sup

cores reflekshin

2009-12-10T11:37:00.000-08:00

I
1. I learned how to successfully develop characters through description and relate them to a focus or symbol.
2. I learned that there are many forms and room enough for creative tempering.
3. Writing it is a process. It doesn't happen all at once and revision is the movst important element to the process.
4.Beside the many listed publications, students in the class presented a publication of their choice. I learned what sites like what kind of writing and what audience I would be writing for.
5.I tried to use characters and description to project my theme.
6.The amount of writing was fair and the most informative assessment of my learning.
7. I wish there was more time for the essays and readings.
8. Blogs

----------------------------

II.
1. Accommodating pace, enough time to do each assignment.
2. Whatever wasn't clear, Dr. Chandler made clear.
3.just right, I would find a way to do more workshopping as a class.
4. yeah, i learned a hunk.
5. Between written responses and private meetings, Dr. Chandler made herself very available for advice.
--------------------
III.
1. The meetings were the most helpful. Human to human interaction works best for me.
2 I enjoyed the meetings the most. I got the most out of them since I was able to presently voice my present queries.
4.Nah
5.more class discussion.
6.less grades for blogs
7. yes, fair.
8. yeah, the grades work to make you want something better draft after draft.
--------
IV.
The course was a great experience. I learned alot about writing. You have very constructive insight for the students and you are good at finding the slack.

maybe take the comps out of the room. people are always more interested in the internet than the class.

the final draft

2009-12-09T21:15:00.000-08:00

The Spark's Inside the Stone

I would have had to have been around four years old. I’m sitting on my haunches atop sodden leaves that were probably in a heap a moment before I joined the pile. Near the skirt of the fence on the concrete of the sidewalk there lay an enticing green super ball. I wriggled my fleshy little arm through the latticework, up to the shoulder. I’m looking up into the raw vapor that is wont to hang about the Kearny swamps. The sky is overcast- certainly sometime around the autumnal equinox. I’m groping at the immediate area and the sleeve of my windbreaker knocks the super ball closer to the fence.

It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a buckeye. It's gradation ranges from yellow-green to brown. It rolls like oddly shaped sphere. It's tipped with spines and a parabolic stem. My dad made my brother and I a simple device for retrieving wayward balls from the neighbors’ yards, a long staff affixed with a terra cotta plant pot at one extreme. I use it to fish the European Chestnut up over the fence.

The weight of the chestnut is enough to push the spines on the buckeye’s shell into the doughy palm of my meaty baby hand. I let it slip to the ground in revulsion. I was still extra cautious because of my uncertainty as to the origin of the creature. I thought it was an animal. Gathering the chestnut stem first, I notice perforations in what I had presently concluded was a hull. My knowledge of living things was limited to a pet hermit crab named Herman and a turtle I found after a rainstorm. I get at the hull with a couple stomps. It’s compromised then it pops. There remains a small streak of green flesh where my weight ground the hull against the concrete pathway, a disjoined stem and revealed fruit.

Two creamy, russet pits rest on the individually carved beds on the inner hull. I remove both of the nuts and check the neighbors’ yards for any more. My aim was to find an unopened one in case I needed to demonstrate the process of opening one to someone. Aware of the buckeye’s existence, I was able to discern another one amidst fallen leaves, collect it and relocate it at my secret plot.

I kept a collection of alien things I didn’t understand from the surrounding marsh and back roads near my house. They were in a box buried in a corner of the yard where two sides are bordered by concrete and no plants are growing around the other two. I dig up my small rectangular box, and make room for the two buckeyes between some other curios- cicada molts and dead carpenter bees mostly. I have a jar of acorns that transformed into a jar of grubs next to it. My father notices me from inside the house and comes out to see what I’m doing.

Dad observes my findings and his countenance appears minutely repulsed. I bury the box and join him in the basement with the grub jar in tow.

*I was never able to exhume the box again because the first cat we had suffocated in the dryer and it transpired that my father buried it above or below my box, he didn’t know and I haven’t had the heart to disturb Tito’s grave. I have a couple dead firebelly toads in a jar and plastic baggy with a green anole down there too.
--------------------------------------------
Downstairs, in my father’s narrow and confined workshop, I watch him fish through a bunch of boxes for a couple minutes. He finally decides one is apt and removes it from the stacks. He motions me sit down and I do. He hands me over the box and I open it. There lay inside stones like polished jaspers, various bits of rock, flakes of gold and a large pleco preserved with shellac.
My father takes the box from me and shines a low range ultraviolet light on the bits of rock. He shuts the workshop light off and the minerals inside the stones come alive in an alien spectrum of coloration. There are molten fluorescent oranges like neon lights, green like fluorescent buckeye hulls, and various blotches of deep purple and blue that glint betwixt the fluorescence.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

It’s around 11PM, raining lightly with brisk breezes at sixty degrees, and I’m slamming back cups of wine, leaning against the shed my dad built when he used to live with my family. A five liter bladder of Franzia brand Delicious Red wine costs about eleven dollars. I’m on the block, John Hay, alone and drinking enough for everybody. I’m the only patron, the only one listening to the rhythm of a concussive orchestra at a dive bar. Sometime around the autumnal equinox, the breeze is persuasive enough to urge the fastened buckeyes from their stems and downward toward the earth. On the grass that acts as grout between the curb and sidewalk, a few of the chestnuts that have been germinating rise like doomed spires, bending like shadows on an unaccommodating foundation.

Slug after slug, I’m laughing at the cars-at the people that own them. The buckeyes ceaselessly drum off the roofs and hoods in a cacophony that only grows uniform after more wine. My cackle is spiky and my disposition is shelled. My grey flannel jacket is soaked through by prolonged exposure to the clinging mist.

Some of the buckeyes are intact after the fall and others lie pinned to the ground like vivisected frogs on a lab table. Often, the sidewalks are stained with streaks of tannin in accordance to the poor irrigation at the lowlands. The fruit, lodged inside of its spine encrusted hull stains the Earth it lives on.
It’s comfortable on the inside. Nothing can get through the hull without applied force unless it has ripened. Chestnuts fall and let off robust, hollow reports in their collisions with the thin, sheet metal car tops.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
I’m plucking mulberries from low hanging tree and dropping them into a cut Chocolate Cow can that’s half full with its original contents. The mixture is brown with seedy purple bits floating in it. I drain the chocolate milk from the can so I’m left with coated mulberries. I walk down the service road that can take me all the way from the avenue that my school on to the back driveway of my house, just where the trucking company’s property starts. By the time I near my house, I see kids down the way waiting for me. I recognize them as friends but they start whipping chestnuts at me. I take a hit and drop my can of coated mulberries. I retrieve it and fire the sticky, dripping can back in their direction. My friends think it’s funny for whatever reason preteens think it’s funny to torment their friends.
I start hurling gravel and quarry rocks. I accidentally break one of the windows of the trucking company’s warehouse. My friends yield.
----------------------------------------------------------
I'm a rock on a cliff above the Franklin mines in New Jersey. I'm the litter on the stones crawling with amateur geologists. The darkness is deep at the high elevation and the wind is moist. I troll a short wave ultraviolet flashlight over a disparate series of stones. The calcite minerals hum bright orange with purple impurities and in a niche beside them, covered by another rock, a curl of illuminated snowflakes peeks out. I hadn't seen any dolomite before, I hadn't even identified it until a couple weeks after when I went searching through a library of images to find a match.

