost nightly and the screaming bothered Patty’s roommates. One of the roommates, Rebecca, had been calling home, telling her father it was getting in the way of her doing her schoolwork. At one point, they were in couples therapy at the school’s counseling center. This was before the first break-up. Per the plan drawn up by the therapist, Patty agreed to limit the drinking on weekdays and they both agreed that before even going out to the bars, to come home after a pre-established number of beers. Shannon, excitedly and honestly, expected Patty to abide the plan they’d worked on with the therapist. Then one weeknight out, Patty starts flirting with a guy right in front of Shannon, smiling and bumping his hip as they all played pool. When Shannon said, “it’s time to go, you remember the agreement,” Patty just said, “I changed my mind,” as if she’d told a waiter she wanted the soup instead. Shannon couldn’t fathom what she’d done, what she’d said. Her roommates were there and saw it all go down. Before Shannon left alone in shame, for some reason he felt the need to tell them “I’m not a bad guy.”
            In one sense, it was the beginning of the end, but in the big scheme of things, there never was a beginning to have an end.

***

Word Count: 618

Write: For this assignment, take a brief piece (500-750) you have written and revise/ write in the style of the featured author. In other words, revise so as to mimic the style

of the featured author. You can, as well, compose a brand new piece in this style.

Style: Norman Mailer (specifically, The Executioner’s Song)

Ruth Reichl

I heard Ruth Reichl on NPR this morning say:
"The truth is, you find time for the things you care about." And so I ask you, all of you: What do you care about? What do you find time for?

Ed Wolfe

Read Stanley Elkin's I Look Out For Ed Wolfe last night and I highly recommend.

The rants here and in The Franchiser are just too delicious not to consume, even if you feel a little, abused economically and ergo, personally.

Will you look out for Ed Wolfe?

The 505 Tom Wolfe

Tough assignment from the 505: write a la Tom Wolfe.

Ooof.

But...I read Wolfe's The Electric-Kool-Aid Acid Test and Style As Argument by Chris Anderson.

I tried to capture, somewhat, this idea that elite musicians are channels for something greater. That the music comes THROUGH them, not FROM them. I first heard this reading Plato, regarding the poets. Then oddly enough, after Stevie Ray Vaughan died and Eric Clapton talked about SRV's playing:

Eric Clapton I don't think anyone has commanded my respect more, to this day. The first time I heard Stevie Ray, I thought, "Whoever this is, he is going to shake the world." I was in my car and I remember thinking, I have to find out, before the day is over, who that guitar player is. That doesn't happen to me very often, that I get that way about listening to music. I mean, about three or four times in my life I've felt that way, in a car, listening to the radio, where I've stopped the car, pulled over, listened, and thought, I've got to find out before the end of the day, not, you know, sooner or later, but I have to know NOW who that is.
...and I remember being fascinated by the fact that he never, ever seemed to be...lost in any way...It was as though he never took a breather...or took a pause to think where he was gonna go next, it just flowed out of him. It's going to be a long time before anyone that brilliant will come along again.
I didn't get to see or hear Stevie play near often enough, but every time I did I got chills and knew I was in the presence of greatness.He seemed to be an open channel and music just flowed through him. It never seemed to dry up.
I have to tell this story: We played on the same bill on his last two gigs. On the first night, I watched his set for about half an hour and then I had to leave because I couldn't handle it!. I knew enough to know that his playing was just going to get better and better. His set had started, he was like two or three songs in, and I suddenly got this flash that I'd experienced before so many times whenever I'd seen him play, which was that he was like a channel. One of the purest channels I've ever seen, where everything he sang and played flowed straight down from heaven. Almost like one of those mystic Sufi guys with one finger pointing up and one finger down. That's what it was like to listen to. And I had to leave just to preserve some kind of sanity or confidence in myself.

ENL 505 - Stylistics

Tom Wolfe Assignment

An infinitesimal minority hear the calling. Of those, few heed the call. The heeders? Many fall by the wayside; rolled over and tumbled in the wake of doubt, or block, or aesthetic attrition.
You and me? The most boring mortals never hear the call... a call. No brrinnnggg brrinnnggg for us!

But there are sentient savants among us, and they offer us, oh just: vicarious prodigy, vicarious transcendence, vicarious peak experience. We can’t have these...on our own. Pshaw!
It’s no one’s fault. Blame is moot. Why try to explain the inexplicable? Got some sort of Sisyphus complex, do ya? Why fret when you can live vicariously?

