The 505 Voice & Style Genealogy Assignment

ENL 505: Stylistics
Voice & Style Genealogy Assignment

Before Philo could savor the fear and awe in his face with any sense of justice –even a simple he’ll think twice sense- the part of Philo’s jaw that connects to his skull was separated and fractured into pieces from the punch of an OU wrestler who military pressed his body weight five times a week.
….Joe watched one of the girls talking into her phone: “a man’s been hurt on Court Street, he’s unconscious, in front of Pawpurr’s…” He looked back down at the ground, through the torsos parting, to see Philo’s face mangled into something like a broken vase, once pale, turning purple and black –his jaw had come so far away from his skull that his face didn’t look human except for his partially open eyes. Blood was filling under his distorted mouth, oozing from ugly lips swollen and shredded from foot stomps, in meek gurgles as his short breaths now condensed in the cold night air.

There is facility here; ability to convey story/scene and show style doing it. Emerging is awareness of grammar and syntax and using those for semantic/emotional affect. My hope is this is reminiscent of David Foster Wallace.

Captain And Officer

Captain: Foul play?

Officer: Poultry don’t engage in games sir; I believe play, with designated rules and desired outcomes, usually of the zero-sum type, is a solitary human endeavor. Why do you ask sir?

Captain: What are you talking about? The dead body here on the floor! Was it foul play do you think?

Officer: I don’t think birds had anything to do with it sir. Unless it was a murder of crows. Tee hee.

Captain: What do we know about forced entry or robbery at this point?

Officer: No sign of forced entry, nothing missing other than some decent decorating ideas. How do people live with these bland color palettes and mismatched materials not to mention a total disregard for feng shui?

Captain: Are you saying Chinese food is missing? Or was thrown away?

Officer: No feng shui is the use of energy forces to harmonize individuals with their surrounding environment. Sir.

Captain: Uh huh,... you hungry?

Officer: We just ate sir. Donuts.

Captain: Yeah! Well I want to use some energy forces to you know, harmonize with my surrounding, environments to feng some shui into my belly.

Officer: Sir?

Captain: Any Chinese places around here?

Officer: Sir it’s 9am.

Captain: Yeah, that’s early. Even for hot and sour soup.

Officer: I’m an egg drop guy sir.

Captain: Can it with that egg-drop talk would ya! I’m getting hungry again. No forced entry, nothing taken. When does forensics get here?

Officer: He was called ten minutes ago sir.

Captain: Call him again! Tell him to pick up some Chinese food. I don’t care what time it is!

Officer: Sir, the usual?

Captain: Tell ‘em to go heavy on the fortune cookies.

This conveys my love for Woody Allen’s humor, George Carlinesque word play, and reflects my desire to make others laugh.

Venn Diagram of essentials:

From the humorists I appreciate the ability to simply be funny but also hide profound points in humor.

From the fiction authors I value the ability to make others feel emotions, the power of voice, and like the humorists, to place philosophical ideas in a story.
From the nonfiction authors I glean the middle style and connecting seemingly disparate ideas into a larger philosophical point.

***

Word Count: 570

Write: Although you may not have written much beyond academic or corporate writing, still you have a voice, a style, and you have been influenced by others, whether they be famous writers, not-so-famous writers, friends or family members. In this assignment, please look at some representative samples of your writing and describe your voice and style as you see them emerging from those pieces. Then, I’d like you to conduct a genealogy of your voice and style, tracing them back through the various writerly influences in your life, and what about those writers influenced you as they did. These writers don’t have to be literary. Could be the writers of jingles or cereal boxes, if that’s the writing that counts for you. Feel free to draw a family tree or flow chart, if that helps.

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How is The Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy funnier than A Confederacy of Dunces? Or Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid?

I ask to know. To learn. Something. Anything.

Naturally

If you want to differentiate between nature and wild, be my guest.

I have made a few enemies in my life stating that there is nothing unnatural. This truth is so obvious and yet so ire inducing to modern paradigms.

Be that as it may, I do like to take a walk in the woods or on a beach… and separate myself from the present dins and whatnot.

So I did, with my two sons, on president’s day.

And it was glorious.

I got the idea the morning of president’s day as I knew my wife would be out all day and I would have to come up with things for us to do.

