Words Don’t Count

New story underway.  I’m still negotiating how much I can steal from real life, and what I want characters to reveal about themselves.  Maybe describing a story isn’t as helpful as sharing the music that goes into it.  Life now is like a shallow tide swept away all my castles.  My past four years were supposed to be mine forever, but now they’re stoney markers of life long past, headstones of other people’s decisions, but not my own.  The people I love aren’t people, the lessons I learned impractical, the friends I made mostly a scattering of lonely socialites looking for ladders to climb and someone to tell their unfortunate secrets to.

I don’t have many secrets because I don’t have much of a sense of privacy.  I have statements that I abide by, or mantras, and they change.  Here are some.  You can’t hide from the truth, because the truth is all there is.  Words don’t count.  People do.  And the people are gone.  My life is starting over in land-locked Berlin.  When I’m lucky, and ready, I’ll turn around and send the right words to the right people.  I don’t have friends, I only have very good readers.  Dignity can’t be held hostage for the price of a plane ticket.  Berlin doesn’t extrodite most American criminals.  You don’t have to erase everything and everyone that hurt you, but you have little control over anyone else’s lives with the exception of your presence in those lives.  If you withhold your life from others they’ll often resent you.  Disappearing isn’t as complicated as you expect, and it’s often easier than dealing with transitions, or watching people forget and replace you.  However, once you’re gone it’s really hard to reappear, and you will regret it when your past is an empty path with very few people left to account for it.  The benefits of having a relatively empty past are the ability to focus relentlessly on the present.  That’s how writing can really help you, to record the past that otherwise might not exist.  And the few people that do remain, after you pulled a pretty swift disappearing act, those are people who you could switch lives with.  Those are your people.  They know your past.

1. Unexpected Delight feat. Laura Darlington – Flying Lotus
2. The Truth feat Roisin of Moloko and J-Live – Handsome Boy Modeling School
3. Oh Happy Day – Edwin Hawkins Singers
4. The Recipe – Locust Toybox
5. She Came Along – Sharam feat. Kid Cudi
6. Travelin’ Light – Billie Holiday
7. Testament (ft. Gonja Sufi) – Flying Lotus
8. You’re Everything – Bun B feat. Rick Ross, David Banner, and 8-Ball & MJG
9. Caravan – Blur
10. Das Erste Mal – Stereo Total
11. The Black Ghosts/Full Moon – DJ Trife
12. In This World – Moby

Hope the music does something for you.

Everything You Ever Wanted

Download my thesis, Everything That Never Happened To Me (pdf).

Download the soundtrack, a mix CD I compiled (zip).

Individual tracks:

1. “High School Lover,” Air
2. “1992,” Blur
3. “Fog,” Radiohead
4. “Etched Headplate,” Burial
5. “Day N Nite,” Kid Cudi
6. “I’m Afraid of Japan,” Final Fantasy
7. “Orion,” Rodrigo y Gabriela
8. “Nobody Lost, Nobody Found,” Cut Copy
9. “U Hurt Me,” Burial
10. “Figure 8,” Elliott Smith
11. “Knives Out (feat. Monica Blaire),” Waajeed
12. “Lose Control,” Missy Elliott, feat. Ciara and Fat Man Scoop
13. “Man On The Moon,” Kid Cudi
14. “(Reverse),” Final Fantasy
15. “Waltz in C# Minor, Op. 64. No. 2,” Chopin
16. “Passing Feeling,” Elliott Smith
17. “High & Dry (feat. Bilal),” Pete Kuzma
18. “Sex Born Poison,” Air
19. “Kesson Daslef,” Aphex Twin
20. “You Never Wash Up After Yourself,” Radiohead

Anonymous Signature

I’ve started writing on my next story, and conceptually this is based off the idea of writing your name somewhere no one will know or recognize it.  I’m interested in what I’ve been refering to, in my private journals, as the Anonymous Signature paradox.

You wrote your name down, so shouldn't we all know who you are, Tommy?

Putting something uniquely your own in a place where it cannot be identified as such.  Like signing your name in a random library book, or taping a picture of yourself to the inside of phone booth while traveling, it’s an act of commiting yourself to (vain) anonymity.