I use the hammer to crack the large overbearing stone into more manageable pieces. I put the chisel
to the niche to break the crystals loose. I make long work of excavating in an attempt to salvage the mineral completely. My next swing has too much force behind it and the chisel shatters the mineral. The low wave light reveals jagged crystals crushed and dispersed.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

My father has a bucket of flint behind the door, on the top of the steps leading into the basement of his house in Rutherford. He knaps at a hunk with a granite hammer stone, shaping the blade. After hours of work, the consummate xiphoid splits at one of the grooves and the missed strike renders the stone serrated and gangly. My pop stands up and tosses the cracked flint into a shallow bucket and grabs another to knap from the full bucket.
------------------------------------------------------------
A repeat Friday night in my teens. I'm down at the tracks with my friends drinking skunked longnecks. I pick up some quarry stones on the railroad embankment. My friends and I start firing stones at the derelict rails that stretch the length of the disused Boonton line. Sparks jump from the rails and shards of stone ricochet back toward the caster.

blog 22

2009-12-06T20:20:00.000-08:00

http://www.literarymama.com/submissions/

Literary Mama seeks:
-Short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction (please see specific guidelines by genre below).
-Writing rooted in/inspired by the experience of motherhood.
-Submissions written by writers of all ages who are also self-identified mothers: biological, non-biological, step, transgendered, foster, grand, or adoptive.
-We prefer previously unpublished work. We will consider reprints, however, if you have the rights and the work is not currently available online.
-Authors retain rights. Please credit us if your work is republished.
-Standard response time from 3-12 weeks. Our reading periods vary; please check the specific guidelines for the department to which you wish to submit (below).
-Simultaneous submissions are allowed, as long as you notify us if accepted elsewhere.
-Electronic submissions only. Please send submissions to the appropriate departmental editors (see genre guidelines below). Include a brief cover letter.

What we tend to like:
-Revelation so stark that it hurts. Pathos can reveal, but so can humor and joy.
-Superior craft (clarity, concrete details, strong narrative development).
-Ambiguity, complexity, depth, thoughtfulness, delicacy, humor, irreverence, lyricism, sincerity; the elegant and the raw.

Creative Non-Fiction
We read submissions from September 1st to May 31st each year. Submissions received between June 1st and August 31st, with the exception of submissions for our October/Desiring Motherhood issue, will not be considered.

What We Are Looking For:
We are seeking personal essays and stand-alone creative nonfiction excerpts by mothers related to motherhood that read like fiction.
We look for:
-A distinctive personal voice.
Attentiveness to language, rich details, lyrical phrasing.
-Vivid imagery, use of metaphor, simile, personification, symbols, setting, and other literary elements.
-Illustrative anecdotes or vignettes.
-Compelling narrative.
-A fresh or startling topic area, or a fresh or startling take on a universal or common experience.
-Character development.
-A reflective element. We're looking for thoughtful pieces that take the experience of motherhood and use it as a jumping off point for exploring deeper issues of identity, relationship, family, politics, transformation, loss, and more. Make sure, for example, that your piece not only describes an experience but reflects, either overtly or metaphorically, on how the experience changed you.

Submissions and Formatting:

-Submissions should be double-spaced, 500-7,000 words.
-Please do not send queries. We consider only complete pieces.
-Please send submissions in the text of an email (please do not send attachments) to lmnonfiction (at) literarymama (dot) com
-Cover letters -- please include a brief cover letter with your submission. This letter should include a short biography, mention of other places you have been published, and why your submission is right for Literary Mama.
-Please include the word Submission and the NAME OF YOUR PIECE in the subject line of the email. If you do not, our computers may read your email as spam and we may never get a chance to read your prose.

Submissions for our Desiring Motherhood should be marked "DM Submission: title" in the subject line of your email.

post 22

2009-12-03T07:44:00.000-08:00

1. My title has very little effect on the piece. It feels like I put it there as filler. Buckeyes are in my essay and they play an important role but the essay isn't about the chestnut. The essay is about me. I think that it adds a boring drone that doesn't allow the reader to make the correct connection to my theme. I am trying to think of something more symbolic-

The Shell Cracks
Peel back the skin and feast

functional-
a quick way to get to the bottom
spikes are intimidating

i don't know, i'll think of something

post 21\

2009-11-29T19:36:00.001-08:00

i'm gonna choose essay 3 to revise. i'm going to maintain the same focus i started to develop in the first draft

i'm going to add dimension to the concept by contrasting stones from chestnuts. i'll have to read it again. i'm just going extrapolate whatever is already there to make the idea a more concise group of images.

20 draft

2009-11-22T21:40:00.000-08:00

Parasites, Pathogens and Cordyceps
Parasite:
I remove the blanket covering my splintered Martin acoustic guitar. I take a look at the mess The bridge is clipped completely but the back of the guitar is intact. The guitar neck is snapped inward by the suspension from the tightened strings and the sound hole is now a mockingly large. My instrument was crushed through by a drunken, stammering eighteen year old guy. I quickly realize that I don't have the skill to repair it. It is not broken beyond repair, but I don't have access to the tools necessary to create a new chassis for the neck because the tools are with my dad and he lives in Rutherford and I live in Kearny and I only use public transportation and I don't want to be schlepping a burden in expensive power tools town over town.
I wake up early the next morning and take the intact pieces of the acoustic and bag them. I grab the neck and bag it, too. I sweep up the sharp shards because I was too exhausted the night before. It's quick work because the air conditioner I had in the room was one of those floor units and it sprung a leak and ruined the rug. My room is in the basement so the floor is damp shale and there aren't many furnishings- a bed and a disused desk. I walk out of my house, uphill to the bus stop and take the train over to the music store on Ridge Road.
I'm pretty strapped for cash and I'm in the music store, standing in line, infuriated because I have to be standing in line in the daytime because the music store has horrible hours of operation. I should be in class. It's a Wednesday but there is an assembly at Kearny High so I said fuck it. I'm pissed because it was a judgment error that got my guitar broken and it was relatively expensive and I don't work during the school year. It's not worth talking about though. Someone got riled up and stepped through it. My room is small any cluttered, whatever.
My turn in line, the doofus with a fuzzy mustache and an imperial tries to cool it like a jazz station DJ. He's talking about some band that I don't even like and I'm not even listening because this is a chore and a chore is not pleasure. After that formal-informal production is presented I show him my heap.
Doofus looks over the neck, looking fine. Martin brand necks are some pretty solid necks. Back of the shell is fine. Front is all busted up, bridge is out of alignment and the sound hole is gaping and tapered. That's probably where the drunk kid's foot first penetrated the hull. The clerk-repairman does that mmm and hmm and um and uh huh. I'm pretty fed up because I can see what's wrong with it, but I'm not about to tell another person how to do their job. If I insult him I'll never get on my way.
Doofus rattles off a diagnostic and I ask him what it will cost. He patronizes me. He tells me it will be a difficult job. I ask him what it will cost to have fixed, again. He tells me it will cost about three-hundred dollars to repair the hull and realign the neck and frets and maintain the action. I tell him I can't afford the cost and I beseech him cut me a deal. Doofus won't budge. I vocalize that I should just buy a new guitar because the amount he's charging me is too costly. He remind s me that I will get it back faster too if I just get a new one.
Doofus knows I don't have the money for a new one and I throw him two-fifty with fifty more upon pick up two weeks later because the real repairman won't be on site this week.

