Nightmare Fuel - Day the Second (and revisit the first!)

More writing today! Every day for the month? We'll see. Those looking for AV, fear not! I'll sandwich in another AV post hopefully by week's end.

Yesterday I gave you my first Nightmare Fuel entry, which I also shared with the other participants. I told them something I've not shared with you on this blog until now: that there was originally a second part which I deleted in one of my rare moments of brevity. Those who saw both posts uniformly considered the second to be the singer of the two, which shows once again that I have no idea how to judge my own work. Here it is for those of you who are interested. Compare it to yesterday's piece and let me know what you think.

On the Swing
by L Czhorat Suskin

2012
It wasn't the story wanted, wasn't the part of the story I wanted. Too big, too sensational, too ... tawdry. You've heard about that poor girl by now. The mysterious disappearance, the slow fade from memory, the growing certainty that we'd never see her again. But this time you know we did, that if you can stop yourself from mourning the lost years of her youth, if you look past the damage outside and in, if you don't gaze forward at the decades of therapy she'll need... in other words, if you're willfully blind and stupid you can almost pretend that just maybe this is a happy ending. Or at least what passes for one in this screwed up world.

So this girl's not dead, the poor thing, and I get a job to do. Take some photos of the spot she was abducted from. Some kinda swing outside a crappy old apartment building. At night, like when she was taken.

I swear it was perfect when I took it. The empty swing at night, a perfect haunting fucking shot. But I get back home, and in every single frame there's this guy with a thousand yard stare. A guy I had to have seen. I gotta cut back on the sauce.

Fuck it. I'll photoshop it out.
_______________________________________
I still don't know how I feel about that one. There's something literal and concrete about it.

Now, on to todays' entry. The picture gave me a clear mental image of a slightly unrelated scene that wound up being the final stanza of this poem. The initial question is one that psychologists ask on intake. This I know because my wife is a psychologist, not because I'm talking to anyone else about the voices in my head.

I wouldn't do that; it hurts their feelings if I talk behind their backs.

Voices

My therapist asked

"Do you hear voices that others don't?"

How can I answer? Do I ask her?

Do I ask her if she hears them? 

My therapist asked

"Do you hear voices that others don't?"

Do I? Does she?

Does she know? Does she

hear symphonies semi silent sussurations 

tremulous tides of timid tidings

deadlines and dinnertimes taxing travails and taxes and

and

does she?

My therapist asked

"Do you hear voices that others don't?"

Does she know? 

Has she been searching, researching,

dropping eaves on my thoughts?

Did someone tell her?

Day 2 Prompt. Unattributed

My therapist asked

"Do you hear voices that others don't?"

Should I? Does she?

What would they tell me? What do they tell her?

My therapist asked
"Do you hear voices that others don't?"
I could barely hear her over the
screaming came across the sky into my head
the color of a TV tuned to a dead station
called
Ishmael

My therapist asked

"Do you hear voices that others don't?"

I didn't answer.

Hours later, a second martini.

glass table caresses my cheek

Oh.

There they are.

That's what they're saying.

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Feminism, Writing, AV Design, and other Modern Sports

This will be a wide-ranging post containing writing, politics, and hint at writing. If you've come here looking for AV and nothing else, you might want to skip to the last paragraph; this isn't a political blog or a feminist blog, but there are times I touch on both. This is one of them.

There's been some spirited discussion about Anita Sarkeesian's return to producing her Feminist Frequency videos, with an ongoing series on sexism in video games. As a writer I find this branch of feminism interesting because it dissects the role stories play in the creation of culture. As a gamer - and I believe all gamers worthy of the name should feel this way - I appreciate seeing the art form of gaming taken seriously as being worthy of the same sort of scrutiny as literature and film. And as a man, as the father of a young girl, and as a human being I'm saddened that we still live in a world in which women are all too often seen as objects rather than independent actors in their own right.

