Monday, December 13, 2004A Weeping Peach
"Well, since you won't, I'm going. And I'm going to take your car because I'm in no shape to walk."
"Why can't you walk?"
"Trevor, tell me again why am I going to the store in the first place?"
"Tampons right?"
"Yes. Because you forgot them the first time. And because I don't have them, I'm in no shape to walk."
"That is GRODY brody. Will you get me some cranberry juice?"
"Why? Did the seeping talk give you a sudden craving for red liquids?"
"Yes. Your bloodied privates make me thirsty. So you will?"
"Yes dear."
"What did we say about that?"
"Sorry honey."
"What did we say about your usage of any noun, excepting pronouns, other than my given name to refer to me? Will you just go?"
If she drove to the gas station I'd have fifteen minutes alone in the apartment. But. I go for closest. She goes for cheapest. Maybe she'd drive to the grocery store. She doesn't pay for gas. A trip to the grocery store would give me a good thirty to forty minutes.
"Grocery or gas?"
"What?"
"Are you going to go to the gas station or the grocery store?"
"Grocery store."
"Here," I said and in one motion jumped up from the couch I'd been sitting on and threw the keys at her.
posted by Samuel @ 10:48 PM
21 comments
21 Comments:
a lot of your writing lately (i'm reminded of the ficnonfic about the guy on the telephone who's not who he is) has been this kind of minimalist there's-something-going-on-but-it's-not-explained hemingway style. it's strange though. i feel the cranberry juice part would do better if it weren't explained -- the blood reference is obvious. at the same time i'm not sure all the extensions make contact with anything. the guy wants to what? jerk off? watch a porn movie? rob the neighbors? not that there should be a specific answer, but i think the cues in the story should lead to something beyond ??? also, why would she want tampons AND pads. one or the other right? it seems to explore the secret feelings of men toward feminist-tolerance, what with the diminunizing nicknames acting as subterfuge for the hidden plot. intriguing, for sure.
Yes. For now I like the snapshots. There's no need to beat over the head. These small snippets have a simple profundity (please understand that I'm not saying that that profundity has anything to do with my creation of them, just that these everyday events are profound). You could discuss the meaning of this forever and that's probably the point. Seemingly petty exchanges are not petty, but infinitely meaningful (See Camus) when examined (and not necessarily examined in any erudite way, just looked at). Plus I think that I'm probably afraid that with my current skills going too deep will ruin things.
You're right about the tampons and pads. I changed it. I had them talk about the blood and cranberry juice to show the sort of fun/cute/loving repoire they have with each other. Not because I didn't think the reader would get it.
Her "Sorry honey" is supposed to be a bit of a joke on her part. (In light of your comment I've put "Sorry" in italics--didn't come through the first time). Pet names annoy Trevor. She doesn't really care whether she calls him by pet names or not. She doesn't think it's a big deal, but enjoys pressing his buttons a bit. And he's not necessarily pissed, he's just anxious for her to finally go. So he can be in his own physical space alone. It doesn't happen often.
I don't know what he does afterwards. But like you said, I'm not sure it matters. I'd considered going on, but felt like the story was over. When he throws the keys that's the end. I was just trying to describe the excitement boyfriends (and girlfriends feel it too I'm sure) to have the apartment to themselves occasionally, away from the beloved. To have the cave to yourself for a bit.
And also the complaints one always has about the beloved, yet transcends in spite of them.
Oh and remember, it's just a story. Just a story.
And haters, please realize that I know the first paragraph in the comment above isn't anything new. Plenty of people have said it before.
New banner: better? worse? same?
What I don't like:
Trevor is a Soap Opera character name. A craving for cranberry juice makes me think Trevor has an STD (every sentence really counts when a story has only a few hundred words—is this the direction you want the story going?). I don't buy the dialogue. It's what Ernest Hemingway would write if he wrote for "Dawson's Creek."
What I do like:
The paragraph in between the dialogue about how Trevor wants alone time (good, simple, desperate writing). Everyone who has ever been in a relationship knows what this is about. I think this is what the story is really about and you should go further in that direction (i.e. the delicate balance between having time to be alone in your head and loving it and being with a significant other and loving it.)