Cordyceps:
My whole life adults point college as my horizon. My whole life teachers press it into me. I got alitte too close and the spores exploded in my face. I spend my whole life trying to get into school and set my goals in terms of writing and experiences and knowledge. I spend so much time searching for knowledge and experience. I did not understand time. I did not understand that I was infected and the fungus would grow inside of me and make me lose site of other opportunities. I did not understand that the need would take me over and ruin my site completely. All I know now is that I want to keep devouring and honing my writing and knowledge acquiring abilities in a scholarly setting.
I am steered away from labor and trade. I have a great respect for tradesman. I have only the skills I picked up as a kid from working odd jobs and building projects with my dad. I am forced to input so much time into one thing.
I am controlled by a biological rubric. I have to keep going through school until I can work at a school and study for free. I can study for free on my own. Everything I have ever learned as been through fear or on my own. I am only pointed in the right direction by adults, onlookers and observers. I'm an adult, too. That's alright.
I hope that the fungus bursts out of my head and all the little tendrils are all along my body. I don't want to die and give up all control to the educational navigator. I've been honing trades and exercising my mind to be more critical for problem solving in creative ways.

I don't want spores to determine my path.
-creative problem solving*

Pathogens:
N. Fowleri are in my brainstem, destroying my olfactory system and traveling impulses through my compromised myelin strands and into my brain. The amoeba leaves necrotic lesions on my brain. Complete disarray
–

.My godmother happens to be my aunt. Nothing special. My godmother and my brother used to hang out all of the time. They are having a petty fight. My godmother is getting married. She tells my brother he's uninvited to the wedding unless he apologizes to her. My family is truly petty. They like to get inside your head and multiply doubt over and over until it seizes control and drives you mad.
My brother won't apologize because it was just a fight and it's nothing to get all crazy about. My mom tells her sister, my godmother that my brother isn't going to apologize. She says that he can't come to the wedding and my mom asks my aunt not to punish her because of a petty argument between my godmother and brother. My aunt tells my family to go without my brother.
I decline the wedding invite. In short, my whole family does and none of us go to her wedding because she was too proud to concede to her family. My grandmother doesn't talk to me anymore. My mother is a villain and my brother is demonspawn and I am forgotten fodder. My sisters are nondescript. My sisters are martyrs.
It's really the culmination of losing your family. Like a family sandwich. Your mom's side and your dad's side as the bread. They get divorced so you just have two open faced sandwiches. Then you lose out on time and you don't know anything about the families you are apart from because they are your mom's and your dad's families, respectively. Not your families. I don't even have one family now. Everyone works, no one is home. There are no more holidays and no more family parties. I don't remember what my uncles are like and no one asks for help anymore.
Anytime anyone in my family has anything to say to me it's some venom directed at my mother or brother. Otherwise, it's some secret question they can only ask in a text message like, tell someone this or at what time does some particular event start. I don't respond to anything anymore. My family sense is fooled and I know them on the decline.
The pathogens eat my senses away and confuse my smells and they propagate doubt at unyielding and overwhelming speed. I can survive as a lone soul. I have no desire for a returned treacherous family or one of my own. I don't need to have a family to atone for the sins and shortcomings of my dysfunction.
I accept things as they come and as they go. I don't try to hold onto precious moments and memories of my family. The earth is an infected nervous system and I'm one of the pathogens.

--It's funny that the host always dies. It's real that the parasite takes and takes and drains until your dry. It's real that the parasites are human. It's funny that they often can't be removed if their deeply seated. It's funny how hard it is to detect it until its blown up. It's funny how easy it is to let things go, to save myself the frustration of piecing together cheating jigsaw puzzles that read 900 pieces but only contains 700 in the box. It's the funniest how hard it is to let things go. It's the difficulty that crafts dimensionality. It's the difficulty that makes you forget.*

19

2009-11-15T21:48:00.000-08:00

my next focus will be either to describe the fever of inspiration and use the coronal emissions to bridge the gap.

my last draft was kinda like alienation so i don't think i wanna run the blesmol route that i'd originally planned for my next draft. maybe i'll drip some sap and liken relationships with women to some substance. maybe my focus will be the long roads we have to travel. i'll make it concise though and insignificant to reflect my opinion.

some scenes
traveling slick, thick mud backroads to unload copper filings and fittings.
running the derelict train tracks and burning a railway station.
a drunk ass me on various weekend nights over the past couple years. getting wasted alone, burning photos and artifacts that i give away as gifts to some faceless something.

edit: i think i might talk about insignificance and use dust particles or subatomic particles or something like that.

blog18

2009-11-11T16:47:00.000-08:00

the rug is thin and grey and caked to the floor. it holds a permanent musk of stale vanilla incense. there are shelves of dvds and blu ray discs and clothes strewn about their feet. the chair at the computer desk leans all the way back and topples often when weight is misappropriated. the computer on the desk is derelict, the power supply blew out months ago. the air conditioner is still in the window, mid-november, and two finches make robotic peeps in the cage below. the mini fridge below the windowsill isn't plugged in but i put my beers in there anyway. mildew paints the plastic. i clean it myself, unplug the air conditioner and put the fridge back in.

on the bed, my pallid, overweight friend blazes some bud in jeans and iconic sweater and watches his 54 in tv and complains about his debt while he's popping tangos with a desert eagle. his black cat inky keeps getting all in my jacket leaving its dander so i hang it up.

