Category Archives: Writing

Dreams, poetry, and time

As the poem below would indicate, flight is a common motif in dreams. Does this indicate limitation or freedom in the substratum or surfaces of the waking world? For example, I haven’t had a flying dream in a long time. But while young, I’d often dream flying over El Paso at night. This notion is reflected in my story “Ejay Mariposa Dreams a Rocket Real”

In real life Mariposa drove a Buick. But in his boyhood dreams he sometimes had a lighter vehicle that could fly and fly fast, the anxiety in such a dream having to do with the height of electrical wires strung between the street poles (which he’d always interpreted as symbolic of the fear of accomplishment, the conundrum of those millions who might have been somebody if they hadn’t suffered insurmountable frictions in their busy and torturous lives). The dream began with the vehicle propelled upward by whatever energies and just clearing the wires. Then the car would gain speed, more and more speed, fly into infinite blue until the speed was so great, so gut-wrenching and reckless, that Mariposa the Younger would wish for a revoking of momentum, and he’d find himself back on the street, peering up at the electrical wires, then waking, haunted by the dream’s incredible physics. But now, Mariposa the Elder was trapped at the top of a rocket, wondering whether he’d bounce on impact with the desert, watching the sun climb the cloudless, rotund sky, the wind screaming in his ears.

The question is, of course, rhetorical, or should remain mysterious. Susan’s poem has no answers. It merely presents an image. Something happens, leaving us suspended in the image. Like spiders suspended in webs. A memory. The anchor’s in the red door. Could be terror there.

Dreams and poetry

Susan Gibb’s first draft in response to the poetry challenge

The Age of Dreams
by Susan Gibb

I flew when I was little
around the cotton candy room at night,
in and out the windows
with a soft swoosh of feathers
and eagle eyes to pierce
my sister’s dreaming sleep
and peer inside her head.
I’d glide above
her bed
and giggle.

These days I roam through
endless grey rooms in houses
built like factories filled
with friends in folding chairs.
My path defined
by hellos and conversation,
I maneuver, looking for
and never find
the red door
leading out.

There’s a nice beat here between “door” and “leading.”

Star Wars: down beats

I usually take my daughter to see the big blockbuster movies, so today we went for Star Wars episode whatever.

We left not understanding really why the story couldn’t be made to work. It has lots of potential: mystery, love, the fall of republics. But the story just doesn’t work. The continuity problems are enormous and the awful acting is a hole that can’t be plugged (you can hire as many powerplayers as you want but they still need something to say). We couldn’t figure out why such inconsistent psychological decisions were made: why does Anakin (or whoever he is) become Darth Vader? Because he believes the dark side of the force will save his wife from a death he envisions in dreams. Or, because he wants to be in charge; or, because he suspects plots and betrayal by the Jedi. The second makes more sense than 1 or 3, but the writer couldn’t depend enough on simple ambition, greed, or pride, and so all of them end up seeming forced onto the character because there “has” to be a reason. Nothing seems natural in the story, much like the dramatic “and” tiresome backgrounds, cities of steel that go on forever without a hint of flower, garden, water, or human touch. That doesn’t make sense either. None of the characters are likeable and without much to say or do the acting is embarrassing.

Ultimately, A. Skywalker is a dimensionless character because he can’t figure out who he is. If he’s “dark” then why not grow that aspect in a dramatic way rather just “deciding” to be bad (which is what he does), then argue with the other Jedi, try to convince them that the darkside is the way to go. The model is Julius Caesar. The answers shouldn’t be obvious. But author is too bent on making things obvious.

For current SciFi at its dramatic best, I suggest the recent Battlestar Galactica, a risky revision of the old family favorite now gone edgy. One episode has more dramatic power than all the last five SW flicks.

Too bad. But it all comes down the “writing.” Good thing we got mid-day price.

Poetry exercise: dream as narrative

We know that dreams often act as a spike for writing and reflection. But we also know that dreams change over time. What changes about them is translatable into image. How does this work:

1. Given: change
2. Significance

As a person grows, the texture and subjects of dreams change. My own significant dreams are those that come in a series and that have that texture of realism. You (second person as a point of view; no, third in my case would work best–but the poem should tell) wake up and are pestered throughout the day by the experience. In this case, motif is critical, it would seem to me. Here’s an example, regardless of interpretation: I used to dream a lot about a space filled with black widow spider webs. The space first had the dimensions of my high school band room’s storage room, where we’d put our instruments and books and things. Later, the dimensions changed to reflect multiple rooms: the band room, a particular friends’ basement, a barn. There were two constants: the spiders and the webs. These dreams would surface then go away after a few days leaving me wondering why? Why, of course, is a part of the fabric of the dream. Anxiety, decisions, whatever. Anyway, the dream would unfold with my entering the space and realizing that I had to make my way through or out; the webs were everywhere: above, in corners, under shelves, laced across the floor like stretched nets. The spiders as a given were shrowded like black points within the webs, terrific potentials, hovering pebbles.