That's it Sam. It's been a while since we talked. How are you? I'm home for Xmas from Dec. 23--Jan. 03. Will you be in MN? We should hold a love-in. See ya round. Chris C.
What I don't like:
That Clay-tron finds it acceptable to cross me. I hold grudges forever. You're dead. At the present time you are alive, but I shall murder you.
What I do like:
This criticism. I need that. You hit it right on the head regarding the dialogue. After a second reading I'm completely embarassed and want to take the whole thing down. But that could discourage you in the future.
I like cranberry juice and find myself craving it quite a bit. And I don't think I have an STD, nor did I know it's a prescription for them.
Trevor is a name and I know of people named Trevor.
Anyway, yes I will be in Minnesota Dec 24 through the 31. We should do another holiday get-together at Bryant Lake Bowl (I won't get as drunk this time, I'm growing up). Or maybe just you and me should hang out. I miss our naked, kneeling, hour-long Eskimo kisses.
I second Lars's comments, and I find the new logo a little hard to read. Also, monkeys are soooo 2001.
I'l have to check out the Tomine guy. Luke, do you have any of his stuff?
Re: Everything
The first sentence is grammatically correct.
I definitely wasn't going for a Friends-ish thing with the dialogue. I've said "grody brody" to and had similar discussions with people of romantic interest. That's the thing with this dialogue. I thought it was real. I suppose it's not, but I wasn't trying to be overly clever with the discussion or anything. Maybe Ise just talks shitty.
Really it was supposed to be kind of fun for the couple. I've had these discussion where you try to talk a certain way with someone. You've got an accepted repoire. You're both trying to be funny or witty, not overwhemingly laugh out loud stuff, just entertaining. I have a tendency to sometimes rehearse discussions with people in my head before, and sometimes while, talking to them. Anyway, I think that's one of the best parts of a relationship.
But the fact that I have to tell everyone this stuff after the fact shows the failures in the piece so...yea.
Christine! Post something! Christ!
the last sentence is not grammatically incorrect, but it's true that it doesn't flow well. it's two ands connecting three statements, further obfuscated: by the construction "the couch that i'd been sitting on" which provides a difficult transition into the second and; and the "in one motion" frame which just adds to the breath. several commas would help, but i prefer when this kind of direct kinetic writing doesn't pause (chris's word was perfect: desperate). so i prescribe restructuring to use more verbs in the conditional present instead of the past tense. i.e. "...jumping with one motion from my seat at the couch. Throwing the keys at her." (i think that fits your style in the desperate paragraph in the middle section.)
I chose the wording of the last sentence deliberately. I think it works. "Jumped from my seat" doesn't work for me. I don't really know what that is. And the "up" was important. Imagining the definite upward motion of his body.
It's hard to jump down .
Well anon you do dump down from a ledge no?
No, but I'll try out jumping down from a couch I'm sitting on.
well whatever. up down, seat or no seat, luke is right that the sentence sounds weird. without commas (of which i approve), it manages to have both too many "and"s and stacked complex modifiers. maybe you could make a punctuation revolution and introduce arrows into ordinary text.
to clarify (not that you cared) i meant i approve of the lack of commas, not that i approve commas. (i do, also, approve commas, in the right circumstances).
fuck all yall
Yeah!
minamalism is cool. it works well for everybody--especially if you've got friends who can read a lot into very little, cause then you can put very little into something and still count on them getting a lot out of it. which beats the heck out of putting a LOT into something, only to have them get very little out of it.
i have a minimal problem with "repoire," however. well, maybe not a problem, but let's just say that i found the author's invocation of this not-actually-an-english-word to be an effective attention-grabber/diverter: nucleating amid the swirl and counter-swirl of "did he not know how to spell 'rapport'? did he really know how to spell it, but he's inviting correction only to then spring his actual clever-intentional 'mis-use' on an unsuspecting and war-weary world?" is the resonance generated among the crypto-clone words of "rapport," "repertoire," and "repartee" [there may be yet others, including "rap-" derivatives, but ya get tha picture i'm sure].
