The Island

I'm writing this the day before classes start. People on campus make the day a weirdly mournful celebration, hosting barbecues and staging massive Nerf battles while all the time muttering about how scared they are about classes. It seems like having your favorite food at a funeral. I shouldn’t be so hard on them, traditions crop up at times of transition, that’s just the way it works. But, even though I’ve operated on the academic calendar for as long as I can remember, the start of school never seemed like an especially important event for me. Maybe that’s because my year has always started and ended with my family’s one week summer vacation to The Island*.

The Island is up in the boundary waters between Ontario and Minnesota, technically on the Canadian side but so close that my mom swims to the U.S. and back every year. My family has been visiting the area since my dad was a kid. When I first visited it at age six I assumed that it was a sovereign nation and we were its royal family. Really, that might as well be the truth. It's a scrap of rock in the middle of nowhere. No one would mind if we raised an Osler family flag on the dock and formed our own congress, and my cousins would probably go for it.

I have so much trouble describing what it’s like up there that sometimes it feels like I’m one of those early European explorers to the Americas who were so overwhelmed by how alien it all was that they inevitably fell back on biblical allusions and words like “awe” and “wonder” when writing about it. It’s a forest, but with no soil. Even at the center of the island there isn’t more than a few inches of moss and pine needles and maybe a little bit of dirt before you hit the jumble of boulders that make up the bedrock. And somehow pines twist their roots through that and get all of the sustenance they need to grow thirty feet tall. Can you picture that? I don’t think I could, if I hadn’t seen it.

Even the simpler aspects of The Island don’t fit into familiar ideas of what a trip to the wilderness should be like. There’s no WiFi or electricity and we have to maintain our own pump system to get water, but we’re not roughing it; we have a propane stove and enough dedicated cooks that we usually eat better there than we do at home. It seems like an archetypically outdoorsy place, but sometimes I spend almost the whole day in the cabin, reading and hanging out with the family. The routine up there isn’t hard to get used to, but it always feels like a jump to a different dimension when we return to the world of paved roads and lights after sunset. I've never been anywhere like it, and I don't think I ever will. It’s a clean break from the rest of the world.

That’s why it’s my designated place to reset at the end of each year. The same way sleep separates one day from another, a trip to The Island cuts off one year and signals the beginning of the next. And the same way the rest of your life drains away as you get lost in the world of your dreams, at The Island it seems like I’ve had an entire separate life up there, one that’s only lasted a couple weeks so far. With the real world a half-hour boat ride away, it begins to feel like the rocks and trees and cabin and lake are all that has ever existed. The evening eight years ago that I paced on the rocks by the shore for an hour, wondering what my new life in Minnesota would be like might have only happened two months ago, and the trip to our new house never came. 

Every year since I was six I had this fantasy that a war broke out while we were up at The Island and I’d have to live up there full time to avoid the draft. I even wrote a terrible novel around that premise to convince myself it wouldn’t be so great, but not even my own heavy-handed writing could puncture my idealized escape from the world. Right now, with about a hundred pounds of books I’ll have to read for the upcoming semester looming on the shelf above me, a permanent return to The Island doesn’t sound so bad.

It sure would be boring, though. That’s what I think I missed in my novel** and fantasies. I might daydream about all the things I wouldn’t have to do if I went to live up there, but what would I have to do? Find a consistent source of food, avoid bear attacks, and survive the winter, probably.

Still, I think that having a quick little exile from the real world is a good thing, and I’m glad to have that privilege. At college it always feels like everything is going a mile a minute, and if life continues  at this rate, I’ll be out of school and in a job and deep into middle age before I can catch my breath. So a little arrested development is nice. As long as our family stays the part-time tyrants of the tiny pile of rocks in the boundary waters, I’ll always have that place where it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference whether I’m six or twenty one.

___________________________

* Sorry if the capitalization bugs you, but I’ve always considered The Island a proper noun and typing it all lowercase seems like an insult to the place.

** And it’s a good thing I did, because that would have somehow been an even worse story.

Sporadic Reviews

A friend of mine who's been doing an email blog over the summer has a recurring segment where he offers reviews of various parts of his life. Since I'm running sort of low on publishable archival material for this Monday segment, I figured I'd just steal his idea:

The Execution of All Things (album by Rilo Kiley): By far the best thing I’ve discovered from listening to the radio in the men’s Cross Country locker room. 4/5 stars.