Face facts! Few will ever possess and only a few more will ever understand, remotely, the genius. Can you think of a more overused word than genius? Gawd! But it is genius proper in these carnate gods. They possess, in spades, a shrug-your-shoulders, don’t look at me, holy schnikes kinda genius. The kind of wunder mensch, beyond talented, kinda brain that can juggle sense data out the yin yang in a nanosecond over a corpus callosum thick as nautical rope:

Right Brain
            ::::left fret hand
            ::::hammer-on index-middle-pinky finger succession
            ::::low e string frets 3-5-7
            ::::low a string frets 3-5-7
            Index-middle-ring::::low d string frets 4-5-7

Left Brain
            ::::right pick hand
            ::::index finger low e (dampen strings below e with remaining palm)
            ::::index finger low a (dampen strings below a with remaining palm; thumb dampen e above)
            ::::index finger low d (dampen strings below  with remaining palm; thumb dampen a & e above)

Whole Brain
            ::::hear but don’t listen-don’t play but be played-imagine ahead-hear the notes a priori-sing the notes in your mind’s voice-feel for the bass line-feel for the drummer-feel for the chords-feel for the crowd...feel…
...with your sixth sense.
Or seventh or eighth sense...or ad infinitum sense.

Do it...ALL AT THE SAME TIME!

Unless you’ve tried to play an instrument, you can’t really fathom the magic that elite musicians pull off. You just watch in awe as the rabbit isn’t only pulled out of the hat but is ejected into the aural stratosphere and explodes to fill your existential/aesthetic void with
je ne sais quoi but something you needed!

Unless you’ve played an instrument and tried to master it to the level of even pro-am status, you’ve no clue the voodoo that they do when they do what they do indeed do. But done it is.

Maybe you’ve near-mastered something in your life. Hell! maybe back in high school you were capable of going from a back handspring into a full-fledged flip and as a result, have an immense appreciation every time the summer Olympics roll around and you watch agape the floor routines as human springs bound and coil and twist with needle-threading precision but never tire or dizzy or seem anything but unbound, untethered, unREAL.

But this isn’t even about mastering. Mastering is B-O-R-I-N-G. This is NOT run of the mill, hey hey kid’s got some talent, second place in some High School Gong Show. This is NOT even about impeccably gifted musicians who can earn a meager life-on-the-road living, performing music. Not even the same ballpark, area code, universe.
This is about those musicians that when you hear, you know...when you are in the presence of...and… when there are no words that pop up, come to mind, do justice -there just aren’t. We don’t need a vocab when we slide into aesthetic nirvana like melting into a hot bath. Seeking is suffering. Epistemic justification is as worthless as justifying epistemology.

But it is certain, oh as certain as 2+2=4. We know because we are changed; certain because we are accosted, held hostage, raptured with an aesthetic drug in our blood, as formless, metaphysical, righteous beauty fills, no sates! us...still; immobile, wordless, clean and cleansed, we cannot reckon...but reckoning is soooo beneath us now.

These musicians are pregnant with god, however defined, in eternal artistic labor, their past dedication and practice serving as the dilation that allows the deity to be delivered but never, ever, apart...always attached via an umbilical of equal reciprocity: each possessed and nurtured by the other.

We mortals never hear the call but we can always hear the music.

***

Word Count: 702

Write: For this assignment, take a brief piece (500-750) you have written and revise/ write in the style of the featured author. In other words, revise so as to mimic the style

of the featured author. You can, as well, compose a brand new piece in this style.

I am not Left Handed

Maybe you've seen The Princess Bride and recognize the title as those words spoken by Inigo Montoya.

Nor am I left handed and nor do I usually blog about my work. I do enjoy a good noir flick though (The Third Man, Double Indemnity come to mind).

But I have an advisee who has shaken me to my core. Probably because I don't do enough crunches or planks but that's not important right now.

Here is what he said:

I found out ten years ago I'm left handed.

I shit you not.

Take a moment and let that sink in.

What does that even mean!

You've used your hands all life long, assuming you have both, you've used both of them, all life long.

What does it mean to learn you are left handed???? and how did you learn it??? did someone tell you after a battery of tests???? because you couldn't figure it out and had to solve the mystery before you died???

What the living fuck? What kind of person drops this nugget ninja in my cranium to fester and bite at my brain like a mosquito?

Dammit this is why people are the worst.