The End of the First Week (I'm going to get flak for this post)

Well, almost the end of the first week. In any case, I'm pretty much aware of how things are going to go and how they're not.

But no one cares about that. Let's talk about something else.

The syllabus: my discussion teacher for fiction writing (grad student) has an interesting one. The thing you notice right away is the abundant use of bold and italics throughout...which is unsettling to the eye and probably unnecessary. If you look out of for these sort of things, you're in the clear for nearly the first two pages until the bottom of the second page where you're greeted with "I will check attendance..." and so on. In that same paragraph she uses "*'s" (four of them around two words) to emphasize, as well. I can't imagine what reading her fiction is like.

Here's a good one: "Respect for your peers is not only appreciated, it is mandatory."


Four sentences later she italicizes an entire clause. This clause is surrounded by a number of sentences about sexual harassment, which is a strange paragraph to include in a syllabus, much less speak out loud with special emphasis (which she did). I'm hoping she had a past experience (probably not a good one), otherwise I'm seeing this as a little weird.

I guess, on second thought, I shouldn't be "hoping she had a past experience" because that means someone was sexually harassed, which, um, sucks.

Another awesome sentence: "Written, one 1/2 page (typed), constructive critiques of each of your peers' work on workshop days are a large part of your participation grade." If you had to guess, what guess would you guess as to what (exactly) I find displeasing (very) about that sentence (sentential-ly)?

Here, I'll emphasize everything I find odd/weird/interesting/bad: "Written, one 1/2 [sic] page (typed) [sic], constructive critiques of each of your peers' work on workshop days are a large part of your participation grade." It was difficult to point out mid-sentence, but she wants this constructive critique to be "written" and also "typed."

And one final treat: "(This outline is subject to change at my discretion as needed or desired.)


I suppose it's a little mean to critique her syllabus in this way, but honestly, I had a hard time doing anything else while she read every word *out* ^loud.^ Plus, she's a fiction grad student, so she, like, writes fiction - a lot.

I'll give her the benefit of the doubt; she's nervous, even though (as per her word) she's taught four or five classes. Here's why I think she's nervous (italics added by me, this time): "There are no excused absences, but in the case of emergencies, that's obviously not the case." This came after talking for a few minutes about how there were no "*excused*" absences, under any circumstances, whatsoever. She was implicating, through certain words and what not, that even illnesses wouldn't be excused, and I'm sure she actually said the words "if you're sick..." But then she ends with that beautiful sentence and cleared everything up.

Another reason I think she's nervous: She has high self-esteem, she's very comfortable with who she is and what she's about - which is great. The problem, though, is that people who are comfortable with their lives and who they are as people sometimes realize that others look at this in an odd way. People who are this sure tend to stand out as a different and no one likes to stand out; 'cause that's weird and people stare. So she's aware of this and therefore a little uncomfortable in front of the class, which is ironic. She's uncomfortable because she's comfortable.

The textbook for my American Lit class is called "The Norton Anthology - American Literature: Shorter Seventh Edition." Most of that's true, but not the last three words, specifically shorter. Seriously. The book (tome, really) is 2800 pages long, thick, dense, weighs five pounds, and reminds me vaguely of Jason Alexander. I'm certain that if dropped on my cat, it (the cat) would no longer be a cat, but would look much like the cat from Boondock Saints - which, after receiving the business end of an accidentally discharged pistol, resembled puddy and mush, thick soup sprayed across the wall.

It's the kind of book that, if dropped on a table from a 12 inch height, would thunder ominously, like the beginning of a small quake or the beginning of a Michael Bay movie.

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Prose Ailment (Or Virus Or Disease Or Something)

My writing has been suffering lately, and not in terms of content and volume, but in terms of style. It's lacking that quality that used to make it sparkle. See? I just said "used to make it sparkle." That, if anything, is an indication that something is wrong.

What I mean is that my writing has become turgid; simple; unrealized garbage. My writing used to speak both in what it said and how it was said and now it seems to perform only the former. Gone are the days, it seems, when I would write in a way that would inform my topic, or inform something, anything. My prose is now simple, straight, direct, and lackluster. It's nearing obscurity and normality. Examples are abundant in the majority of my last 10 or so posts.

I don't think I'm the only sufferer of this disease - "inferior writing." I think it's a common disease (or virus or whatever; I'm no linguist, I won't attempt to identify it's biology) among writers in my generation (or, in my case, people who aspire to be writers). Lots of what I read has that quality where it could have been written by anybody, by some random person. I've no way of telling who authored most things I read, today, and that's bothersome.

Perhaps the reason things got this way is this: in an age of ever-increasing information volume-flux and the abundance of mediums through which to communicate and transfer this information, people are demanding, possibly subconsciously, writing that is more direct, straight, and narrow, writing that doesn't dance around a point for the sake of dancing, writing that doesn't speak in awkward sentences in order to further the point of the piece. People who read blogs and other mediums want prose that is easy to understand, easy to ready, and that gets to the point without meandering through the woods first, even if there's an intellectual and artistic purpose behind such meandering - for instance, the way I'm meandering and repeating myself in this paragraph in order to emphasize the antithesis of what I'm identifying.

People have no time for art, anymore, especially in writing. Writing is perhaps the most difficult art to consume appropriately, because it takes the most time. Or at least that's the pathology. People feel they can look at a painting, a drawing, a sculpture, whatever and get whatever there is to get in a relatively short amount of time, and then move on to the next victim piece. And the same can't be said for writing, which requires applied reading, thinking, and re-reading in order to comprehend whatever the hell is being said. It's much faster to look twice and three times at a piece of marble than it is to re-read Moby Dick. So folks don't have time, they say, to do "art writing" - which to their mind is anything not related to the media and the news.

For this reason, blogs, to attract attention and a healthily dispersed demographic, tend towards journalistic writing as opposed to artistic writing, which causes a decrease in the volume of good writing out there. And hence the explanation to my current prose woes.

As you've no doubt discovered, I've regained some of my prowess in this very blog post, but it all seems unnatural, a little off, somehow, to be writing fluidly and artistically after indulging in garbage newspaper script, a practice that came much too easily for me to be at all comfortable about the future.

The information influx, Total Noise to David Foster Wallace, is having a profound effect on everything, and we - I - keep discovering new consequents to its antecedents.

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Thoughts

I've been writing a lot recently. Not sure what any of it's about, or why I suddenly have the inspiration to put pen to paper and produce something other than blog posts, but whatever. I won't fight it. This shit doesn't come often.

It is random, though. I found myself writing a lengthy character sketch that started out as a description of a poker table. And I don't know why I started out describing a poker table. Later, I started writing a short narrative about a particular experience and now that's turned into a real story, or at least the beginnings of one. Where does it come from?

The uneasy part about it all is the inability to discern whether or not any of this is, um, good. And I'm not even talking about if people are going to read things I write, like mainstream people and what not. I'm talking about good from the standpoint of literary fiction, of writing for writing's sake. How do you tell? Unless it's eerily similar to something someone has already done, how do you tell if it's good or not?

It seems especially difficult if you're like me and you have a distinctive tone and feel and style to your fiction writing, one that's easily identifiable from among the many. You can pick up twenty random books and it's probable that all of them will be written in the same manner: action, dialogue, plot, "normal" sentences and style. Varieties exist, but the rule of thumb that you should write how you speak, or how others speak will still apply. So most books you pick up have the same drawl to them, the same lilt, the same speech patterns. I don't write that way. I'm different, difficult, perhaps. Will this be accepted? Probably not.

Go Lakers, or something.

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