The Radio in the Men’s Cross Country Locker Room (radio): Excepting The Execution of All Things and a few classics, the selection is usually not the best. Then again, it’s sometimes a source of entertaining trivia (who knew Smashmouth was on the soundtrack for The Digimon Movie?) and functions fine as a piece of equipment. 2/5 stars.

Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: A Global History, 15th Edition (textbook by Fred S. Kleiner): I haven’t actually read it yet because my Art History class doesn’t start for a couple of weeks, but that thing sure is heavy and was a real pain to carry back from the bookstore. 0/5 stars.

The Bible (holy text by God): Also difficult to carry back from the bookstore due to its weight. On the other hand, it is The Word of the Lord and the one and only path to eternal salvation, so that kind of evens it out. 5/5 stars.

Pears (fruit): They probably wouldn’t be too impressive under any other circumstance, but it’s slim pickings at the Grinnell Dining Hall until the rest of the students come, so they’ve more or less been getting me through the week. 4/5 stars.

Maze Rats (tabletop RPG): It’s a pretty fun simplification of D&D with much more intuitive combat mechanics. Though a tip for incoming players: if one of your party members is a grave digger who’s way too into the job, another is some kind of pleasure-cultist, and the only distinguishing feature of the third is that he speaks like Tommy Wiseau in The Room, then you’re going to have to put up with a lot of zaniness.

Sleep (basic human function): It’s been kind of hard to come by, given that I’ve spent the past week in a tiny dorm room with no AC where the windows seem to be hermetically sealed to save students from single-story falls. And when it does come, the dreams are really weird. 2/5 stars.

$30 Couch From Goodwill (furniture): Essential for any dorm room. Or it would be, except I think this is the last couch like this in existence, and I’ve got it! Though it has been dubbed a “grandma couch” by several of my friends. 4/5 stars.

Blinking Light on the Ceiling of my Dorm With No Apparent Function (annoyance): Another reason why I’ve been having trouble sleeping. 0/5 stars.

Academia

I’ve been back at Grinnell for the past couple of days, though since classes don’t start for another week I’ve had a lot of time to kill on the depopulated campus. Mostly I’ve spent that time running, playing a variety of niche tabletop RPGs, and catching up on the headier reading I picked up at the New York State Summer Writer’s Institute. Particularly, I just finished Siri Hustavedt’s novel The Blazing World, a book that I bought purely based on its cool cover art and which inspired a random stranger who happened to see the book to tell me, “Oh, you could’ve made a better choice than that.”

For the most part, that stranger was right: The Blazing World is a tough read. It’s an epistolary novel told by more than twenty different narrators, which tells the story of a woman who secretly creates work for three different artists for a variety of abstract and sometimes confusing reasons. But it’s especially difficult for me to read right now because, in a week, I’ll be in the full immersion of academia that is a Grinnell College education. And if there’s anything Hustavedt’s narrators love, it’s academia. And if there’s anything I hate, it’s academia.

Hate might be too powerful a word, actually. After all, I deeply enjoy most of my classes at Grinnell. But still, there’s something about sentences like, “Nevertheless, the successive real environments may pack a punch that is ultimately more subversive than the accommodating relationalism advocated by Bourriaud” that fires up a instinctive anger inside me, the way that seeing an enormous spider might fire up instinctive fear.  

Grinnell doesn’t exactly coddle its freshman when it comes to teaching them how to write for college-level classes, so maybe the rage I feel at academic writing stems from the time I got back my first paper, in which every use of figurative language, every colloquialism, and every contraction was circled in red ink. I mean, seriously, contractions? Try going a day without using contractions in your everyday speech, and you’ll see how painfully unnatural that is.

And that inauthenticity towards language tends to translate over to an inauthenticity towards life. It seems like the most respected academic writing is the kind that replaces any real feeling that the reader can connect with or evidence they can understand with esoteric quotes and impenetrable logic. It’s more than just that the writing is difficult to understand, it’s that it seems to intentionally remove itself from any kind of understanding aside from a lofty, pretentious understanding that you can only get after you’ve been stuck in a library cubicle for so long that physical sensations and memories begin to fade away. Sometimes it seems like academics make their writing impossible to understand without a PhD in order to keep PhD programs afloat. And if the vast majority of the population will never have the education, much less the desire, to read something, then what makes it so important in the first place?