So when it became apparent that my youngest wasn’t going to nap as he yelled “papa” for what felt like eight hours, I coated, hatted, and gloved them up and told them “rule number one for walking in the woods”:

                Stay close to papa

On the drive there I mentioned rule number one again and quizzed them.

                Stay close to papa

We get there and my oldest darts off like a dragon fly in heat.

Rule number one might as well have been cruel cummerbund for all he cared.

Of course he finds himself in a pricker bush and I have to get my little guy to come back and I ask my eldest “are you in no man’s land?” I extricate him from the prickers and most of the remainder of the walk was spent avoiding the bear-claw like horror of the prickers. Never mind that the path is about six feet wide in most areas and the prickers only lie at the edges.

My youngest won’t be three until the end of march but he was such a trooper: running to catch up, never complaining, and being an all-around joy with his curved, brittle walking stick.

My oldest was inquisitive, excited, and steered clear of those prickers at every turn, straightaway, and reverse.

So maybe I don’t think there is anything unnatural. Maybe you do. When you find a square circle, let me know.

In the meantime, I’m going to walk in the woods with my boys, naturally.

How Many Your Lips Do?

I have to share this.

Why?

Because I laughed my ass off.

At 5 in the morning.

With no coffee in my system.

I had started Bill Bryson’s A Walk In The Woods a few days back, based upon Stephen King’s list of recommendations at the back of his On Writing.

Thoroughly enjoying the book I decided to heed my 5am alarm last Saturday morning and, instead of playing guitar in the basement, read at the dining room table as feet of snow awaited shoveling outside.

Soon thereafter I was laughing so hard I was worried I was going to wake the tots. Just howling in the light of the dining room with the rest of the house cloaked in darkness and silence.

Bryson is so very funny and is so because he is so unassuming in his voice. 

The book is simply about his experience hiking the Appalachian Trail, most of it done with his childhood friend Katz.

Read on and try not to laugh:

 

No Need For Verbosity Or Unnecessary Vocabulary Like Verbosity

I recently wrapped up Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up and have to say it was a wonderful look into important years of his life.

One fun connection for me was that Mr. Martin studied philosophy in college and he even mentioned Continental Rationalism and Symbolic Logic courses in the book. Those of you paying any attention to this blog know that I am somewhat versed in both and have been known to point out Leibnitz motifs in our modern world, especially the best of all possible worlds in relation to suffering.

Now what brought me to Born Standing Up was research into memoirs as I write my own. I began with Bill Byrson’s The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid. I’m taking memoir recommendations so feel free.

Both writers share a very concise approach with no need for verbosity or unnecessary vocabulary like verbosity. And both are very funny. Now truth be told, though the Martin book is about his foray into and departure from stand-up comedy, it is mostly about his process and also the business of comedy, much of which is very pedestrian…like a job. Who woulduh thunk it? Bryson’s book, while about growing up in the 50’s, was laugh out-loud funny.

But, both books made me think; Bryson about the incredible advance of the country post WWII but also about the unknown fallout from some of our own nuclear testing, especially the Bikini Atoll and Martin about the importance of early performance experience (he performed magic tricks from a very early age) and the importance of music as it relates to the imagination. As an aside, my father who picked up the banjo as his very first instrument and who could play the ubiquitous Foggy Mountain Breakdown, conveyed to me that Steve’s banjo playing on The Crow: New Songs for the 5-String Banjo was really groundbreaking and incredible.

But gogdammit! Both books made me wistful. What the fuck is it with me and wistfulness?

A passage from each for you:

“I was alone with him in the bedroom; his mind was alert but his body was failing. He said, almost buoyantly, “I’m ready now.” I sat on the edge of the bed, and another silence fell over us. Then he said, “I wish I could cry, I wish I could cry.”
                At first I took this as a comment on his condition but am forever thankful that I pushed on. “What do you want to cry about?” I said.
                “For all the love I received and couldn’t return.”
                I felt a chill of familiarity.
                There was another lengthy silence as we looked into each other’s eyes. At last he said, “You did everything I wanted to do.”
                “I did it for you,” I said. Then we wept for the lost years. I was glad I didn’t say the more complicated truth: “I did it because of you.”