i'll get it sometime

2009-11-08T21:19:00.001-08:00

Buckeyes

I can remember flits my childhood. I would have had to have been around four years old. I’m sitting on my haunches atop sodden leaves that were probably in a heap a moment before I joined the pile. Near the skirt of the fence on the concrete of the sidewalk there lay an enticing green super ball. I wriggled my fleshy little arm through the latticework, up to the shoulder. I’m looking up into the raw vapor that is wont to hang about the swamps. The sky is overcast- certainly sometime around the autumnal equinox. I’m groping at the immediate area and the sleeve of my windbreaker knocks the super ball closer to the fence.
I’ve got a better look at the ball now. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a buckeye. I see a green-brown, oddly shaped sphere tipped with spines and a parabolic stem. My dad made my brother and I a simple device for retrieving balls from the neighbors’ yards, a long staff affixed with a terra cotta plant pot at one extreme. I use it to fish back the buckeye.
The weight of the chestnut is enough to push the spines on the buckeye’s shell into the doughy palm of my meaty hand. I let it slip to the ground in revulsion. I was still extra cautious because of my uncertainty as to the origin of the creature. I thought it was an animal. Gathering the chestnut stem first, I notice perforations in what I had presently concluded was a hull. My knowledge of living things was limited to a pet hermit crab named Herman and a turtle I found after a rainstorm. I get at the hull with a couple stomps. It’s compromised then it pops. There remains a small streak of green flesh where my weight ground the hull against the concrete pathway, a disjoined stem and revealed fruit.
Two creamy, russet pits rest on the individually carved beds on the inner hull. I remove both of the nuts and check the neighbors’ yards for any more. My aim was to find an unopened one in case I needed to demonstrate the process of opening one to someone. Aware of the buckeye’s existence, I was able to discern another one amidst fallen leaves, collect it and get to my secret plot.
I kept a collection of alien things I didn’t understand from the surrounding marsh and back roads near my house. They were in a box buried in a corner of the yard where two sides are bordered by concrete and no plants are growing around the other two. I dig up my small rectangular box, and make room for the two buckeyes between some other curios- cicada molts, dead carpenter bees and a jar of acorns that transformed into a jar of grubs. My father notices me from inside the house and comes out to see what I’m doing.
Dad observes my findings and his countenance appears minutely repulsed. I bury the box and join him in the basement.
*I was never able to exhume the box again because the first cat we had suffocated in the dryer and it transpired that my father buried it above my box, he didn’t know, and I haven’t had the heart to disturb Tito’s grave.
In my father’s narrow and confined workshop, I watched him fish through a bunch of boxes for a couple minutes. He finally decides one is apt and removes it from the stacks. He motions me sit down and I do. He hands me over the box and I open it. There lay inside stones like polished jaspers, various bits of rock, flakes of gold and a large pleco preserved with shellac.
My father takes the box from me and shines a low range ultraviolet light on the bits of rock. He shuts the workshop light off and the minerals inside the stones come alive in an alien spectrum of coloration. There are molten fluorescent oranges like neon lights, green like fluorescent buckeye hulls, and various blotches of deep purple and blue glint betwixt the pile of stones.

It’s around 11PM, raining lightly with brisk breezes at sixty degrees, and I’m slamming back cups of wine, leaning against the shed my dad built when he used to live with my family. A five liter bladder of Franzia brand Delicious Red wine costs about eleven dollars. I’m on the block, John Hay, alone and drinking enough for everybody. I’m the only patron, the only one listening to the rhythm of a concussive orchestra at a dive bar. Sometime around the autumnal equinox, the breeze is enough to urge the fastened buckeyes from their stems and downward toward the earth. On the grass that acts as grout between the curb and sidewalk, a few of the chestnuts that have been germinating rise like doomed spires blackened by shadows on an unendurable foundation.
Glass after glass, I’m laughing at the cars-at the people that own them. The buckeyes ceaselessly drum off the roofs and hoods in a cacophony that only grows uniform after more wine. My cackle is spiky and my disposition is shelled. My grey flannel jacket is soaked through by prolonged exposure to the mist.
Some of the buckeyes are intact after the fall and others lie pinned to the ground like vivisected frogs on a lab table. Often, the sidewalks are stained with streaks of tannin in accordance to the poor irrigation at the lowlands. The fruit, lodged inside of its spine encrusted hull stains the Earth it lives on.
It’s comfortable on the inside. Nothing can get through the hull without applied force unless it has ripened. Chestnuts fall and let off robust, hollow reports in their collisions with the thin, sheet metal car tops.

I’m plucking mulberries from low hanging tree and dropping them into a cut Chocolate Cow can that’s half full with its original contents. The mixture is brown with seedy purple bits floating in it. I drain the chocolate milk from the can so I’m left with coated mulberries. I walk down the service road that can take me all the way from the avenue that my school on to the back driveway of my house, just where the trucking company’s property starts. By the time I near my house, I see kids down the way waiting for me. I recognize them as friends but they start whipping chestnuts at me. I take a hit and drop my can of coated mulberries. I retrieve it and fire the sticky, dripping can back in their direction. My friends think it’s funny for whatever reason pre-teens think it’s funny to torment their friends.
The only way to fight back is with stones. I start hurling gravel and quarry rocks. I accidentally break one of the windows of the trucking company’s warehouse. My friends yield and we run indoors to avoid trouble.

You can’t fight with chestnuts. While they possess qualities that render themselves intimidating, and complex, the hull peels away revealing sweet and creamy prey lodging inside. You can relate to chestnuts in their alien nature, crude defense and seeming impregnability. You can learn that the buckeye behind the hull is more wholesome and communicable in accordance to the complexity of nature and the earth’s inhabitants. You can respect that which is alien to you. You can hide it in a box underground. The alien is still out there.
You can fight with stones. Stones are simple. They are metamorphic conglomerates, igneous extrusions, and clastic, compressed sediment. You don’t need to know what’s on the inside to know what’s it is all about. Rocks are resources. Rocks are homes. Rocks are tactical weaponry. Rocks have precious value. You can respect a stone in its inaction of duty. You can respect a stone for what a stone won’t tell you about itself. What you see is all there is.

Blob 16

2009-11-04T15:59:00.000-08:00

i haven't figured out my focus yet, but i wanna use Blesmols or True Nuts or true nuts in relation to fruit nuts.

i'm going to present something like how fruit nuts have a fruit attached and when you plant a true nut it grows into the same nut. prob some kind of childhood-adulthood thing. not sure yet, i haven't given it enough thought. been getting behind on thinking about schoolwork.

i plan to work more focus intensive on this essay because it's always a necessity and i miff it up constantly. so i'm just gonna take an aspect of the nut or mole or something then directly relate it to a disjointed event and then do the same thing. gotta think of a theme though. i'll just do some reading and it will come to me or something.