Of course, everything I’ve written so far stinks of hypocrisy. My writing definitely comes off as pretentious from time to time (and opening this post by talking about a book on the nature of art probably didn’t help that). And I do really like college. After I get over the gag-reflex to the prose, I usually even enjoy the academic writing I read. And I especially like class discussions, because by pooling our knowledge we can usually find some way to pull all the academic nonsense down to earth and explain it using real language, contractions and all. Despite how inauthentic academics seem to strive to make their work, most of it does have important implications on people’s everyday lives. Under all the pretension and philosophy and obscure quotes, The Blazing World is essentially about how ingrained sexism is, not just in the world of art but in the simplest interactions and deepest relationships. And maybe I came to understand that better for all the work that went into piecing it together.

So now I’ve come to the point in the post where I have to make a stand. Either I can go back to my stance that academia has something broken at its core, or I can say it’s all my fault and I just need to work harder. But, in the fine academic tradition of worming out of hard questions, I’m going to say it’s neither. There’s something rewarding about struggling through a dense article, but I can’t help but wonder why it has to be so distant when the ideas are really so intuitive and applicable to real life once you talk them out. I think the best way to communicate and understand the ideas that academics grasp at is through literature (by which I mean real literature, not that literary theory crap). Whether it’s simple writing or purple prose, it always has enough distance between the language and the deeper idea that by connecting the two forces you to engage with it. But, unlike academic writing, the ideas are told through stories that feel real when you read them (at least, if they’re done well), giving you an authentic target for empathy to hold on to as you journey through the story. It lets you engage with deep ideas, the way the best academic writing can, but through something that feels halfway real.

So here’s my current life plan, which I figure I’ll be regurgitating enough over the next few days that it might help to get it straight now: I’m going to get through two more years of academia at Grinnell. I’m going to graduate with an English degree. And I’m going to teach English to high schoolers, so I can engage with all these fascinating ideas without getting knee-deep in phony ivory-tower blather. And, damnit, I’ll use all the contractions I want! 

Milk the Religion Out of his Brain

Doing this on a dare. Don't ask.

The Horny Hornet Incident or: How I was Almost Persecuted for my Journalism

Starting in middle school I wrote an underground satirical newspaper called The Southern View. I kept it up sporadically into high school, while also writing for the school's legitimate student newspaper. One week I was short two articles, so I just submitted some pieces from The Southern View as humor articles (which didn't make a whole lot of sense, since the school newspaper didn't have a humor section at the time). Somehow, the editors actually approved it, but both articles got deleted as soon as our principal found out about it. At first the principal assumed I was some kind of cyber-vandal who had hacked the school's webpage and even tried to get me suspended. To this day I've never been clear on which article offended him. Sure, odds are it was the use of the word "horny" in a school newspaper, but I've always secretly hoped that he resented my on-the-nose message about our school's push for new technology. Anyway, here they are:

Student Council Begin to Question Merits of "Horny Hornet Dance"

After calling a press release to deal with the fallout from the homecoming game disaster, Edina High School’s Student Council has claimed their invention and encouragement of "The Horny Hornet Dance" was, “Probably not our brightest idea, exactly.”

Meekly defending their decision to create a highly sexualized school-specific song-and-dance routine, teach it to the entire student body during the pep fest, and encourage them to perform it at the homecoming game whenever the home team scored a touchdown, Stud. Co. President Michael O'Neil said, “I wish I could say we didn’t see this coming, but honestly, we knew going into this that there was a 60-65% chance that everyone would be horribly offended. But that’s the risk we at Stud. Co. are willing to take.

"At least everyone had a good time," O'Neil said, a statement which he quickly revised, "I mean, obviously not everyone did, since so many people are protesting and all that. But some people did, I think. The guy in the hornet suit sure was into it."

Edina Public Schools Continues Descent Into Tech-Driven Dystopia

Expert opinions released this week from the Minnesota Center for Apocolypse Research confirmed that Edina is continuing its long, painful decline to a twisted dystopian civilization ruled by technology.

      

Drawing from the proliferation of smartphones, success of the eLearning2 initiative, and new surveys on the amount of screen time for the average Edina citizen, MCAR Researcher Bree Jacobs has gone on record saying that we’re, “One or two months, tops, away from a total societal transformation into a Ray Bradbury-level dystopia where real life becomes a passing inconvenience and our lives are dominated purely by internet connections.”

      

According to the newest reports, Edina is leading the world in the inevitable transformation into a technotopia that, were it presented as a piece of fiction to critics in the 1950s, would be called “disturbing,” “far fetched,” and “a stark warning for what our society may be headed towards are we not careful in our consumption of new gizmos and widgets.”