I'll not rehash Ms. Sarkeesian's arguments here; you should certainly watch the videos for that. There are two interesting side-points that I want to talk about today. The first, and easiest one, is that a writer can sometimes send a message without intending it, and that even the simplest stories do have a message. Consider her take on the coin-op classic Donkey Kong. On the surface, there's not much to that particular story, if there's a story at all; it's an exercise in endlessly climbing the same girders and leaping the same barrels to save the pretty girl from the scary monkey. Sarkeesian makes a very good point, though, that the entire set-up reduces the "pretty girl" to a prize. If Donkey Kong had stolen, say, a bag of gold the story would read exactly the same. This is the point about objectification. So I read this and thought about it and then, through the perils of YouTube search, came across several reactions. A halfwit with a dead animal on his head. A guy who mistakes critique of the writers of the Donkey Kong video game series with critique of the fictitious characters therein. A slew of angry men doing what they thought Sarkeesian was doing: looking into a camera and complaining. (and no, I'm not linking to any of them. Look around if you want; it's not my intention to drive pageviews for mouth-breathing pre-adolescent dimwits).

What this attitude most reminds me of are the critiques of modern writing from traditionalists like Robert Frost (who likened writing non-formal verse to playing tennis without a net) and Truman Capote (who famously called Kerouac's work mere typing rather than writing). Take a moment to read some Kerouac, or Ginsberg's "Howl".

Back so soon? Take some time.

Read them carefully.

I'll wait.


OK. The first thing you notice - at least the first thing I noticed - is the seeming chaos of these works. It really seems as if the early modern poets are just tossing words around. If you try looking a bit more closely, you'll start seeing more. Kerouac seems to be grabbing images at random, but there's an underlying cohesion which hints at much more serious effort and planning than you'd have suspected him of. If you look more closely at Howl's lines you'll find them interspersed with internal rhymes, scraps of meter, and very carefully chosen words. To assume that Ginsberg or Kerouac are just throwing around words and images is the same mistake as assuming that Sarkeesian is just complaining in front of a video camera; it is to only see what is there on the surface without digging underneath and appreciating not only the work that goes into it but also the beauty of the final product. In UPenn's excellent Modern Poetry class (on the Coursera platform last month and destined to return in September) English professor Al Filreis used the adjective "wrought" for these works; it's a good one. They are made things, built things, carefully considered things. You can throw around adjectives and adverbs in an unedited stream of nonsense, but that wouldn't make you a modern writer any more than Ms. Sarkeesian's detractors are gender-conscious thinkers or, ultimately, thinkers at all.

Which brings us, long-windedly, to what I do in the AV design world. It's easy to look at an AV system, be it a conference room, classroom, or a digital signage system it all looks simple; a TV goes on the wall, speakers go where you can hear them, etc. What I've found is that the more I know, the more there is to know. I've seen plenty of spaces with video, plenty with audio. Not all appear to be designed with the kind of thoughtfulness and care that separates an AV system from a room with AV in it.

Did someone do the math to make sure you could have enough voicelift without feedback?
Did someone do the math to make sure that your display is big enough to read the kind of content it's to be showing?
Did someone make sure that the system fit nicely into the space and fit the users' needs?

Life is like that. Not only are there are relatively few things as simple as they seem at first glance, but things that you don't see and very likely never will see unless you've learned just what to look for make a difference. The slightly longer gooseneck mic do improve the PAG/NAG equations. The carefully planned breaks in meter. The emphasis of one detail over another in developing a theme. Life is complicated. Learn to embrace it, learn to look beneath the surface, and have the courage to know what you don't know.

I'll close with more modernism; experimental writer and poet John Cage took Ginsberg'a carefully-wrought text and manipulated it with an algorithm he called a "mesostic" - sort of an internal acrostic. Here's a brief excerpt of what he came up with.