I might have missed the mark teeheeeheee

2009-11-01T23:06:00.000-08:00

Spheres Came First
It’s coming on noon and I’m leaning against the starboard wall at the aft of Franklin’s fishing boat. It drifts like torchlight, a semispherical radiance outward against the darkness of a cave, outlining the sea’s surface like a flowstone floor. The opaque fog sticks to the halo like the domed ascension of cavern walls. The moisture’s torpid skittering is akin to the forms of roosting, lurking bats in the blackness of the aperture. .The sun is fixed at the centermost height of the outlying density like the Pantheon’s oculus and toils through the humidity.
The other men onboard aren’t speaking as the boat is pulled seaward. Their ears are wary, listening for the distant piping of whistles and bass horns from any of the other blind-sailing ocean craft.
I take a seat on a white-capped, blue cooler filled with Yuengling and Quick-Chek sandwiches. I straighten my spine and pop the pressure from my neck. The crackle cascades from my nape to pelvis like patter of a dealer’s shuffling.
I feel like a ray extending outward from a sphere’s origin point. I can imagine myself looking inward on the present scene.
The water is cropped like a fruit bowl and the boat hovers atop. There is one swaying, green buoy with an obscured number tagged in white. A lone gull screams, perched on the top where the metal is oxidized from the moisture carted by sharp, ceaseless gales.
I can speculatively determine what everyone is wearing and who is smoking what brand of cigarette and what tool rests in what sheath on whichever rack on the deck, but the importance lies not in the details but in the shape of the memory for me.
I inhale deeply while leering at the undulating mockery of my reflection in the sea. The air smells like ozone and tastes like salt. The density of fog lightens in the air and I have a complete but momentary visibility of a great distance. I can see until the ocean curls at my peripheral vision and slopes out of view.
I think about the early humans that believed the earth was flat and if you sailed too far you’d fall off of it. I’m sure that the conjecture was almost entirely from land-dwellers that had never been surrounded on all sides by the sea. It is very noticeably rounded by my measure. You can make out the high mast or a large sail of another ship gliding toward your own many minutes before the entire image of the vessel is realized. Look how far I’ve come: When I think about the areas of a black hole where time bends and space spirals like a matrix through a system of pipes combined in limitless variation and emerges in some terrible unknown, I am horrified by the prospect of infinity and would rather believe that our planet is the only one with life and cognitive ability.
When I look at the sea where it curls downward, sitting on the cooler only dreaming and not fishing, it seems rational to me that our eyes evolved spherically to compute the depth proportionally to the plane on which we exist. If humans lived in a cube, everything would be depthless and diced ham sized eyes would be sufficient enough to view each of the universe’s six two dimensional square faces. The perception of height would be likened to the blurry film a fish sees when it looks up at sea level from the shallows.
I fancy my mind a village of age-spanning architecture. The eldest and most perfect memories compose of house of cyclopean masonry. The images that form as spheres are self containing and self existing. They stack upon one another and divide the stress between themselves. These are the raw memories that I accept for the scene and event and offer no reflection on anything but the shape. The memories I contain in spheres are preserved in my brain so I can explore every crevice and gather every detail from each, individually, painstakingly and clearly. I hold onto the memories for what they are: the scene, person, landscape, animal, speech, or event that transpired and Shellac them for their purity.
The sphere is a memento of the planet I come from, the vessel of my advent, and my machine that translates shapes: the earth, the fertilized egg and the cavity in my cranium that is filled with brain matter, respectively. Every other shape is hewn from the original sphere, or from limitless spheres bonding limitlessly with each other.
Further into my village, memories are solid and animate creations. My demons are the shared electrons on the outer orbital of every bonded memory-the bats on my cave wall. The demons haunt my memories and often connect one memory to another. They are mysteries that I’ve observed in various comparative situations. Their covalence becomes my ability to theorize and extend metaphor. The memories bound together allow me to three dimensionalize an entity or idea and express it. I’m reminded that everything is relative, like the man is as much the stones he uses to build his home.
My father, one of the men on the boat, is one of the demonic electrons that bind together memories into an animate shape. He is the one image in all of my inchoate, blurred, and largely forgotten childhood memories: the sight of half-severed, pulpy, dripping fingers- work of a table saw and human error, the smell of the flipside of Honey Brown beer caps- my brother and I would play hockey on the dinner table with them, and the taste of dread- when I’d realized as an eight year old that I’d distanced my family on the boardwalk and I was lost and my dad’s face popped out of the thick horde some horrible eternity of frantic soundless searching. He also reminds me of the sound of secrets and the power that silence has to keep things sacred. It is with thanks to silence that I am often allowed a cleverly sculpted environment weigh my thoughts and consider their ramifications and relativity. It is with thanks to paper and pen that I am able to reflect on the scale that my memories are weighed on and embed the secrets in symbols.
About the only thing I’m certain of is the significance of humans to ourselves and our ability to attain immortality for our memories and reflections by writing them down.
Around the perimeter of the village are the noncovalent tribes of thought. They take ions from one another in order to bond and broaden. They are the spheres that are on the fringe like highly charged plasma floating in the atmosphere collecting more and more energy. They are often radioactive and misappropriated memories. A lot of the time, I leave the chaotic tribes to govern themselves and disperse their creative energy freely. When I try to make sense of the instances, I am always left with too much of one thing and not enough of another. These unstable memories become fantasies and inaccurate depictions of truly transpired events that I cannot remember.
The din in the boat I’m in is coming from the hull, underwater. Metal torn from metal by the outstanding presence of a reef. It capsizes and I’m dragged under because I lose my grip on the cooler that floats my father to safety. I see him bounding toward the surface of the water and the salt in my eyes is the last stinging I feel before my adrenaline starts racing. I try to break free of the debris but I hold my breath when I’ve failed in order to increase my buoyancy. I see one of the other fishermen on the boat floating dead and lifelessly upward toward the surface as I’m dragged further downward. The V of the hull is wedged up against two large stones that the reef is formed around and there is a pocket of air. I’m in the pocket of the broken hull and I’ve got about two minutes of air to decide whether I’m going to try to navigate upward through the reef in the blackness or make my peace.
I don’t know if the unknown is more horrifying than the impossible.
There is always an invisible force resting against the outer shell of a sphere, trying to compromise the bond and infiltrate the compound and attempt to erode the shape into something more conformed to the forces that oppose it. The force is the same that the incalculable void of space applies against the earth’s atmosphere. The electron dispersal from the suns coronal emissions is always trying to disrupt our chemistry and fry the entire planet.
The amount outward pressure is the most important factor in memories. It’s the ability to keep them sacred and vivid and revisited. Horror and difficulty lend the ability to create the cloud of steam that filters out all of the blistering sunlight and assailing, echoing inconsideration of humans allowing for a clear, pragmatic mind to objectively decide the best course of action in a given situation. It’s proper maintenance that will keep the mind fit and impervious to the selfless will of the outside world.
The fears and difficulty hole up in the cave. The end of the town. That’s where I dwell and that’s where all of the irrational and unknown float freely. That’s what I use as fuel. That’s where my inspiration is rooted. Difficulty is the preferred taste to a caveman. It’s a full spherical taste that attacks the taste buds from all angles and the tongue must rely solely on the will of the brain behind it.

