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I like to work on things, with my hands and with my mind. Since 2000 I have been an amateur woodworker, and since we moved in to our house in 2002 I have been doing a good deal of carpentry as well. Also, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about computer programming, and occasionally do some human-directed writing and translation.
So you'll be talking about mistranslation and shortcuts, in the back yard with Laura, drinking in the humidity and the bird calls -- you'll be sprawled out on the grass beside where she's sitting, effectively you are looking up at the fading glow of sunset and she down at the book she's reading -- she's already getting annoyed at the dusk and swatting at a mosquito, heading in.
Peter's in the back yard lying sprawled out on the grass and Laura's sitting by his side and reading Josner's thoughts on magic -- sitting listening with half an ear to Peter's rambling discourse, now he's stuck on mistranslation
The book of poems is Josner's writings, short melodic notes on magic, not allowed to quote them but I should quote Peter's mistranslations, also show him writing in the back yard with his insect noise cicadas larks and bumblebee and walking in the early morning down past Mountain Station and the park, he's fretting, brooding as the nighttime's dark and quiet ebb, he heads back home and goes to brew some coffee.
Maniapedia offers clients supervised, controlled "Mental Illness Experiences", in a variety of safe settings. Clients will have the opportunity to descend into the pit of schizophrenia/mania/psychosis and to emerge unharmed from its jaws after a set period.
Slogan -- some variation on "Abandon hope all who enter here" which makes it clear that Maniapedia is in the business of hope and growth. "Embrace hope all who enter here" possibly; or something a little faker, slicker. Possibly have the Hippocratic oath on the homepage somewhere, with a sort of implied self-consciousness of the irony/hypocrisy (There's a fine line...) in such a declaration.
Understanding of self. MIE and the experience of return to normalcy will provide client with a heightened understanding of his/her internal structures, needs, desires, fears (and, but, is that such a selling point?)
Conquering fear of illness. Fear of mental illness/breakdown is a neurosis* which can prevent the client from living an honest, non-repressed life. The controlled, supervised nature of the MIE allows the patient to confront and master this fear across multiple sessions. Here we will have to include some language about the low failure rate, and I'll note in passing that the sardonic tone does not quite ring true for a "business proposal", if that is indeed what's being proposed, and that the high negatives of the term "illness" may be a way of shooting yourself in the foot, it's becoming an inseparable core part of your strategy.
Vacation from self -- market this aspect of it to the "mental health tourists" segment of the client base mentioned above. (Strictly avoid, of course, too much time spent on this segment, this and the neurotic repeat business, would not be desirable -- we would like to try and paint a more therapeutically defensible picture of the business. But they have to be mentioned when they are, after all, such a key potential piece of our revenue stream.)
What motivation people would have for using our service is going to be a sticking point if you make it one -- on the one hand it sort of seems obvious to me that people would want to experience insanity if there was a safe out, but --
I know, not really, right? That would be difficult and unlikely to succeed, for us just to come out saddles blazing, "We know you want to go crazy, come on, give it a try," doesn't make much of an advertisement unless there is already a group of well-off people who want to go crazy and will seek us out -- and if we pitch it that way it will seem more like a form of entertainment we are advertising than a therapy. So instead of trying to justify it we take as read that we will be a success, that everybody's already on the same page... if we can get away with that...
*And of course a key to Maniapedia's success will be getting its client base to accept this formulation.
posted evening of July third, 2012: Respond ➳ More posts about Story ideas
Another stab at the story of Laura and Peter's day in the life.
Morning
Laura's wishing Peter would just
Drop this false persona, would just
Break this patterned silence
Where he's built a lonesome castle. Now she
Cries out in the morning when she
Wakes and finds him gone. She wishes
He'd reach out and touch her, wants
To hold him in his grief -- she wants to
Have back these long years that
she's been waiting for his voice. Peter's
Walking in the garden, where his
Winding paths are laid,
Blooming crocus in the springtime, blooming
Hostas in the shade, he wanders
Down the road to town, but nothing's
Open Sunday morning, now he
Rubs his eyes and wonders if he'll
ever find his home.
Expectation conquers knowledge and the
Evidence of senses; what I
see and hear and feel
I'll never grasp, I'll never find;
For all I cogitate and pray I'll never
Sit beside your bedside, seeing
Gauzy patterns traced out
On the page of wounded time.
She gets up, groggy, runs the water,
Steaming up the mirror, she hears
Peter downstairs in the kitchen,
hopes he's making coffee,
Laura's tired out, she didn't sleep well,
Combs her hair and squints and in the
Mirror she can see the look of
anguish on her face.
She's downstairs with a cup of coffee,
Looking quizzically at Peter,
Peter's solemn face that just
can't seem to meet her gaze.
A question's in the air and they both know it, but the
heavy silence keeps their lips held tight; keeps
Heavy thoughts drawn back to yesterday.
Peter in his sweatshirt and his
Groggy eyes, unshaven, takes the
coffeepot that's sitting
On the table, on the table.