Even this is harder to do than it may seem! I encountered this during the Modern Poetry MOOC from UPenn, and had the assignment to try it myself. Since it was election time, I went nakedly and shamelessly political. I started with Ruth Lechlitner's 1936 piece "Lines for an Abortionist's Office" and tried to bring it to the present with Akin or Murdock's names after their rather questionable views on women's rights became major news. Neither gave all that interesting a result. Then I tried again with the Akin's poorly-chosen phrase "legitimate rape"

Writing through Lechlitner's "Lines for an Abortionist's Office"

              CLose,
          officE
           brinG
              wIth
          greaT
          offerIng.
               May
          outrAged,
            buT
pain-sharp Ened,

              fRuit:
              fAt
          deeP
            thE

And then gently touched up with "wing words"

              CLose,
          officE
       to brinG
              wIth
          greaT
          offerIng.
                May be
           outrAged,
             buT
  pain-sharpEned,

               fRuit:
               fAt and
            deeP as
              thE


I somewhat liked the way it ended mid-note, and think it certainly gave a mood or a tone. More to the point, even a quick throw-away exercise like this for a peer-reviewed class took some time and effort and a few false starts to give what looks like a somewhat effortless result.

Moral of the story? (all my stories have a moral!): There's more than you see. Think more deeply and question your assumptions before judging.

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Spirits and Staircases, two more weeks of poems

More poetry today! I'll start with something a little strange and experimental; this is another one I wrote for my good friends at the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers group. As I've already mentioned here, I'm slogging my way through the Modern Poetry course from UPenn offered on Coursera. So I took this writing prompt (a photo of a ghostly figure on a staircase which I seem to have misplaced) and threw a mashup of various poetic styles we've studied at it. It's also a touch feminist in that there are obvious references and allusions to four famous female poets or other artists. Is it obvious who?


Spirit of the Stair


You see the ghostly form upon the stair
An apparation clad in wisps of white
She whispers secret words as you draw near
steady she remains as you take flight

Does she hear you? Would Cassandra? Would Cassandra
would she hear you? Would Cassandra would she hear you
hear you hear you hear her hear you? would you hear her hear her hear
you would she hear you hear her hear you hear the risers rising
upward hear you rising upward see

her ghostly face is fair, but soon forgot
her ghostly arms, they fade into the air
Her ghostly frame, some would call it hot
but nothing more. The spirit of the stair.

into your glass eyes, your button eyes, your dead eyes
you are flesh, she is soul --
she will rise, she will descend
she is air, she is real
You are flesh.
Is Cassanda? Is Cassandra on her deathbed? On her deathbed?
Would you hear Cassandra on her deathbed, on your deathbed,
would you hear Cassandra when you hear Cassandra

Beneath your feet, the treads are solid wood
the balustrade your hands caress is smooth
You'd stop to meet the spirit if you could
but up you sweep, a brain within its groove.

You stay within your groove
the one that mother gives you doesn't do anything at all
But they know
the lifeguard found Sylvia already immensely drowned, but they know
they know they know.

You'll not drown.

You'll not touch the spirit.

Or

Would you meet the spirit gaze to gaze
to see the echoes of your better days?


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And, some horror poetry from the Nightmare Fuel project, of which I'm slowly fading out:

"Three small turns"

Again a night of jagged, broken sleep
again the well-trod path, bed to kitchen to crib to bed
nightmares to milk to sleep to nightmares - 
an insomniac's triangle-trade
My eyes are red
her eyes are red
his eyes are red. 
His night-terrors haunt us through the day until

until the ancient guardian is engaged
a man of wood clad in a wooden hat
a sentinal from when my nightmares raged
who calmed my fears of spider and of rat
beneath his watchful eyes the terrors cease
and now once more we all could sleep in peace

until

the jagged edges of broken sleep cut once more
no spiders, no rats, no monsters under my bed
but terrors named
mortgage
terrorists
criminals
lawyers
bankers

so I take it
creep into his room - he whose nightmares are banished
and take the talisman of my youth
its wooden face still severe, strong, beneath a wooden helmet
worn smooth by young fingers

The terrors stop
the terrors stop

in the pre-dawn I wake to see 
termines fleeing the disintigrating wooden carcass
to feast on fat houseflies

The wood is no longer hard, no longer smooth, 
but soft and rotten and stinking of decay

The nightmares of parents are stronger.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And, finally, something blatantly and shamelessly political:

The hundred less one arrived to join the hunt
left words behind, spoke only in animal grunts
will the goddess and gods protect those who eschew meat
from bright-burning hundredth with carnivore's teeth?
On this day masks are worn outside our face
See our spirits form paper-mache-
clad this - this autumn night when worlds collide
when veils grow thin, we see the other side
When we, the hundred less one run enmasked
as ancestors did walk in days long past
though creatures meek as we may earn your scorn
remember that stags too are armed with horn.