       

“Just ten years ago, Edina of today could easily have been presented as a novel or film about how we need to be careful not to trade our individuality, tradition, and right to privacy for mobile phones and social networking,” said Jacobs. “Heck,  science fiction writer Astrid Soup’s critically acclaimed 1972 short story ‘Braindead Education’ about a school in which books and teachers have been replaced by computers and electronic games is virtually indistinguishable from the EHS of today.”

________________________________

* The Edina High School mascot is a hornet. This was meant to be a take-down of the racy dancing the homecoming court did during pep fests, though really I didn't have a problem with it. I just thought the phrase "Horny Hornet" was funny.

Children's Horror

Here’s a paradox for you: Think about all the pains we take to avoid exposing kids to anything frightening. We don’t fight or swear around them, we censor references to sex or death. My parents even made midnight runs to Petsmart to replace seven generations of fish that were poisoned by Waco tap water so I wouldn’t have to say goodbye to the living decorations I hadn’t cared enough about to even name. With all that in mind, think about the most terrified you’ve ever been. Unless you’ve experienced some real horror in adulthood, odds are it was sometime when you were a kid. As constantly stressed out as I’ve been since fifth grade, nothing has ever topped the nighttime hallucinations I had when I was in Kindergarten, when the posters on my wall were windows to worlds of monsters and horrors slithered through the dark mass of toys on my floor.

Or maybe it’s not a paradox at all. Maybe we try so hard to avoid exposing kids to real-life horror because we know that their minds work differently and we don’t want to give them any more ammunition to terrify themselves over. As scared as I was as a kid, I’ve missed that kind of fantastical horror as I’ve grown up and forgotten how exactly it worked. There was a kind of awe to it that you can’t recapture with day-to-day stress or real life violence. That might be part of the reason why my one of my most recent guilty pleasures is the genre of children’s horror. 

By children’s horror, I don’t necessarily mean spooky stories for kids, since a lot of those use halloween imagery without ever really drilling into deeper anxieties. The best example I can think of is the Toy Story movies. Toys coming to life isn’t in itself a horrifying concept (at least, not the way Pixar does it), but it hits on fears of growing up, becoming obsolete, and not being able to move. Those feelings that scared a lot of kids (me, for example). Or think about the waiting place from Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go! I’ve read Dante and Christian mystics imagine purgatory, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt the same fear of a life of resigned anticipation than that one page in a kid’s book.

Most of the children’s horror I’ve seen lately has been TV, movies, and video games: Coraline, Over the Garden Wall, Gravity Falls, Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and the like. Even in less literary forms, I’m impressed at how the writers evoke horror without falling back on more mature things that haunt us. It really illustrates how universal so many of these fears are, that you can communicate them with a PG-rating and assurance that everything will turn out okay in the end and still haunt the viewer to their core.

Maybe these universal fears are at the core of what makes children’s horror so effective, and why so many adult horror stories fall back on the symbols of childhood (think Stephen King’s It or The Babadook). For kids or adults, it’s hard to confront guilt or mistrust or the fear of losing a loved one head on. It’s exhausting, so much so that it’s usually easier to ignore it and let the anxiety seep in to the rest of our lives. Rather than being vehicles for pure horror, then, these monsters actually make dealing with these issues easier. I think a lot of people underestimate what kids are capable of understanding and think that their fears are just signs of immaturity and stupidity. But even if the monsters are in your head, the fears are real. I wasn’t scared that the night terrors would hurt me, I was scared that they would eat my brother, sleeping a few feet away from me, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. That anxiety sticks with me to this day.

Maybe the reason why I’ve been so into children’s horror these days is because my time at home for the summer is dwindling. I’m heading back to Grinnell in two days, and I won’t be back home until Thanksgiving. Getting whisked away to some world of magic and danger is a common trope in children’s horror. Maybe venturing to Narnia isn’t the most accurate representation of what my next semester will be like, but sometimes we need little lies to make the world easier. 

Everything I Read This Summer

While I didn’t get nearly as much reading done as I wanted to over the summer, I was still able to get through quite a few books. Here are brief, reductive reviews of all of them:

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck: My family made fun of me for choosing this as my beach read, but it was beautifully written enough to be worth it.

