Returning some video tapes

I planned on making attempt number three to read Doctor Zhivago. It is the greatest story ever told after all but I’m feeling lousy. I need easy to read stuff. Or pictures! I can read comic books pretty good. This is why I love Chuck Palahniuk. He writes so casually I can devour most of his stuff in one sitting and I don’t feel like I’ve wasted time. I mention him only because I bought Choke around the same time as American Psycho (for the same low price) and the two deal a lot in sex. I suppose if you don’t know the plot stop reading because I’m just going to talk about it.

If I hadn’t seen the film before I read the book I do not think I would have continued past the first lengthy description of what everybody was wearing and where it was from. I found myself skipping past designer names after a while. I also skipped most of the stuff about music. I thought it was a good idea to follow such brutal displays of violence with calm critical reviews of music but I was not interested in it at all. When there were just hints of violence, both sexual and just physical, I thought oh is that how he’s going to do it. I was both disappointed and thankful. We all, deep down, want the downright pornographic at times. We want to know exactly what happened. But the hints were subtle, clever. The entire novel was well-written I thought until it came to the sex scenes. Sex is always messy. Some of the most erotic things I have watched and read are subtle. Things that aren’t sexual at all really. Or hint at it. Off the top of my head I can think of Garden State when Natalie Portman and Zach Braff are in bed and there’s something about the curve of her bum and his hand on her while she’s sleeping that is downright sexy.

Now I’m talking incredibly subtle and frankly irrelevant here because Bret Ellis Easton loses his hold on his narrative when it comes to sex. It’s all a bit this goes there and she was sucking this and then and then and then. To be honest since Bateman had this penchant for threesomes I never knew which girl was doing what at any given time. Now you could say ’sex is difficult to describe without being flowery’ and I’d agree. You could say ‘it is written like that deliberately to counter the controlled tone of the rest of the novel’ and I’d agree. But it’s a cheap thrill. A thrill I could get easily by going online and being female.

The violence was murkier. I wasn’t sure at all what was going on mostly. Some of it made me flinch. But overall one can easily list the plot points of sex. This goes in there and it was wet/hard/throbbing/moaning. But what does a drill actually do to a face? It takes a little more thought and it was obvious when I read it. So then is it because of the time? I have become desensitized? Sex and violence never upset me really. I’m not sure it’s all down to that.

So I can’t make up my mind if I liked it or didn’t. I’m torn between admiring such an idea and the ability to maintain it for close to 400 pages and utterly despising it.

I will say that Christian Bale is a damn good actor though. And Choke is hilarious. There’s a book that deals with sex in the same sort of this went there and it felt like that way but it’s funny. It’s descriptive and easily imagined. This was sex that happened to real people instead of porn.

Now I will also say the possibility crossed my mind that it is just pornography. He watched it, he fantasized it. It is not real. Because I’m not sure if any of it was real. The film was more apparent because it’s a visual but like I began; if I had not seen the film I would not have read the book.

Here endeth the review.

well alright then

I might fail History but fuck you can’t deny a project

especially one you suck so hard at.

The Earth is blue. How wonderful. It is amazing.

on the top of a hill stands a girl wrapped up to the nose in scarf and the wind blasts through the wool and her hair and rattles her eyes behind her lids. She spreads out her arms and the cedar trees bend back and her cheeks bloom blast off

far away the mother hears, the mother knows where her daughter flies in the sky

Yuri Gagarin, the cosmonaut, was the first man in space on Suzie’s birthday in nineteen sixty one. Yuri Gagarin was a Soviet Hero. Yuri Gagarin knew where the best conkers fell. Yuri Gagarin could swing higher than anybody Suzie ever knew but only Valentina Tereshkova knew how to land. Parachutes.

It wasn’t Suzie’s fault the kitchen window smashed. Yuri Gagarin kicked the football too hard. It was Yuri who left the paints open and forgot to feed the fish and stole a marble from the boy next door.

When Suzie turned twelve Yuri Gagarin left to find Laika, the Space Dog. He returned only once when she was fifteen and her first boyfriend had cheated on her. But he didn’t stay. Space is demanding.