---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Overall, my favorite thing about these is how I have the chance to play with form, with meter, and with the sounds of words as well as the words themselves. Look for more experiments in weeks to come.

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A week of Horrible Things

Happy October! For this month, in addition to continuing with the Modern Poetry course at Coursera, I'm playing with a daily writing-prompt exercise on the Google+ social network called "Nightmare Fuel". Google Plussers can find the Nightmare Fuel page here. Every day the lovely and talented Bliss Morgan (aka Andrea Trask) posts an image, and every day all those interested write .. something. Anything. A story. A flash piece. A poem. Then we share them.

Because this is daily and time is at a premium, I've been taking the influence of the Modern Poetry class to write poems for most of these. Others have taken different directions. I'm especially taken with the "prosems" Kary Gaul is writing and the horrific little flash pieces from... well, I'm not sure what the man's real name is, but this guy here. sometimes known as Kewangi and sometimes as Johannes It doesn't matter. His stuff is consistently creepy and punchy.


Check out theirs, and look below for my attempts:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lilithwitch/8039767847/
 Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License.

Day 1 - The Curator

Standing stone -
your letters and numbers
precise
edges sharp, grooves deep and even -

Standing stone
slick and smooth. Reflecting 
sky

What engine carved
lines and squares
- an alien script - 
for what engines to read?

and earth

Standing stone -
will your faded lines remain
will you remember
when the engines have fallen
silent?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/devenlaney/5154194591/
Creative commons 

Day 2 - Sparkly Shoes

An early fall morning, a crisp fall morning. A drycool bite in the dry cool air. Summer is over. I'm walking with the girl and her new backpack full of marble composition books and crayons and number two pencils and erasers and tissues and even - for reasons unknown to me - plastic baggies. A bag as big as she is. The girl in her new dress and new windbreaker and new shiny purple maryjanes. Companionable silence down the street, past the swimming pool, long since drained for the winter. Companionable silence across the street, now a half-block from the already-formed clusters of chattering girls and hyperactive boys and gossipping moms at the dropoff. 

Companionable silence broken by the girl's voice. 

"Lynsey has sparkly shoes. And Maddy. And Jessie."

Indeed, they do. Brightpink glitterclad things adornded and embellished with flowers, with hearts, with peace-signs. Flashy things with thick pink laces and little blinking lights winking at the world with each shuffling step of little girls' feet. Sparkly shoes indeed.

I'm calm, noncommital. "So they do." I'm not crazy. I hear the edge in her voice, I hear the pleading. I also know that the shoes on her feet - her rapidly growing feet - cost forty dollars, and the sneakers under her bed (white with fun pink stripes. Not spartly) another thirty. The shoe money is spent. 

The girl starts to say something in a hushed whisper. Pat her on the head as I turn, bridge the gap to a mom-cluster at the periphery of the dropoff, an empty unspecial square of sidewalk. The girl edges into a cluster of other girls, her eyes on her own feet As Lynsey and Maddie and Jessie hold court over the sidewalk, their eyes up, oblivious to the winking, sparkling, blinking beacons adorning their own feet.

Day 3 - The Machines

The machines like a dream, like a wish.

Everywhere - the machines -Clean and proud in the bank

Encased in logo-bearing glass - the machines -Beside the battered ice machine

.

,

http://www.flickr.com/photos/maydaymassacre/8046148926/
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons License.

loitering in a supermarket - the machinesin a dark alleyway

ill-fitting here today gone the nexta magic shop out of a fairy tale

full of wishes open for wishesa battered plastic well gleaming

in the city night.

the machines reflect eyes the machines have eyes the machines are eyesI see them seeing me seeing them

seeing.