He mumbles some reply to Laura's gaze, he smells the coffee,
Smiles weakly, frets; he says
The weather's beautiful outside this morning,
springtime Sunday morning, says
we ought to take our bikes up to the Glen Trail, take a ride.
 
Afternoon
Laura's in the garden, weeding,
Smiling, legs are aching
From the ride up Union Hill to Chester
fresh now in her memory;
She bends down, and the shadow
Of the mountain laurel's branches
Writes — asemic scripture sliding off her shoulder as she moves.
Peter's sitting reading in the sunshine, drinking coffee,
Now his book lies open on the lawn,
he's watching Laura working,
Dancing slow across the garden,
Yellow t-shirt smudged with topsoil,
Dancing slow across the garden
through the sunlight and the shade.
Evening
Laura's by the bedside, catches
Peter's eye, she smiles and asks him
what's he thinking, work tomorrow, ready for another week?
He yawns and stretches, smiles back, already dreaming some,
he mumbles, says let's take some time off in July, he'll maybe
take some days around the 4th... and fireworks already going
off in the air around them
I want to think about this story (or poem, or poem-story) I am trying to write, without actually working (right now) on writing it -- analyze what I have, what I'm looking for, how to get there, whether it is worth while. Suddenly realized this morning that this blog would be an agreeable venue for such a project -- a journal is the right place for thinking about the writing process. Maybe I'll come up with something useful, maybe not.
What I have right now, what seems like a well-crafted kernel for a SOPOPS† -- a lovely fun, sing-song meter that is reminding me a bit of "The Raven" and occasional rhyme; two characters Lauren and Peter in a stable, complex relationship, living together, maybe not connecting with each other quite as much as they'd like to, needing and not always finding each other's support; I have the setting as a smallish town, maybe upstate NY, maybe Maryland, and the house they live in, not far from the commercial district of the town. A garden, the the street they live on is not really described yet but I have a vague picture of it in mind -- small houses, the lots are not super-wide but not cramped either. When the story opens it is early morning on a Sunday late in Spring, still pretty dark out but getting light in the east, streetlights are still on. Peter can't sleep, he is walking down the street wishing something was open in town, a shop where he could buy a pack of cigarettes, longing for a little human contact -- and this longing is strange because after all his (wife? long-term girlfriend?) Lauren is back at home, realizing he's not in bed with her, (and the understanding here is that this has been a habit of his, insomnia, not being around early in the morning). Scene changes are kind of loosely spaced here, she's in the bathroom, she hears him downstairs, hopes he's making coffee, then they are both downstairs in the eat-in kitchen with a coffeepot, he's not meeting her eye.
But so now what happens? I'm thinking there was some transaction between them in the last day or two that made the two of them uncomfortable, drove them a little apart, but I'm not sure what it was, quite, and anyway that is more scene-setting, what needs to happen is a plot of some kind that will unfold over the course of the day. Structurally it would be nice to have three chapters, named maybe Morning, Afternoon, Evening, with maybe a Yesterday in between the last two. Hoping the result of whatever happens in the story will be Lauren and Peter feeling a bit more of a connection in the last scene, where they are going to bed Sunday evening, here I could see putting a short bit of conversation, just a couple of lines, and a pleasant visual description of the shadow on the wall by their bedside, possibly even hinted-at hanky panky. So no earth-shattering revelation in other words, just a day in the life, a minor resolution of a minor clash. (Yeah, still nothing in focus, but at least the sense that there is an image there to come into focus.)
* Is this the right name for her? I had "Laura" for a while but last night came to believe that it did not sound quite right. I guess she could also be named "Kathy"... Her husband (or long-term boyfriend) Peter is definitely named Peter. Not sure why but it seems to fit him like a glove.
† The newly-dubbed genre of Story (Or Poem, Or Story-Poem)
posted morning of June 30th, 2012: 1 response ➳ More posts about Poetry
Lauren's wishing Peter would just
Drop this false persona, would just
Break this patterned silence
Where he's built a lonesome castle. Now she
Cries out in the morning when she
Wakes and finds him gone. She wishes
He'd reach out and touch her, wants
To hold him in his grief -- she wants to
Have back these long years that
she's been waiting for his voice. Peter's
Walking in the garden, where his
Winding paths are laid,
Blooming crocus in the springtime, blooming
Hostas in the shade, he wanders
Down the road to town, but nothing's
Open Sunday morning, now he
Rubs his eyes and wonders if he'll
ever find his home.
Expectation conquers knowledge and the
Evidence of senses; what I
see and hear and feel
I'll never grasp, I'll never find;
For all I cogitate and pray I'll never
Sit beside your bedside, seeing
Gauzy patterns traced out
On the page of wounded time.
She gets up, groggy, runs the water,
Steaming up the mirror, she hears
Peter downstairs in the kitchen,
hopes he's making coffee,
Lauren's tired out, she didn't sleep well,
Combs her hair and squints and in the
Mirror she can see the look of
anguish on her face.