I know the source: black widow spiders love El Paso, Texas. We’d find them all around the house, out back, in manholes. They hunt at night. We’d hunt and find them with flashlights. It was always electric. When you found one in the small, confining basement, hung cupped in its silver universe, you had to stop and and wonder. In addition, at work one time, I entered a dark pumproom at night and nearly tripped. I scrabbled for the light, and sure enough I’d stepped through a web laced across the threshold, like a tripwire. The spiders, after all, have an aura of creepy intension, as if they’re after “us.” To us, they live alien lives in alien worlds, thinking up sinister plots; their revelations, like their webs, are as hard as iron and they see thousands of us simultaneously. Of course, all of this is reflected in film, and, of course, dreams, where the world can become “weblike.”

That’s just one example. But I haven’t had such dreams for many years. Others have taken over. That’s the exercise: to poeticize the calculas of change: one example, two examples. How do these dreams form a parallel experience of existence? What is the story or image that the dreams provide via the memory space of the poem?

Semester roundup: on evaluation

Another semester has closed. The narrative has found resolution. For me it’s always interesting the way things happen. Number one, students always surprise me. It’s always a mistake to judge early. “These students can’t write, read, or think their way out of a sitcom.” No, they typically can, if they do the work and take it seriously. Some do rise, some will have to try again.

I learned early that the best education is about teaching people to think for themselves, to face problems with confidence, and to act with self-possession and to initiate action deserving of respect. This is why all exams in British Lit are comprehensive: we learn Mill by aiming at Wollstonecraft; we draw from the Green Knight for insight into Paradise Lost. Yet, one of the attitudes I saw a lot of this semester had to do with students putting off for tomorrow what they could do today. I’ll get to “that” when I get to the four year, I hear them thinking. I teach at a community college. Problem is the courses I and my colleagues teach transfer to the four year school. Hence they are “university” courses. They are not preparatory for university; they’re preparatory for deeper study into similar content areas, the addressing of which will have to come at another institution. One of the unstated objectives of British Literature and Creative Writing is to maintain the integrity of the content. That’s one of my jobs. I want students not to “like” Eliot but to respect the work. I don’t want people to take my word for it, to trust in what I think is good description. So we read lots of examples and try to figure out what makes the description tick. Then we write self-generated work and hope it “exceeds” the examples. Do we “exceed”? Let’s keep trying is what I say. “As good” is a static ethic. I’ve seen too many students succeed to begin playing it safe.

I’m now what would be considered a “seasoned” teacher. I’ve been teaching for over 12 years, at three institutions. When I was in school I learned quick what I didn’t want to do for a living. I had the typical jobs: hotel dishwasher, factory worker, and others. I cleaned out the “professional’s” waste basket. Fine. But the image of this work, from my own perspective, gave me enough ambition to work through the trigonometry, an area of math that I still love, but didn’t then consider my bag. There were other bags, but cosine still made enough of an impact to generate topics of conversation over beer. I entered school as a computer science major but found the study confining at the time. I loved to write, so I figured I could always write about the science, and so English was a good path. Nobody told me that I had to write just about Wordsworth. Dr. Wren and others claimed that I acted like a “dedicated generalist.” I enjoy history, science, mathematics, programming, art, and games. Sounds like new media. “Dedicated generalist” sounded good and “is good.”

I know that competence matters, and so do a lot of the students at Tunxis or anywhere else. That’s what the Eastgate talk for the last week has been about. Some grades are about competence; others are about averages: A to start finished with D averages as pass, but what does it mean, really?. Can a student do the work? Do they do the work at the level of excellence. Part of the meaning of this word has to do with royalty, but we mean it in the sense of “to rise.” An excellent friend of mine, a teacher in the CC system of El Paso Texas once told me that “to want to be like” is an ethic of mediocrity, and I buy that as an exemplar worldview. Teachers have to think about “things that rise.” Do we have to be excellent? Of course not. But do we lose anything by doing the work, the reading, and completing what we started? No. Some of the students I’ve seen this semester actually worked hard at avoiding the work or concentrating on other things yet expecting to know what I asked them to consider on their own with some guidance from me. If they’d put the same amount of effort into completion and risk, they would’ve done just fine. Still others weren’t in the right place to complete because they had import things pressing against them, family matters, personal adjustments which competed for their attention. That’s fine too. But a student can’t expect an honest evaluation under duress. An honest evaluation can only come after honest attempts at learning what hadn’t been known or understood, which is always exciting.