Like in a fairy talewishing machines like in a fairy tale full of wishes

I wave my card with a big swish swish and then I wish to wish a wishfor a dish of fish to be rich i wish 

I wish

I wish.

Nobody knows my wishes

Nobody save the machines.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/postbear/2989879481/
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons License.

Day 4 - Surviving Excerpts From the log of the FNC Emma Goldman

Tuesday, May 1
Not on ship yet, but it's motherfuckin Mayday and we have a motherfuckin ship. The Emma Goldman, a state of the art sailing vessel. Or at least she would have been two or three centuries ago. Today? She's ours. She's seaworthy. She even has a manifesto - to be the best damn anarchist-collective freespirited, freeloving, freesailing freelance cargo ship these oceans have ever seen. To the seas!

July 3rd
Finally got a cargo, on the high seas at last. Struck the flag we're registered under (I won't even write it here) raised our true flag - the black flag. Beholden to no nation, lyal to none but ourselves.

Glad to be at sea. The business part is the part I hate, but until someone gets around to overthrowing capitalism, this is our world. We need money for spare parts, money for foodstuffs, money for rum. We're tall-ship sailors. There has has to be rum.

Anyway, the cargo part is what I hate. Creepy client was creepy, mysterious boxen are mysterious. Battered leather trunks, smelling of mildew and mothballs and... something else.

July 8th
Rum gone. Too many fucking disasters. Damage. Rats. Matty drank the damn rum. And he had the nerve to 

August 2nd
still not working but we have the sextant. Anctient tech FTW. Matty said he hears sounds from the cargo. Voices. He must have a secret stash of

August 9th

.............walk the plank if we were pirates. We should still throw the bastard overboard after it. We still have the stars. We'll find our way.



must have jumped overboard. Just wasn't there one day but he's right there are voices they're talking whispering some strange language I wish I could understand I wish I


No sun for days. Sea is grey, sky grey, sails grey. The black flag is grey. I am grey. The others are looking funny at me, I know. They might know


A cheer from above. Land? I need to see first. Need to see what's in this cargo. I can almost make out the words. 

I think it's callng me. From above a scream, "what is that". I'm down here I'm openingit now

Source Unknown

Day 5 - backroads

Back roads, way off the interstate
the smell of fake pine

Late afternoon, small town
through dry dust and dry air an old
sign reds and blues faded into woodgrain

FREAK 
SHOW

tired and I need to stop eyes need to start
eyes need to wake step in

No freaks.
No living freaks.

Curio cabinets full of two-headed taxidermy dogs
inexpertly stiched together
improbably dry spiders
wax sculptures of the freaks
the mystics the hysterics the madmen the drifters on 
the backroads.

stiff posed manikins no art no artifice no motion but
disapproving scowls
and a lingering scent
of fake pine 
and a scream




Day 6 - Patriot Day

Source Unknown

The specter of those hands against the glass
shut tight against the smoke and acrid gas
A hand but not a face
haunting, follows 
me

in each mirror
each window
each mirror or window or glass door or glass wall or showerglass or plateglass window or display glass each glass each window

each glass door
no matter how far from the city, is that glass door. 
Even in the woods, even in the cabin, it is that window
hands pressed hard against behind faceless faces
A window I dare not open.

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ModPo - LIVE!

As some of you might know, I'm two weeks into the 10 week Modern Poetry course from UPenn, brought to us by the good folks at Coursera. This week, they tried something I've not seen yet in one of these courses: the first of their weekly life webinars. It took the same format - in this case a panel of an instructor and four graduate students discussing a poem, and opened it up to questions from the online student body via several avenues:

1 - A student could pose a question via a special sub-form of the online discussion group set aside just for this event. Someone was monitoring the forum live for interesting questions to pass on to the group.
2 - The same person was monitoring the Twitter hashtag #ModPoLive. She first noted a number of "role call" posts as people tweeted that they were watching the webcast, from the four corners of the world.
3 - Old school and low-tech. They had a phone line set up - what appeared to be a single POTS line or equivalent, to which people could dial in to Philly's local area code with a question. They in fact took some this way, which also gave students a chance to introduce themselves.
4 - Really old-school and no-tech. People could actual walk in to the Kelly Writers' House at the University of Pennsylvania and attend the discussion live in meatspace! This is about as analog as it gets, and another way to make it feel more like a "real" - or at least more traditional - event.