A girl lay propped up on her elbow, the duvet pulled up to her ribs and she ran her fingers through the hair of the frowning boy beside her. Laika snored from her basket. With solemn certainty the girl emptied the fish bowl, the goldfish floundered in a pint glass and screwed it round the sleeping boy’s neck. They were calling him back to Star City.

will tear us apart again

Lee opened his locker one morning and unleashed a wave of plastic cable ties. Rainbow Brite seaweed strands lapped at his ankles and tangled in his hands that tried to stem the flow. The sound roared down the corridors turning heads and stopping student traffic flow until the last few trickled down and bounced off his toes. His books had been cleared out, his goggles and stethoscope were gone and the remains of his lab coat could be tweezed out forensically from the metal edges of the locker door. On the revealed back wall was a mosaic of polaroids, snatches of wheat-coloured waves and twisted limbs. Lee slammed the door as shapes of thighs and an arched spine formed through the dim shadows inside the locker and gasps of moans fluttered through his ears in memory. His forehead sought the cooling metal and he hissed out excuses to the intrigued crowd.

He waited there until the rest of his class had shuffled into the lab, not wanting to leave the locker unguarded, unprotected. His hands were buried deep in the pockets of his jeans to better fight the urge of another look. When the coast was clear Lee slid his thumb under the edge of the centre photo and inspected the blue eye that peeked through all that hair. It wasn’t quite fear squinting through the instant film, but something close.

When are you coming back?

He tugged the rest of the photographs down and tried to shuffle them into the complete picture. Close-ups of skin and freckles, lace and the strain of shiny suspenders and malleable nylon. And scored into the white border of an artistic blur of a bending torso were her last words in his ear.

[I have the vaguest notion that she's a girl that kidnaps herself but truly I have no idea where I was going with this.]

Now you are dangerous, snoozing through Shakespeare.

Someone said “All the world’s a stage!”
I want to say Shakespeare but I’m terrible with quotes.
Anyway, it was written on the wall before my desk
in the English department at school.
Monday to Friday, periods 1-6 variation
I stared at those words.
All the world’s a stage,
we are merely players.
But you need a lead,
a supporting cast
the love interest and a rival.
Is it a comedy or a tragedy?
I need a genre,
who determines this?
Are we doomed to repeat typecasting
or can I still audition for the role?
Monday to Friday, periods 1-6 variation
I thought to myself if the world’s a stage
and I’m merely a player
what a dull performance this shall be.
Watch, my most wonderful audience,
as your heroine, your frantic broad,
A dame without a heart!
drops her brunette head into
trenchcoat arms to hide from hardboiled phonecalls.
A guy without a conscience! lurking beneath a fedora brim,
speaking easy through cigarette fumes,
snatching leads where and when I drop them.
But the world’s a stage and I don’t much feel like playing.
Ever watched a noir nap?
This is the picture I was born for,
but I’m not acting for nobody nomore.

my words don’t travel far, they tangle in my hair and tend to go nowhere

Ignoring writers group tasks and other little things (definitely not including poetry), this is what I’ve achieved this year and is what I should be working on to better 1) myself and 2) my writing. I have been mostly neglectful.

Today Has Never Happened: 20,623 words, finished but not redrafted and barely reread. Incest needs heavily rewritten.
Endings Start with Questions (working title): 17,915 words, not including several added pages of diary extracts and flyers, finished and partially redrafted. Masturbation needs rewritten, may be entirely ridiculous. Blow job needs heavily rewritten.
Missing Shade of Blue: 11,863 words, abandoned but planned. Death needs heavily rewritten.
Suicide Society: 4,747 words, stopped in the middle of a sentence. May be too much like Brick.
Swimming with Dolphins (alt title My Brain Hurts A Lot): 3,950 words, finished and planned redraft. Bulk up nurses.
The Manifesto: 881 words, abandoned and half planned. Too purple.
Peanut Butter and Strawberry Chapstick Sandwiches: 3,604 words, finished and half-redrafted. Purple.
Love, Your Third Daughter: 39 words, abandoned but in a pretty font
Eschatological Verification and You: 1,695 words, finished, vague redraft plan. Purple.
Anarchy: 305 words, on hold
Samson: 104 words, stuck
Straight, no chaser: 1,048 words, finished, might redraft, may be too disgusting.
The Revolution is not a party: 968 words, finished, should redraft
People on the other side of the phone are not real. Discuss: 1,704 words, abandoned
How the war began: 1,464 words, a reason why I shouldn’t push myself to write when I feel shit
Hold Your Applause: 1,300 words, I can’t remember if I wanted to expand this

And we’re losing all touch, losing all touch

Message read on the bathroom wall

I take pictures of graffiti in toilets. If you read something good in a toilet and you have some form of camera you should do the same and send me it. I collect them with the vaguest notion that one day I’ll make a coffee table book of toilet scribblings. This will never happen because my pictures aren’t good enough but be quiet with your dream shattering dose of reality. Bah, logic.
And the last one isn’t mine but I found it and I giggled.