I got into this idea when I was reading an article on the Mayan languages.  One of the reasons why the written Mayan languages took so long to translate is that the characters don’t stand for a single sound, but for several.  Symbols can be multisyllabic.  They can be drawn in different ways by different people.  But what I find most interesting is that Mayans were expected to add their own personal touches to their script, so the reader could know who wrote it for a fact.  The goal of having your own unique way of writing in a common language spread throughout a very large population strikes me as a very Western, familiar idea I’ve grown up with.  Writing in English as I’ve known in my time has been a task of telling people just the facts while simultaneously defamiliarizing extremely trite, overcontemplated concepts.  My script, however, looks the same.  I write very plainly, in neat print – and if I write in cursive, it’s sloppy and bubbly, but hardly is it in any artistic way unique.  My sentences, and by extension my complete thoughts and stories, tend to sound conversationally my very own. I might discuss a lot of trite subjects but I hold one compliment dear to my heart, that I have my own voice in how I do it.

The Anonymous Signature is the idea that you can make something familiar your own, change it completely and leave it touched by your language, while still providing the common, understandable-to-anyone-and-everyone foundation.  Making your signature something everyone in some way recognizes as a name.

On top of this, I find myself confused about the Mayans.  Mostly, Central Americans are associated with the Aztecs, who lived in modern-day Mexico.

Mayans lived below that, taking up a large area from southern Mexico through Guatamala, Belize, around northern El Salvador, down through Panama.  But most of El Savalador and a small bit of Nicaragua belonged to the Pipil tribe, which I am descended from.

These tiny little child-like people still exist and speak Nauhtzl, which my Great Grandmother, Nena Pauola, still speaks.  I look very much like everyone else in still-existing pockets of the Pipil.  There is a lot to say about what I’m trying to write/get across when I talk about this Anonymous Signature paradox.  I want to relate it back to my experience as a foreigner nearly eveyrwhere, and I think there will be more to come in following weeks after I am done with finals here at Reed.  As of this post, I have only 19 more days until I leave for Berlin.

Is this a grocery list? A poem? A prayer? A confession?

_

Modern Love is Rubbish

How do you count your days?  What’s your point of reference? What’s the good thing that keeps you going in your shitty life?  The highlight of your week? Month? Year?

For Oblina, it’s the possibility of being contacted by her former English teacher, Casper Steinkey. For me it’s the possibility of seeing my own modern love.  I think it’s a counting thing, but everyone I know has a look-forward point.  This goes totally against the living-in-the-moment ideal, but people do it anyway.  On a daily basis I look forward to lunch or dinner, when I eat with my friends.  On a weekly basis I look forward to my thesis meetings.  On a semester basis I look forward to my breaks.  Generally I look forward to writing my characters like this, as time-sensitive creatures who humiliate themselves and wait for opportunities to redeem themselves.  They make mistakes, make other characters uncomfortable, lose sight of their normal coping mechanisms, fake indifference, fry eggs, smoke cigarettes, cry themselves to sleep, sober up, laugh at themselves, and so on.  Ultimately people resort to their look-forward point, when things will be better, when So-and-So will forgive them, when they’ll leave their old life behind and rise above their terrible current status.

The album by Blur, Modern Life is Rubbish, is taken from graffiti on a parkbench in England.  My story, Modern Love is Rubbish, is more of a product of the Blur album, 13.  Behind Modern Love is Rubbish are the concepts of looking forward, a perpetual waiting, and a threat to the promise that hope springs eternal.  A warning, a reminder, that perfection is the enemy of good.  The better thing doesn’t always come, and the looking-forward point begins to fail you as you build up your interest in it.  I’m not advocating satisfaction with mediocrity, but I am encouraging people to appreciate the things they have, the moments they’re in, the good-enough people who love them.  Oblina becomes the good-enough character, the not-quite-perfect girl, and is abandoned by Steinkey after she accidentally stains his coat.  In order to win him back over, she retreats to her aggressive sister’s basement, where she draws Steinkey a new coat, and apologizes for having pursued him so forwardly.