Year’s Best Science Fiction 14: Like most anthologies, is was pretty hit-or-miss. Some stories were fun, some were excellent, some were boring, a lot seemed weird purely for weirdness’s sake.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman: By the end of it I was nearly moved to tears with nostalgia for six hours ago, when I had started the book.

Neon Green by Margaret Wappler: It’s basically about aliens, suburbs, and the 90s, and doesn’t treat any of those the way you’d expect (well, maybe the 90s).

Nine Tales of Terror by Edgar Allen Poe: Maybe I’m not as easily scared as the first readers of these stories, having been desensitized by much less subtle forms of horror, but the elegance of the writing hasn’t lost anything with age.

Zot!: Sometimes the chapters tackled deep moral and personal issues of hope, death, freedom, and the nature of reality. Other chapters featured two characters in a room, talking about whether they wanted to have sex or not for sixteen pages. And then there was that chapter where everyone got turned into monkeys and just sort of went with it. All in all, it averaged out to a pretty good comic.

Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link: The title story made me feel exactly how I felt discovering Avatar: The Last Airbender when I was eight. It’s rare for literary fiction to bring such a specific, unique emotion to the surface, which makes me appreciate it all the more.

White Noise by Don Delilo: The only distinctly bad book I read this summer. Satire can be powerful, but for it to work the writing has to be legitimately funny. Similarly, novels can only be powerful so long as we give a damn about the plot or characters or anything besides whatever pretentious code the author is hoping will get us to smirk at.

1984 by George Orwell: An excellent palette cleanser for White Noise. Finally: a novel ideas where you actually care about the characters or the plot (or the ideas, for that matter).

The Green Mile by Stephen King: It might be that I grew up with five church services a week, but the Jesus metaphor came off as a little on-the-nose. Still, it was a well told story all the same.

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee: I didn’t enjoy it as much as To Kill a Mockingbird, I didn’t agree with it as much as To Kill a Mockingbird, but I think I learned more from it than To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s easy to decide whether or not we should kill an innocent black man, it’s harder to decide whether we can ever forgive people who think we should. 

Small Gods by Terry Pratchett: How did it take me this long to find Terry Pratchett? Easily the funniest thing I read this summer, and it entertained some religious questions I’ve been mulling over without ever getting too dark. Also, it’s sort of like something else I’ve written.

Sula by Toni Morrison: An excellent refutation of binary thinking, wrapped up in characters and plot worth caring about. People say Edina High School focuses too much on writers of color (a ridiculous argument in its own right), but so long as Toni Morrison isn’t required reading, they really haven’t gone far enough.

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell: I’m so glad I went to his reading before starting on his book. The language is beautiful in its own right, but even more so when you know how he’d say it.

Lost at Sea by Bryan Lee O’Malley: This captured so many little things that I’ve felt deeply but have never seen depicted so honestly in fiction. Also, cats steal souls, apparently.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides: Among other trenchant observations on young adult life, Eugenides writes: “English was what people who didn’t know what to major in majored in.” Yeah, like I needed a reminder.

The Sculptor by Scott McCloud: This book put me on the brink of an existential crisis about life and art. I’m not sure if that’s a recommendation or not, but hey, some people like crises.

Loverboy by Victoria Redel: My teacher at the New York State Summer Writer’s Institute wrote this one. After listening to all her rules for how to write well, I expected to find some catharsis when I found out she didn’t follow her own rules. But, somehow, she actually did.

And, in case anyone’s curious, here’s the haul from birthday-presents, New York State Summer Writer’s Institute signings, and garage sales that I’m hoping to get through soon: 

Animal Farm by George Orwell, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain*, Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell**, Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes by William Kennedy, Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart, The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt, and The Grata Book of the American Short Story.

_____________________________

* I got those four at a garage sale last week for a quarter each. When I tried to buy them, the lady running the place cackled, “What kind of middle school boy reads Sylvia Plath?” When I told her that I was actually a rising junior in college and an English major, she replied, “What kind of English major hasn’t read Huckleberry Finn? What are you, a foreigner?”

** I’m almost done with that one, actually. Nearly every book I read this summer had a romantic plot or sub-plot of some kind, but none struck me as deeply as that one.

Measuring up to a Masterpiece

The great and terrible thing about graphic novels is how fast they go. Since there are sometimes only fifty words per page, you can take your time to see the subtleties of the artwork and still burn through a hundred pages without even trying. I hoped that Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor, which is heavy enough to give you a concussion if dropped from the proper height, would keep me occupied for a few days, but I went from cover to cover in a single sitting. Still, as beautiful as it was and as much as I wish it had kept on going, it’s fitting to the story that it all went by like a dream, over before you can quite tell what’s happening.