Blog 10

2009-10-28T16:18:00.000-07:00

Well i have some new ideas now. at first it was the shape of eyes and their relation to the world,
how spheres exist, what they look like
human representations from human perception
how spheres of memory, unrefined memory stack like cyclopean masonry.

new ideas-
chemical bonds between spheres
orbitals
and the extension of spheres into a focus

Blog 9

2009-10-28T16:16:00.001-07:00

what went well in my first paper is that i was able to filter my experience and reflection and get it out coherently on paper. was pretty glad for that. In my next essay i want to focus more on reflection than the actual dramatic occurrence of my childhood. it won't be about childhood.

i found my focus for spheres because i was out on a boat and it was mad foggy. the area around the boat looked like a globe and it got me to thinking about the shapes of my eyes and memories in relation to three dimensional enclosures.

Blog Photograph 14

2009-10-26T07:04:00.000-07:00

there is a fat little boy on a trampoline. he's lying on the pad with his thumbs up and a huge smile. There are the legs of two others jumping. It's my yard, it's my cousin. I think it's my birthday. The trampoline is moved onto the cement path to my house. It must be my birthday there. It could be my sisters birthday, however, because hers is like nine days after mine and we usually just celebrate hers instead of mine.

I haven't seen the child in about a year because my extended family disowned my mother and her children indirectly. No one has made an attempt in that year to talk to me. I can stare into the faces and feel no sympathy. I see the features of my grandfather and grandmother in the child. He is my uncle's kin, eldest son of the family with the most distinguishable family features.

my poor mother, that she shares those features.

Blog 13

2009-10-22T00:52:00.000-07:00

There is a porcelain statuette of this clown holding a mallet, the stone of the hammer at his feet and the pole extending to his waste line. The clown rests his weight on the staff. He's wearing lavender overalls, pretty worn and stained with dust. His shoes are a creamy orange and his hair yellow. The clown's collar is up and his eyes are pointed upward, staring at a squirrel that stares him quizzically back.

There was a point in time that the squirrel had a bushy tail that snailed down the clown's neck.
I was pretty young, five-eight.
I thought there was a shadow at the base of the ceramic statuette. It was just thick with an algae of dust.I was pretty young, eight maybe. One time it did cast a doofy clown shaped shadow, long and squished. It was on top of this shelf that was bolted into the living room wall. Some statuette of a male in a big chair. It was smooth and he was largely featureless. Had a nose. I don't know where that one is now or what it was made out of. I wanna guess green jasper just because it was that same dull matte color. My dad collects minerals and the like.

I'll ask him whenever I get around to crossing the towns to see him.

The last statuette on the last spot on the shelf was a mother or father giving a bottle to a kid. It was really crumby looking. I don't even remember the human type looking human. It was kind of cool now that I think on it. I should like to look that man up if it's still around.

The clown statue was the first to fall. I had knocked it off with a wet paper towel. Throwing them at a bird. Birds would get in through the roof and furnace vent. Not that much damage but I couldn't find the squirrel's tale. I just too the statuette and haven't given it back in years. I would like to get my hands on that previous statuette I was talking about.

Blog 12

2009-10-22T00:47:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna revise my second essay.

Stories from my childhood disinterest me.

I'm going to create two more cohesive images explaining my second and third topics. I don't know what yet because I haven't read it over yet.
If I remember the second image correctly I think I may just add onto it. I don't though so I might replace it with a hogan. it's easier to relate to as an earthly object. gonna relate some stuff to a hogan and use those metaphors.

hey cool what's up

2009-10-14T23:01:00.001-07:00

Shapes That I Think Are Kinda Cool
It’s coming on noon and I’m leaning against the starboard wall at the aft of Justin’s fishing boat. The fog is dense like a domed chamber in deep cave. The walls are thick with lurking, roosting bats and the boat drifts like a beacon emitting a semispherical radiance, outlining the sea’s surface like a flowstone floor. The sun is fixed in the centermost point of the outlying dome of fog like the Pantheon’s oculus.
The other men on boat aren’t speaking as the boat is pulled seaward. Their ears are wary for the distant whistles of all of the other blind-sailing ocean craft.
I take a seat on a white-capped, blue cooler filled with Yuengling and Quick-Chek sandwiches. I straighten my spine and it sounds like the machine gun claps of a black jack dealer’s shuffling. I feel like a ray extending outward from the sphere’s origin. I can imagine myself looking inward on the present scene.
The water is cropped like a salad bowl and the boat hovers atop. There is one swaying, green buoy with an obscured number painted in white. A lone gull screams, perched on the top where the metal is oxidized from the moisture carried by sharp gales. There is the sun peeping through the thicket of mist that caps the ocean and nothing else. I can speculatively determine what everyone is wearing and who is smoking what brand of cigarette and what tool rests in what sheath on whichever rack on the deck, but the importance lies not in the details but in the shape of the memory for me.
Spheres are the most humbling of images for me. They remind me always where I come from: the sun, the earth, the fertilized egg and the cavity in my cranium that is filled with brain matter.
A sphere is the most naturally occurring shape. Every other shape is hewn from a sphere. There is always that force pushing from the outside of the sphere, trying to change the shape memory. It is most often my reflection on memories that whittles my archived recollections from spheres to other less perfect polygons.

A side note:
It’s nearly impossible for me to conceptualize the container that encases every star system in existence, but my mind augurs that infinity is spherical. There are no corners in a sphere, no dead ends.