Steinkey looks forward to something, and I think it might be Oblina’s visits, but I haven’t articulated all his desires yet, or his feelings towards his younger, louder, and sometimes more obtrusive counterpart.  This will affect how the story ends, and what Steinkey does or doesn’t do to avoid Oblina or recover her.

You want to know where miserable men hide from their pasts? The same place where teenage girls hide from their futures.

I’d love your input, on your specific look-forward points, and I will be finishing a new draft of Modern Love is Rubbish sometime within the next week and a half.

This song, off of 13, is responsible for the half-past sober, sleepy tone of the story, and the video itself inspired me to use so many sleeping rituals and scenes in the story.  Sleep has become one of the most important moments in my characters’, and my own, lives.

Alright, this video might not be working – but here’s the link.  And you can download the song here.

I’ll be putting more music on here as it becomes more related.

Table of Contents

In theory, I don’t really share my thesis too often because I don’t want to ruin the final product for those of you holding out.  But I figure most of you will appreciate the mandatory Table of Contents I had to turn-in to the Division of Literature & Languages secretary.  It plays like a parody of the Oprah-backed sob-story autobiography that’s become very popular in the past few years.

Everything That Never Happened To Me

First of All I Was Born a Half (dedication/prologue)(page 1)

My Sister Died (page 2)

Then My Mom Gave Me To A Cleaning Lady (page 25)

California Sucked (page 50)

My Long Lost German Brother Appeared (page 75)

Lived With My English Teacher (page 100)

Adored A Medical Experiment (page 125)

Forgets (essay) (page 210)

Died Alone in a Hole (epilogue) (page 230)

(portrait of Oblina, a character just as ugly as her name suggests.)

(family tree drawing for posterity on the next page, convoluted and spiraling.)

I might be looking for an illustrator in the near future, so if you think you know what Oblina should look like, stay in touch and watch for more posts.

Popularity

It appears I’ve become the 8th fastest growing Blog-of-the-Day on WordPress. I want to respond with: yes, I’m very excited, but also, I’d like to share my writing here.  Here, here we go: something from this summer, something that ISN’T about Heartbreak or Let Downs (at least explicitly).

Tonight was my first night sitting for Aiden the 3-year-old.  Excellently behaved child, very clever.  No fusses at all.  Took him to the playground where he immediately noticed, out loud, “Little Girls!”, delectably.  Chose the blond one, little Payton, started playing tag and came back to ask me what I thought of her.

He pointed across the play structure and said, “The curly one with the poodles on her shoes.”

“What about her?”  I said.

He lowered his voice, “She still wears diapers.”  I couldn’t tell if he was pleased or disdainful, but he turned around and ran back to his beloved Payton.

Payton’s mother, Julie, came and sat down next to me. She said, “Our kids are really hitting it off.”

I couldn’t resist it, I took credit it for him without even thinking.  “Yeah, he’s a real lady-killer,” I hammed it up. “But little Payton’s got him on a string.”

I should add I look nothing like Aiden, that he’s a potato-blonde with dark green eyes and a
sweeping button nose.  My skin’s dark as rotten pears and my hair, which shows at the roots of my blue, is black as God-blinking, same as my eyes.  My face is all wide and Mayan-plate looking, too.

Julie smiled at our children benevolently, “He’s got your mouth.”

Both children ran away, Payton chasing Aiden.

I laughed, and pointed at them behind a tree.  “They’re rolling in the grass!”  And surely enough, little Payton had pinned down Aiden and they were kissing, one kiss at a time, next to an ant hill.

Julie suggested we wait it out, so we discussed Junot Díaz and library sciences for a few minutes (Julie is a librarian).  We turned to look at them a few minutes later and Payton was still going at it, so Julie went over to pick her little Carmencita off the dutifully submissive Aiden.  “I think she needs a nap,” Julie said.

“I don’t need a nap!” Payton protested loudly, “I need a gummi bear!  What happened to all our gummi bears?”  Payton said all this while being thrown over her mother’s shoulder.

“Aiden! Help!” She pleaded, quite sincerely.

“Bye Payton!” Aiden waved and jerked his whole arm around to do so, “Take your nap!”