The story is about a struggling artist who gets sculpting-specific superpowers in exchange for a death date less than a year away. It sounds like the most generic “Wish with a downside you really should’ve seen coming” story, made to fit an aging artist’s autobiographical struggles and fears. And it sort of is, but within that archetype McCloud makes a personal story that feels real, even as he uses the rules of the format to play with reality. Maybe it won’t sweep along everyone the way that it did me, but it hit on my hopes as a writer and existential anxieties perfectly.

It was around noon when I finished it, and after lunch and a run I fell into that weird kind of boredom you get when you’ve seen or experienced something so deeply moving that it feels wrong just to continue your day as if nothing had happened. The most fitting things I could think to do was ride my bike to library and work on my novella.

Over the past month or so I’ve been working on revising a novella I wrote a year ago. Since I like being able to physically cut and add to and rearrange my writing rather than doing it all on a computer screen, my weeks of work have turned a nice stack of printer paper into a mess of loose sheets covered in ten pens worth of ink. Aesthetically, I like having an artifact like that to show for my work. But it’s been a real pain to type it all up.

Typing at the library the day I finished The Sculptor, I had to move into a private room when people around me got annoyed at how often I muttered, “This is so stupid,” to myself. I spotted three plot-holes in a single paragraph. The dialogue tried so hard to be quirky that it lapsed into incomprehensibility. And the whole story suddenly seemed ridiculous. Had I really spent a months writing and planning this mess? No matter how bad the first draft was, it couldn’t be any worse than this. 

And all the time I couldn’t stop dwelling on how much worse than The Sculptor it was.

Maybe part of it was that I picked a particularly bad chapter to start out on, but part of it was a fallacy in my thinking, something so obvious that any grade-school writing book would discredit it but that I’d only recognized recently. I always assumed that writing a great book was a lot like reading one, that some newly unearthed creative organ in your brain takes you on a journey you never could have imagined. In a way that’s exactly what it’s like, at least in the planning stage, but then you have to transfer it all onto the page. And in that transfer inevitably something gets lost and you have to clean it up and reorder it so someone other than you can understand it, and that process takes time and skill. 

When I was a kid I thought that when I grew up I would invent a machine that could let people project their imaginations into others, so anyone could create stories without having to know how to write or draw and everyone would see them just as perfectly as the author did. I think I’m still a little stuck on that idea. And, fittingly enough, it’s an idea that McCloud investigates in The Sculptor by letting his protagonist trade his life in for that very ability: to make art without time or skill. 

But, in the end, not even that is enough. The titular sculptor still struggles to make his art into anything other people can understand. The only work he makes with real worth is a representation of the life he lost in order to make the art. 

The applicable point here is that creation of any sort needs time and skill and revision, that it’s unreasonable to expect that anything will turn out perfectly the first time. The more abstract point is that art never has worth in its own right, only in how it relates to the real world. But actually, the two points are really the same. It’s ultimately a good thing that I never got around to inventing the imagination-telepathy machine (one more reason why a psych major wasn’t for me), because the process of revision, frustrating as it may be, slows art down and gives life a chance to work its way in. Which, in the end, gives the whole thing meaning.

Dispatches From a Kraft-Brand Notebook

I’ve had a pretty productive three weeks off the blog: I went to the New York State Summer Writer’s Institute, spent a week on a remote Canadian isle cut off from all civilization, transformed a novella I wrote last year into a mess of cut-up pages and scribblings that might be a full novel once I type it up, and nearly filled the Kraft-branded notebook (featuring a bizarre poem that heralds a Mac-N-Cheese maker as a bastion of creativity). Here are a couple of the mote presentable scraps from that notebook.

1: A Political Cartoon From Judas's Perspective

2: A Bullet Point in the Middle of my Extensive Notes on Garth Greenwell’s Reading

My legs hurt.

3: A Story Written Entirely in One-Syllable Words for Some Reason

It is not hard to rob a bank. You don’t need brains or strength or an in with the right crowd, just a gun and a mask and a plan you stole from some crime film. You need luck, too, at least if you want to get out at the end.

Life after the deed takes skill, though. You have to live low and find a thing that’s worth it to do for the rest of your life. Lars took some time to learn that. When it takes no more pain to live, it’s hard to know why you should keep it up.