She's downstairs with a cup of coffee,
Looking quizzically at Peter,
Peter's solemn face that just
can't seem to meet her gaze.
A question's in the air and they both know it, but the
heavy silence keeps their lips held tight; keeps
Heavy thoughts drawn back to yesterday.
Still having some trouble figuring out where to take this. It seems like it could potentially make a really good short story in verse; but (a) how fucking pretentious would that be? and (b) I don't have a story, just a setting of the scene and introduction of characters. I guess that's as good a place as any to start at a story, but it's not any significant portion of the whole task.
This morning, riding the train from Mountain Station, I happened to be looking through a notebook of mine, having a hard time pushing myself to write, so just rereading some pieces I've written over the past year or so and fretting about how they are not good enough... I found an early draft of the poem "Morning", which I really enjoyed reading, was even having a hard time picturing anything that could be changed to make it better -- a nice time reading. (But can also be a bit worrysome, like "Hm, well it is not good enough and yet I enjoy reading it; ergo my taste in poetry is poor.") Happily(?), it did not take too many repeated readings to start hearing missed timings and improper tones...
Then this evening, back home, I was looking at my blog and noticed a referral from Orbis Quintus (a READIN-editorial-favorite blog for interesting links about archæology and more, which has been dormant for a while but is back in a big way this past week or so) to an old page of mine, one which coincidentally features midway down a later (second?) draft of the poem in question. Well! It did not take much to persuade myself that that was what I should be working on this evening. It's getting better, the poem, and it was pretty good to start with I think, with just a couple of semi-glaring flaws that came out to me a little more with each rereading. I will post the version I'm working on now a little later.
Si, en suma, fuese un acto carente de honestidad el simple gesto de coger un pincel o una pluma, si, una vez más en suma (la primera vez no llegó a serlo), tengo que negarme a mí mismo el derecho de comunicar o comunicarme, porque habiéndolo intentado fracasé y no habrá más oportunidades.
...No soy pintor.
What comes to mind as a means here of identifying with the narrator, or rather as a way of explaining the identification that is occurring, is to mistranslate his stream of consciousness, to replace the references to painting and to calligraphy with one's own arts and shortcomings; of course one would not be able to hew too closely to the original text for long/at all, and it might straightaway degenerate into pastiche and thence to original writing (a degeneration devoutly to be wished, one might assert) -- one might well veer off into pedagogy, might feel compelled to instruct one's (sparse, and ever dwindling!) audience in methods of blogging, on how to write without having to consider it writing, on how to take heart in one's feelings of inferiority to the successful bloggers and/or successful writers and journalists, to rejoice in one's own failure and lack of intellectual cred. Talk (to them, since you know who the couple of people are who read your journal, though perhaps without being up front about whom it is you're addressing) about composing posts with a particular ear in mind, and about how to avoid feeling slighted when you fail to engage, and here of course you will want to be careful about laying down a guilt trip, and will wonder if this bait will be sweet enough to pull anyone in. Push them away more likely!
The noises on my evening porch on Meeker Street divide
into infrequent spots of sound --
the quiet cars and trains far off and sometimes getting closer --
and constant streams, these further classified
into degrees of variation:
cicadas' incessant, homogenous roar muffles
(but listen closer)
the babbling brook of excited birds:
the quiet fizz of soda in my glass.
In the array of inexplicable matters which is the universe, which is time, a book's dedication is surely not the least arcane. It is presented as a gift, a boon. But excluding the case of the indifferent coin which Christian charity lets drop into the indigent's palm, every gift is in truth reciprocal. He who gives does not deprive himself of what is given. To give and to receive are identical.
Like every act in the universe, dedicating a book is a magic act. It could be considered as the most pleasant, the most fitting manner of giving voice to a name. And now I give voice to your name, MarÃa Kodama. So many mornings, so many oceans, so many gardens of the East and of the West, so many lines of Virgil.
Jorge LuÃs Borges inscription to La cifra: May 17, 1981
Am Am(sus)
Finding aptly chilling epitaphs in Robyn Hitchcock lyrics,
Am Em
All I want to do is fall in love while there's still time
Am Am(sus)
Sitting crosswise on the centerpiece and shining off the mantlepiece
Am Am(sus) Am
A skull, a suitcase and a long red bottle of wine.
I was playing in a pubful, of afternoon drinkers
And I asked them as I strummed my guitar, who's got all the chunes
And he crawled along a centipede and rode on his velocipede
Cutting paper napkins into little crescent moons
Tom and Kevin citing happily the sages of their destiny
His living words were dying words he smiled and he said "Yeah"
Searching sadly for that bluegum you can take my eyes I've used 'em
Searching sadly for a quaint old fashioned way to say goodbye
I happened to be looking through a notebook of mine, having a hard time pushing myself to write, so just rereading some pieces I've written over the past year or so and fretting about how they are not good enough... I found an early draft of the poem 