Such was the end of their amourous adventure, and Aiden and I went home to eat dinner. Aiden ate his pesto pasta heartily and asked for a gummi-bear vitamin.  I asked him if he remembered Payton.

“Oh yeah,” he said.  “I loved her.”  He swallowed his vitamin and asked for a cup of orange juice.  I obliged.

Later I set Aiden to bed in the midst of a thunderstorm, which made him shiver and hide at my skirt.  I had to peel him off and remind him to pee before going to bed. We sang Radiohead songs in the bathroom and he stomped on some stray ants that had gotten inside the house.  We read stories but he clung to me and wouldn’t let me leave, so I told him he was a good boy and he’d sleep just fine.  Eventually he fell off and I sneaked out, but as I closed the door, he called out to me:

“Don’t eat the last cupcake,” he said, “it’s my cupcake.”

Two hours of reading later, I realized I can very happy with this job.  For some reason I feel the need to record all of it, mostly because there’s something I’m touched by in this ex-Reedie single-parent’s house.  It might be all the space or it might be that the kid is a total hipster, or some other combination of things.  Something about it, though, worries me deeply, as if I would actually want to be a mother, as if I could have a house and keep things in it very alive.

Done with my book, I watched the television set downstairs and doled my attention to the rain coming down the windows occasionally.  The Daily Show was on.  It was sometime after eleven.   I stretched out on the couch, ran my fingers through my hair, and fantasized about a mid-May snow drift, so I wouldn’t have to go back to my apartment, so I could eat the food in the fridge up, so that I could be trapped.

One of Six!

Thesis Proposal

I present you with my creative thesis proposal.  I have been working for a while on this, and I finally finished a completely reworked version of Archangel — Prodigal.  Prodigal, like Archangel, contains previously used characters, but stands on its own much better.  It’s severely enough edited that I almost want to call it a new story, but I keep remembering the first few pages are virtually identical.  I am linking it separately in my fiction section, away from The Rest of Your Days collection. 

Prodigal is my first writing sample, and my second is Even Your Absence.

And the long awaited proposal is here:

Everything That Never Happened To Me//Fiction of Exile

I would like to write five short stories that focus on the experiences of foreigners in this country.  Specifically, I’m interested in the Latin-American experience and elements of magical realism within contemporary American literature.  Latinos are the fastest-growing minority group in the United States, and I’m concerned primarily with presenting different angles of the experience through my writing.

Writing creatively has been my only habitual craft for the past three years, and my most beloved academic interest.  My experience as a writer, primarily at Reed, has evolved into an experience as an editor.  My greatest strength as a writing student has been the second-draft (sometimes the third, fourth, or eleventh).  I have taken classes with Maxine Scates, Jean Thompson, Charles D’Ambrosio, and Peter Rock.  I attended the Tin House Summer Workshop this summer and studied under Steve Almond.  This summer, I was invited to give a reading at Brown University through a program called Project Eye-to-Eye.  At Reed, I’ve been published in the Creative Review and sat on the board every year.  I am founder and signator of the Writers’ Alliance, a workshopping group for student writers that meets once a week.  I have written recommendations for other students applying for grants and internships.

 Junot Díaz won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.   After reading his novel and his short-story collection, Drown, I wanted to find a way to allow my own writing voice to take unnaturally somber situations of transience and translate them to feelings of arrival.  I want to capture the anxiety over a new home and a new language.  My experience as a foreigner in this country, and of having a separate language for my private thoughts, resonates whenever I read Díaz’ writing.  I want to present my own collection of stories in the context of other Chicano and Latino literature.  My reading list might include more canonical texts, like Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Parámo, and more contemporary texts, like Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya, but I’d hope to come up with a challenging reading list with suggestions from professors.  I have consulted with Rebecca Gordon about putting together such a reading list.

The stories would have the common theme of abandonment and disembodiment within American culture, both of which are forms of exile.  Barriers such as language, skin color, and class will figure heavily. My writing, though realistic, is heavily affected by magical realism, as is it an important element of Latin American culture.

