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Sunday, October 2, 2016
Saturday, October 1, 2016
This Is Not Law School.
This is my first weekend as a student in an MFA Creative Writing program. I had classes this past week and now have actual stuff to do!
You know, when I was doing my MA I secretly harbored the masochistic desire that it be harder. The romantic in me kind of wanted it to be as terrible as law school or medical school, something truly challenging and intensely difficult. I am not saying that getting my MA degree was easy, it certainly was not, but it could have been harder.
Sometimes when I’m running (which I have not done since I got to Portland and which I might take a crack at later today), my body says, “Whoa there buddy, these are your legs calling and we think it is about time that we go a little slower.” And my brain says, “Well sure, that seems like a reasonable request.” But then my runner’s ego pipes up and says, “Wait just a minute! Are you dead? No you’re not? Then keep running.”
Doing my MA, I was often able to downshift (listen to my legs, as it were), but I’m not sure if I am going to be able to do that sort of thing anymore. I am looking at my to-do list for this weekend and the coming week and thinking, “Well shit, that is a lot of stuff to do.”
That masochistic part of me is excited, but all the other parts of me are asking, “What have you gotten us into now??”
This is going to be an interesting couple of years. Wish me luck!
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Thursday, September 29, 2016
Once Upon a Midnight Dreary.
I wrote a new story! Well, it is more a “story”. I have been tinkering with it this week. Below is my first draft. It is nothing special, but it is something I wrote! And despite the multitude of photos I’ve posted the last few months, this is after all a writing blog.
It is kind of dark, but that is just where it went; I promise my spirits are pretty good right now.
As you read it, imagine that you are turning the pages of a book and that each gallery is on its own page.
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The Impossible Museum.
The Impossible Museum
By James Bezerra
Gallery 1 contains the hat check, the coat check, the weapons check, and the mandatory blood donation center.
Galleries 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 contain variously incorrect maps of the museum.
Gallery 13 contains a complete, fully-functional scale model of the universe.
Gallery 28 contains anti-Semitism.
Gallery 33 Contains Edgar Allen Poe, who sits on a white wooden chair inside of a sound-proof and bullet-proof clear lexan box. He is very much alive and can see you. His situation has never been explained to him.
Gallery 42 Contains a vibrantly alive cancer cell. Surely it is not hubris to exhibit such a thing.
Gallery 68 contains approximately a chest-high quantity of warm, liquid, fresh human blood. Rubber waders are complimentary, but limited in supply.
Gallery 79 contains two cancer cells.
Gallery 87 contains all of your existential fear: the quiet, bottomless disappointments of your life. The stuff of your midnight anxiety. That you have wasted your brief time on the planet. That you have lived your best moments, none of which were even remarkable. That you will die and never be thought of again. That your loved ones find your tiresome. That you will fail at everything.
Gallery 96 contains four cancer cells.
Gallery 121 contains more that thirty-seven million panes of window glass removed from murder scenes.
Gallery 158 contains a conveyor belt delivering an endless supply of Schrodeinger Boxes for visitors to open. Dead cats may be left in the ever-growing pile or retained as souvenirs. Live cats are to be left to scrounge off the pile.
Gallery 186 contains sixteen cancer cells.
Gallery 202 contains the bullet that actually killed JFK.
Gallery 235 contains professional black & white headshots of the people your lovers have thought about while having sex with you.
Gallery 296 contains seventy-three million swatches of carpet removed from rooms where suicides have occurred.
Gallery 331 contains a large, fully-functional scale model of the left ventricle of your mother’s heart.
Gallery 444 contains a sealed cube on a borrowed, plastic green patio table, which contains approximately 4,000 baby panda eyeballs.
Gallery 501 contains 256 cancer cells.
Gallery 505 contains a perfect replica of Edgar Allan Poe’s white chair and nothing else but an oppressive sense of foreboding. This gallery has no exit.
Gallery 616 contains 65,536 cancer cells.
Gallery 738 contains over 300 million individual strands of human hair left behind on the pillows of abandoned lovers.
Gallery 819 contains Yoko Ono.
Gallery 916 contains a 6-inch bench vise, a zinc nail, a hammer, a bullet, and a sloth.
Gallery 1004 contains a green-winged teal duck and a rhesus monkey that has been electro-shock conditioned to want to ride the duck. The monkey has not been trained to ride the duck.
Gallery 1228 contains a single, possibly decaying atom, a vial of sarin gas, and a docent with a Geiger counter who will break open the vial should the atom decay during your visit.
Gallery 2034 is a lightless, soundless, airless, floorless, and wall-less black cube with no apparent entrances, exits, hope, or time.
Gallery 3891 contains 700 speakers playing an endless audio loop of every I-Love-You ever uttered by your current lover to someone else.
Gallery 4000 contains 4,294,967,296 cancer cells.
Gallery 4408 contains a more than adequate amount of burn victim pornography.
Gallery 5562 contains a tall, aging pile of nosebleed tissues of cocaine-addicted former Presidents of the United States, and also Bolivia.
Gallery 6119 contains the souls of masturbation sperm never allowed to grow, age, live, love, exist, thrive, cry, fear, cure, laugh, or die.
Gallery 7288 contains used, faulty mountaineering gear.
Gallery 8138 contains 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 cancer cells.
Gallery 9787 contains the revelation that most clothing is donated to secondhand stores following the death of a loved one.
Gallery 10216 contains live feeds of child molestations from around the world. The gallery has been upgraded to now feature sound.
Gallery 11896 contains the end of a tunnel and a switch.
Gallery 20256 contains an innumerable quantity of cancer cells.
Gallery 30000 contains a small amount of hope.
Gallery 30001 contains a blinding white light.
Gallery 30002 contains nothing but cancer cells.
Gallery 30003 contains the museum gift shop and the single, non-functioning parking validation machine.
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Sensory Map.
The other day my writing workshop met for the first time. The workshop is the core of a writing program like the one I am in. But since it was the first day, there was not much to actually do.
We talked a lot about the way the workshop will work and about feedback and revision and blah blah blah, a bunch of other writerly stuff you don’t care about. We also did a writing exercise using a “sensory map” and while I do not generally like writing exercises, this one was okay.
A “sensory map” sounds way more fancy than it is. Just imagine that you have a piece of paper and you divide it up into sections for each of your senses (sight, touch, taste, etc.) and you focus on writing something for each of those senses. The idea being that we make automatic, subconscious writing choices about which senses we use and often forget about the others. You know how Hemingway wrote a lot about how things taste, but how I always forget to? A sensory map helps a writer work though some of that. Usually the map is aimed at a particular prompt. Our prompt the other day was “fireworks”.
This particular map had the sense of ‘Touch’ broken down into subcategories: skin, nerves, internal organs, limbs, fingers. That was kind of interesting because I had never seen one like that before.
Below is the exercise I ended up producing. I don’t think it is particularly good or anything, but is a thing which exists now, but didn’t a week ago.
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