I inhale deeply while gazing at the toiling, opaque water’s mockery of my reflection. The air smells like ozone and tastes like salt. The density of fog lightens in the air and I have a complete but momentary visibility of a great distance. I can see until the ocean curls at my peripheral vision and slopes out of view.
I think about the early humans that believed the earth was flat and if you sailed too far you’d fall off of it. I’m sure that the conjecture was almost entirely from land-dwellers that had never been surrounded on all sides by the sea. It is very noticeably rounded by my measure. You can make out the high mast or a large sail of another ship gliding toward your own many minutes before the entire image of the vessel is realized. I’ll bet you can easily see how the earth bends if you stand observing while surrounded by a tundra or windswept desert as well.
When I look at the sea where it curls downward, sitting on the cooler only peering and not fishing, it seems logical to me that our eyes evolved spherically to compute the depth proportionally to the plane on which we exist. If humans lived in a cube, everything would be depthless and little pieces of diced ham would be sufficient enough to view each of the universe’s six two dimensional square faces.
I fancy my mind a village of age spanning architecture. The eldest and most perfect memories compose of house of cyclopean masonry. The images that form as spheres are self containing and self existing. They stack upon one another and divide the stress between themselves. These are the raw memories that I accept for the scene and event and offer no reflection on anything but the shape. The memories I contain in spheres are preserved in my brain so I can explore every nook and gather every detail from each, individually. I hold onto the memories for what they are: the scene, person, landscape, animal, speech, or event that transpired and respect them for their purity of conjecture.
The buildings in my mind made of cubes and rectangular prisms have been neatly carved and stacked in relation to one another. The memories that compose these factories are full of interchangeable parts that I use to relate to other human beings. They are the happenings I’ve reflected upon to make sense of myself and how the people around me affect my personality.
I’m in the pediatrician’s lobby. I’m a child of a very young in a bright orange shirt with sticky, dirty hands and mussed hair. I must have refused to bathe before leaving the house. I’m playing with the stock toy of waiting rooms- that M. C. Escher esque abacus along with an African American boy wearing a plain black t-shirt affixed with a front pocket, a style popular among midfolk in the 80’s. We’re both weaving away at the beads along the twisted and coiled tracks advising each other to uniform the colors in one spot or another.
I didn’t take the time to learn a person’s name as a little kid because I was addled with that attention deficit that every little boy says is “just the way I am.” I titled people by the dominant color of their clothing. The conversation I’m having with the kid is as all direction of what color goes where and “Can you pass me this color, please? Thanks.” All the while I’m calling him The Black Boy and I’m proudly looking to my mom, whom sits next to the boy’s mother- a rather brazen, traditionally dressed woman.
She’s leering at my mother from about a chair away. The woman is projecting a frustrated stare in my mother’s direction. Thinking back, she was giving her a look that all but stabbed, “You’re raising your child racist, bitch.”
My mother has reddened and she’s trying to explain to the woman that she isn’t a racist and her son just calls people by the color of their shirt without actually revealing that she is defending herself. The skittish act was left unrealized to me until I got some delight out of how innocent I was years later when I understood racism and ignorant prejudice. It just so happens that when I reflected on that event in my life, I realized my mother wasn’t invulnerable and needed the support of her children and vice versa.
The last erections that paint the mentalscape of my memories are the pyramids. These memories are in part reflections. They start with a flat earthly basis. The aspect they all have in common is the way that they extend upward from their base to the same point in space the unknown. They are ponderings on other life forms that exist on Earth, life and death, black holes and other occurrences that yield rather humbling reflections.
It’s late on a Tuesday evening and I’ve got class in the morning. I’m sitting at shoreline near some derelict railroad tracks. The only lights are the ones reflecting off the Hackensack River and the New York City skyline. I watch the headlights only; muddy colored blotches and backlights travel over the Verrazano Bridge away from Jersey and into the city. I try to envision one of the people in one of the vehicles crossing the bridge. I can’t. The insignificance of the convoy of cars is really the most humbling point of the memory. It helps ground me. I’m reminded that all humans are animals. I can see a bit of myself in every other animal I encounter. I notice their features similar to my own, their attitudes, simple likes and dislikes, and survivability as a unit. Even though I can’t envision every last individual, I know we all come to terms at the same point somewhere in time.
About the only thing I’m certain of is the significance of humans to ourselves and our ability to attain immortality for our memories and reflections by writing them down

Rough Draft

2009-10-04T22:52:00.000-07:00

GL

I’m in sixth grade. A mush-nosed little guinea sitting on the fold-down in the front row of Franklin School’s congested auditorium. The fourth grade cadet band is on stage rattling off a very rustic rendition of Sawmill Creek. There hangs in the air a vague cry of sweat. The Bb clarinet I got as a gift from one of the sons of my town, Kearny, is all doctored up, but the felt pads hold tightly to the fingerings and wistfully direct passing currents of breath. The cork washers that adjoin each segment of the interlocking pieces are discernibly dry-rotted, so there is a decent amount of grease on each segment to delay the degradation of durability.
Mark, a childhood friend of mine is on my left spewing out little league stats and arguing with me over who is going to make it to the playoffs out of the four teams in the eastern division of town. The clamor of music stands and shuffling musicians clouds the distinction in his pronunciation. I gesture to him and we both sit back, both impatiently waiting to blurt out a crucial point in our opposite conjectures.
The boy on my right is a doughy-faced, long-eyed Greek three years my senior and part-time tormentor. Eleftaris is supposed to be in high school but he stayed back at some point in his elementary career. The clangor dies down and he raises his voice to pipe a rudely insulting declaration that he’s been watching my mother with aim to rape her.
I dole a none-too-gentle shove. Eleftaris’ countenance cast an expression on incredulity. It was the same expression you see on a catfish when you’re ripping a hook from its upper lip with your dad’s rusty forceps-dumbfounded and dull. He had a terrible circular strategy in his tormenting. He’d bait a hook and leave it to wade in the water, and then bite it himself.
The altercation is immediately intensified when one of his peers take a shot at his pride with an insult equally as crude as I was dealt. He tore my painstakingly self-repaired clarinet from my hand, partitioned it a dropped them haughtily to the floor. The fourth graders are playing a jangly Regal March, muffling our skirmish. Mark was wearing a mother’s mask. It was a sympathetic, if passive plea to man-up and gather my gear from the grey washed cement floor of the orchestra pit.
I couldn’t comply. I had tasted the viscous and virulent adrenaline and my brain lusted for violence. I rise and the fold-down chair flaps against the back rest of the chair. I was relatively short while standing and Eleftaris was still seated, lining his left temple with the fury in my fists. I land two quick punches and beat him with the clarinet which has by this point sustained irreparable damage. The Regal March ceases midway and we are pulled apart. He throws a piece of the clarinet at the back of my head while I’m being shooed into the hallway.
We were both chastised by the principal and Eleftaris was suspended. I was too, but only for a half day. When I was in the air conditioned main office waiting on my mom and dad to conclude conference with the vice principal and take me home, I heard the school psychologist proclaim that it was my parents’ divorce that was at fault for fueling my violent outburst.
I was a smart student. I understood that, as a son, I am pressed between the vice of my mother and father. I did want to tell the psychologist, however, that I deuced the kid up because I’m a kid and I felt like he needed a lesson impressed upon him by a battering and buffet of bludgeoning.