I was waiting only for the moment when I was invited to step up to the toy box and make a selection.
                When that moment came, it took forever to decide. Every little package looked so perfect and white, so ready to be enjoyed. Eventually, I chose an item of middling size and weight, which I dared to shake lightly. Something inside rattled and sounded as if it might be die cast. I took it to my seat and carefully unwrapped it. It was a miniature doll – an Indian boy in a papoose, beautifully made but patently for a girl. I returned with it and its disturbed packaging to the slightly backward-looking fellow who was in charge of the toy box.
                “I seem to have got a doll,” I said, with something approaching an ironic chuckle.
                He looked at it carefully. “That’s surely a shame because you only git one try at the gift box.”
                “Yes, but it’s a doll, I said. “For a girl.”
                “Then you’ll just have to git you a little girlfriend to give it yo, won’tcha?” he answered and gave me a toothy grin and an unfortunate wink.
                Sadly, those were the last words the poor man ever spoke. A moment later he was just a small muffled shriek and a smoldering spot on the carpet.
                Too late he had learned an important lesson. You really should never fuck with the Thunderbolt Kid.

Neophyte In Nawlins and other assorted Musings

It’s been a while since I have blogged for you. It’s been a while since I thought blog could be a verb, and the past tense blogged is just off the hook yo!

A lot has happened.

Visited the Big Easy. For the uninitiated the big easy is a gigantic easy quiz. Think a big life size check from the Price Is Right but instead of date, pay to the order of and all that, it is just a bunch of easy true/false questions like Water is Wet T F or Water Boils at a temperature of microwave oven T F or Donald Trump’s Hair is Real... Opossum T F. I kid, I visited New Orleans. And let me tell you, after two hours into your trip, when you see a woman place a 4 month-old baby onto a bar so that she can do two shots, you know you are in for a good time. Oh, did I forget to mention that I wasn’t in a bar but in a shopping mall? Yes, they live differently in New Orleans my friends. I just flew back from New Orleans and boy is my liver tired. Yes a hedonistic delight down there, once you whip out your machete and cut through the humidity only to find that once you get indoors, you need a parka because it is freezing in most establishments, which accounts for the gumbo, etouffee sales numbers, which coupled with the day round/week long/month entirety/year round drinking, accounts for the obesity. But I had a great time and ate a bunch of stuff I can’t pronounce like remoulade and drank a bunch of stuff I can’t remember, like remoulade. Hell, I even got to run around the Mercedes Benz Superdome (because we all know about the strong german contingent in Nawlins’ and the goose stepping at Mardi Gras) at 6:30am for a 5k without one single local yelling who dat!

(Geography note: The Mississippi River basically spans New Orleans to Canada.)

M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I - why do I feel like I need to pee, or do I just miss peeing? Weird. 

It was basically a moral imperative, even for this moral nihilist, to get beignets.

This is a shot of The Spotted Cat bar and Jamey St. Pierre & The Honeycreepers. They were a really soulful group and very tight, despite the fact that it was 3pm on a blistering, humid sunday afternoon. This to me, in my total New Orleans neophyte-ness, symbolizes New Orleans.

Read Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid. I don’t think I have devoured a book this way since Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. I know, too much fiber devouring whole books like this. While not a child of the 60’s and not from Iowa, I found the book incredibly funny and did not mind the strange looks from the other hotel pool inhabitants as my laughs interrupted their imbibing. I also marveled out how Bryson could deftly place some historical stats to better give you a sense of the 60’s; especially the atomic age and the testing that occurred after WWII. 

Behold: the power of adjectives.

Speaking of WWII, New Orleans also houses the WWII museum. The museum is huge and it is actually rather hard to get through and feel like you learned a lot; this is because they theme the areas and try to make it feel like you are in the jungle via overhead trees and ambient nature noises or in a bombed out Germany with uneven flooring and dilapidated décor to match – which in the end just cramps things a bit too much on a crowded day. Ah but the saving grace of the museum is the Beyond All Boundaries movie. A really neat movie experience that, because you are seated and not pressed along through installments, feel like you are wiser on the other end. But but but, this is not, I repeat, not, a museum for kids. There is very graphic video at points throughout which include persons burned alive and shot in the back. Not for kids. 

Visitors could don the outfit for their own iconic shots. The kid before me said the shirt stunk. He was right.