In person, there wasn't much in the way of visible technology. The participants all had wired handheld mics sitting on desk stands, all of which ran into what appeared to be a small mixing console. It was live-streamed onto YouTube with the familiar Google+ Video chat watermark. The audio and video quality were as clear and intelligible as for the rest of the course to date. 

Sadly for those of us taking Coursera courses because we work, the event was scheduled for 10AM on a Wednesday. Fortunately for me, I had a rare day off to pack for a trip,  so was home even if nit entirely able to focus.  This is another place where technology is our friend; I was able to carry the webcast around on my tablet while occasionally stopping by the desktop to check in on the forum or toss out a quick tweet. The webcast was also recorded - complete with the five or so minutes of down time at the front end - for those of us not able to be there live.

So what was the webcast like? Given the number of participants it felt more like a lecture than a truly interactive webinar, although they did a very nice job of integrating audience questions into the course's main theme of "openness" in meaning and interpretation of modern poetry. I even got one of my questions addressed. I'd asked about the stanza break between the lines "Grease is the way" and "I am feeling" in Rae Armantrout's "The Way". It might not have been a brilliantly insightful question, but was an element which I felt neglected in the discussion and a way in which Armantrout used the familiar in an interesting and non-familiar way (the first two thirds of the poem were made of "found language" - sentences borrowed from elsewhere, including three lines from the musical Grease). I ended my forum post by backing off the question a bit with an uncharacteristically self-deprecating "...or am I over-reading this". That was the part of the question they really dug into, beginning a spirited defense of "over-reading" - or at least of sincerely looking as deeply into a poem as one wishes to and being open to whatever one finds there. I'm glad to have sparked a discussion, and will certainly remember to express my opinions and questions more confidently in the future!

The next webinar seems to be scheduled tonight at 10PM. That's pretty close to my going-to-sleep hour, so there's no promise that I'll be there live to blog about it. Expect more of a full review of this course, including reflections on what I've learned, here in this space after it comes to a close in seven weeks or so.
And yes, I know this post is coming over a week after the event. Why so long? As hinted before, I was on vacation! Tune in later this week to hear about some of our adventures in the happiest place on earth.

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V is for Verse

It's national poetry month. I'm more of a prose writer than a poet, but on can't let National Poetry Month pass without at least one stab at verse. 

The inspiration for this poem was Tim Wakefield's retirement, leaving the Mets' Robert Alan Dickey as major league baseball's only remaining knuckleballer. I started imagining Tim watching on TV as the last knuckler pitched his last game, saddened that the lore isn't being past on. I find this image a bit more compelling. It allows for some more imagery (although the knuckleballer's typical square-cut fingernails are gripping a TV remote was a nice mental picture which I'm sorry to let go) and some more action.

So, happy National Poetry Month.

The Last Knuckleballer

Under the shadow of Mount Fuji
The last knuckleballer stands
his fingers tense, his nails square-cut

His grasp
too tight

The ball
too small
too smooth
wrong

horseleather.

He throws straight and true,
not dancing, darting, diving.
Not knuckling.

His limbs heavy with the weight of years
his joints well-worn,
he's been on his way down the mountain for years.
Maybe forever.

He grasps again. Deep breaths.
The ball still too smooth
still too small.
Did the next throw dance? One little side-step?

Tomorrow he'll go back to the ballpark
back to his search for someone.
Someone desperate enough
to cut his fingernails square
in hopes that he can cross an ocean
and make a too-big cowhide ball dance.

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