Competency isn’t politics. But politics can strive to look like it. Currently, the officials are trying to close down military bases in Connecticut. They’ll make it sound like a reasoned decision, that it’ll save money. Easy waste is easier wasted. We just killed a madman in Connecticut knowing full well that he didn’t know a lot about life to give a damn either way. We’re not very good, still, at managing the proportions at large scales, which may be what the future looks like to some. It’s a continual struggle to know want from need.

Anyway, here’s what I learned this semester:

1. The directions are important. Students who followed them did better than those who didn’t or didn’t bother to try. (Note: following directions is not a measure of competence or of individuality in and of itself. I.e., you can be cool and edgy and still know when the deadlines are. There’s just something silly about not being able cite a source or turn in readable copy. I like as much edge as the next guy, but edge still needs texture and nuance.) I have lots of directions for online students. One of them is to submit papers through email with names and paper # in the file name. The majority of the students ignored this direction even after multiple reminders. Believe it or not, those who got it down were better at organization, authority, focus, and risk. To conform to ActionScript 2.0 I have to note my datatypes just like everyone else.

var sSoThere:String = “Okay, okay!”;
trace(sSoThere);

2. Organization really does work. Those people who kept to a semblance of organization knew where to go to look up the answer to a question. Good notes, systemic structures, and attention to details made for a marked improvement in finished work.

On playing with paper

Susan Gibb writes

And, we played with paper. In the New Media class I was happy for days fiddling with the handed-out Mobius strip. In this class, we folded a plain piece of paper in such a way that corner flaps were created and various writing surfaces were then made available. The professor had us write a story, a sentence at a time in separate areas, then hand it to a classmate and read the story. Obviously, the narrative structure is affected by what is opened and read first. The sequence, and thus the story, is completely in the control of the reader.

I don’t know if the reader has complete control, but control may be an issue. We could also come at the paper experiment, which turns the writing surface (2 sides) into a muti-surfaced space. In a hypertext the reader must let go of control in a sense or seek another kind.

Practice with Photos

I’m still getting used to WordPress and there are a couple of things that need working out before the Narratives weblog goes live in the new space.photo One of the nice features, one lacking in other systems, is the wp static page element which may work great as a place to upload and store fiction, poetry, and other work in the pipeline for the Narratives group. What I’m trying to anticipate are the problems that may arise with uploading, design, and access by the numerous members of the Narratives group.

The Art of Synthesis

Susan Gibb writes over at LtS

Two days of writing, ten pages of Absolutism, Peter the Great, Declarations of Independence, D of I’s for Men, D of I’s for Women, and Napoleon Bonaparte.

Will this knowledge help me in the twilight years? Has the lack of a clear understanding of the French Revolution hurt me in some way for the first three quarters or more of my life?

And the biggest question: What if I forget it all (highly likely) anyway?

Or maybe this question: How has the writing of historical fact and assessment essays helped my creative writing? For one thing, it has destroyed my ability to transcend above it into the realm of free thought. But for another, it has forced the discipline of research and the ultimate sorting through and establishing arguments to put down in a condensed and concise manner my findings.

But then again, I think I could have done okay without it.

Something about the idea of the universe’s expansion really gets the blood going for me. I don’t know why but it has to do with imagery. I can see the physical consequences; then I think about the scales, the sizes of things “out there.” How would a poem capture the flash of the image?

This is a natural inclination, to want to draw the image. It may be that under the stress of assessment, the real questions get lost. There has to be a way of following up. I’d suggest that for the writer, the follow up happens in the story or the poem. Even on the weblog.

New media, writing, and conferences

The folks did a great job at the writers conference yesterday. Susan Gibb gave an informative and professional peek into weblogs as writing tool. She went pretty deep, providing examples of the form, genre, and the pros of portfolio writing.

Mark Anastasio was smooth with comics; Jim Keating did fine with IF, although he needs to work on visuals and examples; and Patrice Hamilton was excited about digifilm; and John Timmons was funny and energetic with illustrations from Patrice’s film.

Thanks everyone.