It’s my tenth grade year. My teacher has a voice like a DJ on a jazz station and wears one of those beatnik goatees. Mr. Tyre’s one of those scrubs that fails his elected position of authority by humbling himself with the friendship of high school students. Parent teacher conferences occurred the week before and my single teacher met my single mother.
Then on, he tried to impress me with his ability to be a friend and father figure. It’s a couple week after conferences, midmorning, and I’ve had a couple cups of coffee. I’m wired. In the middle of class he tells me that I need to join him to get some speakers from the gym and bring them to some nondescript place.
Tyre leads me through the halls past the gym, spouting some steam about how he knows I don’t have anyone to watch me and how I could make good with some supervision and how he’s doing this for my own good because I’m a bright student saddled over a dread horse on some hellish path.
We arrive at the nurses’ office and fat Tyre tells the fat nurse that she needs to call the principal, cops and my mother because “his father is probably not around and he’s all hopped up on cocaine.” Betrayed and enraged, I’m pounding my fist onto the empty chair beside the one I sit for the next two hours. My single mother worked only fourty-five minutes away but she was unable to leave work so they imprisoned me in the dusty, white-washed and corbelled cement room for the sickly while I came down from whatever falsified claim was cast upon me.

I’m in fourth grade. My parents are divorced and I’m at my father’s one room apartment in Lyndhurst. It’s six PM. I’m eating dinner with my older brother, two younger sisters and my single father.
I’m in fourth grade. My parents are divorced and I’m in the house my father bought for his family in Kearny. It’s six PM. I’m eating dinner with my older brother, two younger sisters and my single mother.
My parents divorced. Their decision, their marriage. My mom had to take up full time work and my dad had to put in extra shifts. I became a boundless putty to mold on my own.
I’m pragmatic.
I performed exceptionally in school. I read novels and pursued information that I deemed valuable. I was a hard, proficient worker and contracted odd jobs from my friends’ parents. I tinkered with small appliances, repaired bikes and worked with wood. I roved the swamps with the other free boys that littered the town, and through various encounters, with my father and mother as models, developed my own consideration for humankind and a moral exterior to guide my doings.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Pride:
I feel it when I’m sixteen, gunning it home downhill in the pencil grade predawn. At an intersection I happen upon a rust flecked pickup with its headlights off and interior lights on cruising down the road, piloted by a man appearing drug addled and vicious. The driver makes that tracker’s inevitable recourse realized as he turns in someone’s driveway and closes the distance between us. Had I been terrified or less than modest, I would have accepted the only option to prove myself as a man and stand up to this driver.
The pride flickers warmly in the energy and determination in each of my sprint’s footfalls toward the swamps where along I reside. Knowing that humans are hunters fond of wearing the devil’s face out-of-doors, I break away and hide myself amongst the tall grass so as not to lead the junky to my home and family.

blog 7

2009-09-30T21:56:00.000-07:00

The truth in this story is that war and truth are contained in the same sphere. Like whips the war for truth in circles, so whips the truth in war. The two chase each other around in three-dimensional, erratic circumambulations. When a truth is found, another war follows it up from behind and where a war is found, the truth hurries after it. Truth and war become an enthralling grey area. One defines the other and the other is all-encompassing.

O'Brien, like myself, believes that the truth is what you make of it. Through symbolism, cooked up personalities, and expository set pieces, one can create a very apt virtual world to bring to life the emotions and tribulations. The world becomes the conduit between the experience of the reader and writer.

Blog 6

2009-09-28T00:34:00.000-07:00

1. Lott-a. an important piece to keep in mind because thinking about it helps draw inspiration from writing, while writing b. creative nonfiction is the experience in relation to the writer
2.Drummond- a. she conveys her personality and has a developed voice b. the author's reflection is the constant struggle between life and death and her involvement
3.Orwell-a. tells a very enthralling story b. how the author reacted to a situation in a Burma just to avoid embarassment
4.Schwartz-a. uses form to bridge her stories different set pieces under a common theme. b. mimi and her father, an immigrant, finds out that they are alot alike and the realization that he's more Americanized than she is
5.Kinkaid- a. uses an item to tell a story b. portrays the author's temperament in a variety of situation in her life in which she appeared in the yellow dress

Blog 5

2009-09-23T22:27:00.000-07:00

Drummond's Alive focused on the idea that the universe tries to balance itself out and maintain equilibrium which means that by being alive you are always in danger of being dead. The point is that you've always got to be alert to safeguard your life from those events from which you can emerge harmed or bobbing dead down a river. Through her actions we see that she does not project a paranoid discourse. She uses her training to gather knowledge about the man each time she sees him. When you're able to notice danger and assess the magnitude of the situation you're able to act more logically and accordingly than someone with a discordant disposition.

The Alive structure does well to simmer, through various encounters with the stranger, what it is that Drummond dreads.

The structure of Westbury Court uses a cataclysmic event to convey unexpected doom that can befall the unwary. The author reflects how easily it could have been him that died.

Blog 4

2009-09-20T21:43:00.000-07:00

The main focus of Schwartz's essay is to draw comparisons between an immigrant child's life in Queens to her father's life in his homeland of Rindheim.

The first section brings you up to speed with the teen age girl's home life and her father's demeanor.

The second section focuses on the trip to Rindheim mentioned at the end of the first. She doesn't speak the language and can't understand anybody. Her father starts to explain how he lived and unknowingly draws comparisons from the immigrants in Rindheim to those in Queens with their many varying religions that must be accommodated in an enclosed area. They point out the Moslem Turks that have invaded the now tainted synagogue and Schwartz notes that her father never goes to synagogue in America.

The third section focuses on Schwartz's ignorance of World War II and how the magnitude of it by explaining how quickly homelanders visit the graves of their dead families.

The fourth is the focus on how many members of the Rindheim community fled together and died together in concentration camps. Her father reminds her that you must remember your dead like he wants her to realize his old way of living and the reasons he is the hardened man he lives to be.

Schwartz uses the gaps to separate encompassing ideas and scenes that drive the theme of the composition.

Blog 3

2009-09-16T22:19:00.000-07:00

Both Montaigne and Orwell are relatively the same as the more contemporary examples previously presented. Both essays, through analysis of a sequence of events figure out more about themselves and their dispositions. They both refer to themselves in the first person as well. Like Kinkaid's use of a dress as a focus, Orwell uses the elephant as his focal point to project the story he's involved with. Montaigne's essay has a more formal tone rooted in history. Montaigne processes outward influence in order to discern more about himself while the more contemporary writers like Orwell, focus far more greatly on themselves and their reactions to situations.

Blog 2

2009-09-13T20:08:00.000-07:00

Kinkaid's essay adds to my understanding of the definition of creative fiction that the subjective perspective when analyzing an inanimate object in relation to the memorable events in which the object had appeared. Lott's essay reinforces this sentiment by constantly venturing the idea that creative nonfiction is in part the author's perspective in relation to the presented event. It is not to turn chaos into order, but to make order out of the chaos. In Kinkaid's case, she used the dress as a bastion against the attacking force comprised of scattered memories over an indefinite period of time that exist vicariously through the dress.

Blog 1

2009-09-09T16:00:00.001-07:00

Creative nonfiction is a vehicle by which an author will employ creative literary devices, concrete writing and descriptive details in order to make a nonfiction composition intriguing, concise and communicable.