He bought a house in a place with class and found a wife with just as much. The wife, Kim, thought that Lars had made his cash in a high-stakes bet. In a way he had. She made art, and it kept her fed, so in a way she had too. Quite a pair, those two,

“I wish I could be like you,” Lars told her many times, most of them when he drank. “You found what you could do well, and keep it up. Me, if I do what I do well one more time, I might lose it all.”

“Not that I want you to,” Kim said. “But if you lost your cash, I would still love you.”

Lars knew he would lose more than cash.

For some time, he did not need more than love. Love can feed you, but food can get you fat. You need a thing to do, to use that love, to burn it off. So he had to give it one more go. The touch of the cold gun in his hand, just the right weight. The fear in the crowd, like all his fear was put on them.

The second time, Lars had the gun, the mask, the half-brain you need to make a plan. But he did not have the luck you need to get out at the end.

4: A Dream I Wrote Down in the Middle of the Night (Before my Fine-Motor Nerves Woke Up, Apparently)

So I just had this really weird dream that I need to write down. [Indecipherable writing that gets progressively larger.] AND I THINK IT ATE OLEK! [Indecipherable writing that I don’t think was even trying to be language by the end.]

5: Some Stuff I Wrote During an Unusually Boring Reading

Blessed flowing through my mouth. The dryness like flaking paper on my flesh dissolving under the fast-running fluid. What we need water for is interior, but we never have thirsty throats, thirsty stomachs, thirsty blood. All we feel is the need for trivial spit.

6: A Response to the Prompt “A Bus to the Moon”

Okay, I gotta crap out of a video game. 

I used to be a real bummer at dinner parties, back when I thought game design was an art form. Especially when I described the knock-off Nintendo I worked for as, “A youth-centric creator of visual, interactive storytelling.” 

But you can put lovely details in every frame of a game, and kids buy it and play it and forget it the same as they would have if you’d just crapped out at game. So screw it. 

You need a final level? Sure. Let’s see, what better games can I steal from? Majora’s Mask, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, Super Mario Oddesy, they all have a finale on the moon. If it worked for the best, it can work for us hacks, right?

How do they get there? Take a bus? Sure. Kids won’t know any better, and any critics who accidentally care will eat it up, say it invokes childhood whimsy. Maybe it really does, though. You really believe, when you’re too young to know better, that you could got to a bus stop and use your transfer pass to go to the heavens, to that shrinking and growing orb, not a lifeless mass of rock but a real place, a magic place, all the more magic because you haven’t been there yet.

No. Can’t get distracted with this stuff. Crap out a game. Just crap out a game.

7: Disappointingly Unfunny Thoughts on Humor

People act like you can’t care about something a whole lot if you joke about it. That’s not how it works, though. Sometimes the only way you can really understand or respect or love something is with well-constructed humor.

8: Really Not Sure Where I Was Going For With This One

Cliff chomped the edge of the quarter until it was sharp enough to cut flesh, then opened the print of his middle finger. Money was prohibited at the institute, as coveting and greed naturally festered when currency was present in any form. The cutting potential of coins was only an incidental concern. But Cliff had smuggled it in in the sole of his shoe, knowing it would be good for something. And it was. Not for buying something, as he’d expected. If there was a black market here, he hadn’t sniffed it out. No, the coin was good for making a blood pact with Margret.

9: A Chart of Feedback Reactions

9: A Response to the Prompt “Genesis is an Allegory”

I thought I’d be immersed in a world of high-class scholarly exchange, going to such a prestigious liberal arts university. Instead I’m nearly pulling my hair out trying to understand why my professor thinks Terminator: Genisys is an allegory for the human condition.

“It’s a really dumb movie, though,” I say.

“That’s not the point!” my professor declares. “Man mixing with machine rendered by digital technologies, the past story of the future affecting the past remade in the present, the ideologies swirling around Schwarzenegger’s governorships, not to mention the Biblical allusion-”

“Does it even count if the book of the Bible it alludes to is misspelled?”

“What would you rather have me assign a term paper on? Would you like to pick apart the filmography of one of your auteurs, your patron saints of pretension?”

“Yeah, that’s be pretty great.”

He sighs so despairingly. I wonder what’s happened to academia.

10: A Map, Presumably For Some Kind of Project, Though I Never Got Around to Writing What the Letters Mean and Then Forgot About it so Really I Have No Idea