Category Archives: writing

Words Now More Than Ever

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While writer’s make us think or might even provide a little comfort, their most important task, as Matthew Zapruder writes in Why Poetry, is to “create space where individual imagination can be activated…which helps preserve our minds as well as the possibility of mutual understanding, not by arguing for it, but by demonstrating it.”

It’s a shitty, frustrating time. The rise of Trump & Co coupled with global conflicts and a population that has been crippled by an excessively intense addiction to phones has bred a world of isolation and fear where there is a new terror to be ingested every day.

As crippling and out of control as it all appears, everything is as it was: air is air, water is water, the world on the same axis. And so…some words to mull:

Alien: exotic

Duende – the line between life and death (according to poet Federico Garcia Lorca)

Reverie: a state of being pleasantly lost in one’s thoughts

Negative Capability

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At once it struck me what quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature, and what Shakespeare possessed enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason. (John Keats, 1817)

Only recently did I learn of the term “negative capability” in Mathew Zapruder’s Why Poetry, where he writes “What is important is not the cause of the feeling (of engaging with the arts) but the feeling itself, those moments of deep inexplicable feeling, of sadness or melancholy or joy that we cannot place, a feeling that is maybe only possible when one is truly alone.”

This term is a revelation for me, akin to emotional intelligence, an idea to which I have a great affinity, but didn’t know was a thing and will now use as a moment for Davis n my script, Wave That Flag, where he leaves school and to explore his negative capability through a journey on tour with The Grateful Dead.

The Sacred Whore, Version 3,5

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Shockingly, I met my goal for yesterday of completing a draft of The Sacred Whore. I had two major problems in completing this latest draft. First and foremost, I had to move the primary point of view away from a male perspective, which meant not only minimizing the pimp Jefferson’s role and switching the king-pin to a queen-pin, but also expanding the voice of a number of the sex workers.

The other challenge was updating the work to present day. And since I wrote the first draft in 1988, the inclusion of phones and other technologies was paramount. Once I figured out that Dorothy could be a vlogger, everything seemed to fall into place. I also edited out much of the speech at the end. Pontification is a not an effective device.

I’m going to take a swing at Wave That Flag today and try to give Davis a little more clarity in his arc. We’ll see. Today’s writing prompt: “My favorite teacher…”

Scared of Writing

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I waited outside of Mr. Carver’s class, thinking of how I could get an extension. The assignment – a 2,000-word creative self-reflection – was due that afternoon, and I hadn’t even started. I didn’t understand why I had to do it, because I had graduated long ago and was in fact now teaching at the school.

I gave up and beetled off to my classroom, the Dean of Students behind me, a row of exiting buses ahead. As I sprinted up the hill, I opened my eyes to find it was late into morning, another cloudy day. I was scared of getting back into my writing. That’s all it was.

There is a sprawl of projects to address. I have to fine tune three scripts: Ave and Dorothy need to be established as live-bloggers from the outset of The Sacred Whore. Davis’ motivation for going on tour with The Grateful Dead needs more focus in Wave That Flag. And the background stories need to be more relevant to Davis’ isolation in Just Weird.

The Vanishing Pill is a mess. Two years in, and this book remains cluttered with notes all over. I haven’t figured out the starting point or the crisis nor where or how it ends. And then there’s my teacher’s guidebook, Fuck Pedagogy. No idea how I’m going to focus that into anything relevant at all.

To paraphrase Matthew Zapruder in Why Poetry, I’m afraid of being exposed, of being seen as banal, derivative, uninteresting and stupid. That’s all it is. And so, “To bed!” I will arise at dawn and begin this battle anew! Or now. I’ll do it now. And start with my first prompt: “My favorite childhood vacation…” That was in Anna Maria Key in Florida where everything was magic, especially the gift shops.

No One Cares How You Scroll

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No one cares who you like or who you follow.

No one cares what you post or what you share.

No one cares about your story or your memes.

No one cares what you comment or what you click.

No one cares because they don’t know how to care about you.

No one cares because you don’t know how to care about them.

Thanks for reading! Be sure to like and share.

Not Enough Is The Right Amount

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I write best when there’s not enough time.

With too much time, I’m hopeless.

Waiting Game

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Not knowing and waiting, that’s where the promise lives.

Knowing – no matter what – especially if it’s not true.

That faith – and lie – is better than any proof.

It’s all we need to get to the end.

The Thing of Expression

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You go down the pipeline thinking you know something you don’t and it isn’t a bad thing but it’s an obvious thing and that’s still okay but then you remember it really isn’t because that’s sliding to nowhere, not knowing who you are and thinking that’s okay when it isn’t.

Then you’re left asking who are all these people are and how did they get into your living room.

A Tale of Two Books: The Alchemist & The Little Prince

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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist are two of the most popular books in history, each selling over 150 million copies. Both are simple yet convoluted tales set in fantastical places. However only one of these books is worth the read, multiple reads in fact, while the other comes across like an inspirational poster on a middle school teacher’s wall.

The first half of Coelho’s book isn’t awful, following a boy in search of treasure, but the writing, attempting some kind of mythic, becomes tedious and facile. “Well, why did you say that I don’t know about love?” the sun asked the boy. More than anything though, it is the repetition of the two phrases Personal Legend and Soul of the World that tips the experience into something barely worth skimming.

Saint-Exupéry’s tale, on the other hand, straddles the wonder of a child’s imagination and philosophical reflection.

It offers a fairly simple rundown of the problems of mankind but with wonderful phrasings such as If you tame me, then we’ll need each other. Most of all, it is the structure of the work, the little prince an apparition to a man lost in the desert, and the painful finale where nothing is resolved. We just want the little prince to come back.

17 Slices of Cheese

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The deli counter was in the back corner of Gristedes, a New York supermarket I had mistakenly pronounced as Gris-TEA-dees to my sister — and not Gris-TAY-dees. She had mocked me for that. “Ham and cheese sandwich please.”

The woman didn’t look up from her phone.” American, Swiss, Provolone, Cheddar, Swiss, Colby, Pepper Jack?”

“Cheddar, Medium, thanks.”

“Roll or hero?” She continued to scroll.

“Rye please.”

“Rye.” She turned off her phone and placed a block of cheese on the slicer.

“Thank you.” I looked around the great empty space, lit in the horrible bald light and thought about my childhood fears and trauma, being abandoned, alone, all of that amorphous stuff, fanged blobs out from between the walls, bursting out, and then saw the woman wrap the thick sandwich in wax paper. “Oh, I forgot to ask for lettuce and tomato.”

“Anything else? Pickles? Pepper, salt? Mayo?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

She opened the sandwich to reveal a teetering stack of cheese, ten slices, more than that, atop the ham, and added watery slices of tomato and a tough ribbed section of lettuce.

“Maybe not the pickle.”

“No pickle?”

“No pickle,” I reiterated.

“What about the salt, pepper and mayo?”

“Yes.”

She wedged the sandwich back together and gave it to me.

“Thank you.” I opened the sandwich outside and counted the slices, 17 ion all along with three slices of ham. It had to be pulled apart to be eaten. I thought that was just how it was in the city, massive sandwiches that you couldn’t get in your mouth.

Even though I was wrong and came to learn that 2-4 slices of cheese was the standard, I still think of that woman as the gatekeeper of sandwiches. And that Gristedes as the gatekeeper of delis. Gris-TAY-des.