think about how this one word, used so sparingly (only twice) and NOT IN THE TEXT ITSELF, but only in the author's counter-comments responding to the comments of others on the text--comments that the author may have, with freaky precognizance, ANTICIPATED, but which he could in no way have totally COUNTED ON [ya gotta admire the authorial risk in THAT!]--encapsulates the whole communicatory vibe of this relationship, which i take it to be the real kernel of the story [i think y'all are letting yourselves get a little overly focused on the "desperation" aspect of wanting to have some alone-time in the pad here, which after all only serves to emphasize both the closeness and yet the roominess, the togetherness and yet the separateness, of the relationship itself. the push-me/pull-you dynamic!]
only extremely adept minimalists can jump down and get funky at--what?--four levels of removedness from the text itself.
we're not really dealing with texts and meta-texts here, not floating above but drilling down into, so does that make this the infra-text?
i mean, yowza!
forget it sam
don't worry about "repoire" versus "rapport" ... typography isn't the main focus of what we're doing here. we can all edit till the valkeries come to collect us but the point is we're putting down our ideas and if they come in a phonetic way (because perhaps we've never encountered and connected the spellcheck written version of the important word we know well -- i remember my dad thought "misled" was pronounced mize-uhld until relatively late in life) so be it. we know what you meant.
Ooh! Dat hurted!
One wonders whether "Sam" really needs this type of defensive intervention. Nothing about the piece that was commented upon suggests an author so fragile that "he" requires this kind of coddling.
Nor did the comment that seems to have triggered "Lars"'s protective instincts ever directly accuse "Sam" of a spelling error, as such, but instead used the questions raised by the "apparent" spelling error as a springboard for making several other, not notably hostile, comments about the piece. Including the suggestion--not contradicted by "Sam" to date--that several of the earlier commenters (including the thinskinned "Lars") may have worked themselves so far down a sidetrack in trying to unravel the piece's various levels of meaning that they may have overlooked the piece's main point...
[Perhaps this implied criticism of his own comments stimulated the immune response from "Lars" (who along with "Luke P"--one can't resist noting--seems to have felt perfectly comfortable kicking around the author's use/misuse of commas, so WTF?)?]
One certainly understands why the core posters of a given blog would wish to avoid flamers (though, again, the rather overblown comments of "Luke P" appear to be tolerated, possibly only because "he" is a also a member of the blog's "in" group) or to otherwise maintain civility.
But if the intent of the posts on a blog is not to expose the primary pieces and their authors to at least a certain minimal quantity of critique, commentary, and deconstruction, and if the intent of allowing secondary commentary is not to encourage debate of a certain robustness and rowdiness, then perhaps the medium of the blog invites a bit more exposure than the core posters can actually handle. Or perhaps the core posters need to lay out the "rules" of discussion more clearly than they have yet done.
Well, "steviepinhead" can no doubt also fend for "him"self, should "he" ever pass this way again, so enough of this...
who was that masked man?
surely his covered eyes also notice that no attempt has ever been made by "lars" to dissuade anyone from criticism. steviepinhead, who is more likely my dad than anyone else, made valuable comments indeed. targeting "repoire" is neither commentary on the piece nor an unwelcome invasion (the word was used in the comments). the "in" crowd wants more people to post, i presume, and would even welcome some attribution; though anonymity certainly deserves its place too. tear the shit to shreds, sweep up the fragments and throw them in the ashcan in prison, and all that. thinskinned might be a word for a stranger getting upset about our writing about ourselves, or a known acquaintance shielding him or herself from contestation. perhaps sam has yet to defend himself because this thread is so far down the page (and old) that no one's bothered to look at it but someone eager to pull that loose thread and unwind the whole fabrication. blast away, anonymous. we respect your views. god knows your name's been attached to enough important works in the canon of art and literature.
Now I've read it. I didn't mean anything by spelling "rapport" as "repoire". I just made a mistake. And it's not that I didn't know. I try not to spend too much time on my comments. Hopefully I would have caught the mistake had I spent more time on it.
And stevie pinhead (forgive me if I've misspelled it or misnamed you) you're right about your comments on minimalism. But Jeff Tweedy, and many others I'm sure (he just comes immediately to mind), would say that the space leaves room for the real art. He would say the decisions the viewer, listener or reader makes are the art. But yes, that seems like a bit of a cop-out. And I didn't put ALL that much time into it.
Keep the criticism coming.
Oh man, I spelled "rapport" wrong twice. I'll have to pay more attention now that people besides the posters (and usual suspects) are reading this. Hopefully they'll continue.
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