 

I will wake up early this morning and turn this in.  If you’re interested in marching through Vollum to the box with me feel free to convey such interest (soon, as in before 9:30 AM today).

 

            

 

Perpetual Semihysterical Holiday

Despite hours of editing, my writing sample for my creative thesis proposal is going very slowly. Compare this opening of Archangel (title to be changed) to the new third-person narration:

There is a Guatemalan man in the high desert outside of the Mojave who is waiting for his surrogate daughter. His daughter arrives on a Sunday night in mid-March. He is on the roof crafting bags for the Los Angeles flea market, surrounded by cloth, garden lamps, and old-t-shirts. Her headlights hit him from behind, casting his shadow across the trashscapes, his backyard bicycle pieces bent around with strange light. She emerges from the driver’s side window without opening the door and vomits on the driveway. The engine is still running. Maybe she’s drunk.

“Little Felicia” he says climbing down the ladder, “you’re home.”

Her body flexes on the gravel as she heaves. He walks down the driveway and stops in front of her. He checks his watch. It’s half-past midnight.

“What have you been drinking?” he says.

Felicia paws her own face and inhales deeply.

“Do you need help?”

She stops sobbing for a moment, then shrieks loud enough to rent open a hole in the desert. He looks into her mouth while she wails. The inside of her cheek is bright coral. Her voice hums on into the night after she closes her mouth, echoing off of distant walls and nearby pavement.

He slides his arms under her ribs and thighs, leaning his head against her ear. He lumbers the girl up the driveway and into the house, to the bed she used to sleep in. She falls in. He brings in the comforter from his bed and lumps it over her.

“Dad?” she says, opening her eyes. She hiccups once and falls into a deep sleep. He turns off the car, goes back on the roof, and sews.

————————————

During the night Felicia’s father stays on the roof. He positions the radio as far as the cord will let it go. The cord is attached to several extensions leading directly through Felicia’s window into her room and behind her toy-box.

The girl has not lived with him for five years, but returns during times of desperation. He receives her phone calls as she merges on the I-5 from Los Angeles, San Francisco, wherever she comes from. Every few months, she arrives during the early hours of a late night. This time she drove in from the east, from Virginia. The phone call came in at around six earlier that evening. He answered it expecting a bill-collector.

While he sews the radio is going and he can hear the news – the primaries are on, New Hampshire is the next big swing state, Obama could win.

I don’t know if the third-person adds pressure to keep the story in real-time (which is very, very difficult for me) and whether this is ultimately to my benefit or disadvantage. Will the committee be happy to see I don’t have woefully wrinkled chronology? Or will I be dismissed for uninteresting prose? I think the language gets more interesting in first-person narration. There’s something to be said for having a straight-forward narration. I want to write clearly, so I have to think clearly. In fact, I think fiction might be the most rewarding placement of clarity of thought. If only it wasn’t the distillment of intense sorrow. (Take that, ironic youth culture! Sincerity and Spite motivate my days!)

Blink Once for Yes

Have I completely forgotten you? No – I’ve just completely immersed myself in thesis preparation. In less than ten days I will be presenting my thesis ideas to the English department. I have two applications: an analytical thesis application and a creative thesis application. Ideally I will be writing a creative thesis this year, but there are no guarantees. A creative thesis requires real talent. I have been editing Archangel for my creative application. The story, about a man waiting for his step-daughter to return from her perilous obsessive travel, is being completely overhauled. I’m eager to turn in a completely reworked (but recognizable) copy of Archangel because my creative thesis proposal is about traveling generally. I want to write a few stories about characters in exile, travelers, those that are lost, people in the wrong places without their normal tools. Paco’s, the narrator of Archangel, struck me as one of the tenderest character I’ve had the chance to work with, and I want to expand on his loss.

While not editing my own work and reading Dan Savage’s fascinating book on gay marriage, The Commitment, I’ve been nursing minor addictions to coffee and second-hand smoke. I also went to Bishop’s on Hawthorne yesterday and rearranged the dead blue cells on my head. I’m pleased with the haircut.

New fangled hipster.

New work will be delayed as I focus on my proposal. Summer’s ending and I have a lot of work to do.