August 2010
7 posts
Landscape
One of the installments from Capital City Blues that I finished a few months ago. Never posted it, but thought some kind of personal reminder that I can at least sustain some kind of narrative for a few pages could potentially be welcome.
David dug up rocks. Ziploc bags. Small lengths of knotted twine. He dug up shards of glass from old beer bottles and scraps of newspaper articles that...
Life Preservers
These are the things we do. These are the motions. We cover distances to be with each other. We take our shoes off in airports and eat at Ranch*1 and feel a welling in the back of our throat with longing.
The alchemy of shared presence sometimes does its tricks. Its various emotional somersaults. Even as our guts turn over in their own backflips.
In the meantime, we wait for revelations. ...
Under
“If I come in, it’s going to be in my underwear!” Edwin shouted. He killed the can of Old Style and let it fall to the bottom of the paper bag. He placed the paper bag on the ground next to the others.
The Lake, freezing cold still. July. Hot days have no effect till August. Even now, with a string of sweltering humidity, the water would be around 60 degrees. Dragonflies...
Get the fu*king Cliches out of your system and...
Thunderstorms, heavy air, crickets, serious thoughts, freight trains, refrigerators, blondes, brunettes, Margaret, repressed memories, the father-son relationship, shotguns, Paris, London, Venice, Montana, New York, NEW YORK, the Subway, the El, the Metro.
Cali-fucking-fornia. Jesus. Get over it.
Airplanes, sailboats, rowboats, paddle boats, vintage convertibles. Escalators, snowglobes, the...
what the hell is this margaret thing about anyway?
beats me. The voice of these posts is kind of savant-ish though. Whatever. It’s hot.
Margaret II
Margaret, I want you to know: I have serious thoughts in my spare time. That is to say, even when I am not professionally obligated. I wonder about the densities of objects and look up articles on buoyancy. I understand how ships float, which is more than one can normally say about oneself, I would imagine.
I think a lot about planetary motions and about the swirling fluxes of goods as they...
July 2010
5 posts
Never Write
Leveling. Here’s the thing. It’s hard to do this un-self consciously. There are considerations. I think about generosity, about selfishness. About the necessity, even, some would say, responsibility, to write for others. How to jive with the imperative to write, first and foremost, for oneself. How to think of oneself as both writing in a vacuum, without audience, and at the...
Thoughts for You
At the Washington Street Station on the Blue Line today, there was a guy playing Pachelbel’s Canon on the harmonica. I waited for an O’Hare bound train. It was right when rush hour bleeds into the time of day when no one takes the O’Hare bound trains, so we had to wait a long time. Everyone used their phones. I started to sweat. The harmonica notes bounced back and forth in...
Delicious Words
Margaret, I wonder: do you still find words delicious? Do you savor expressions, hoard grammars, luxuriate in the warmth of your breath as you speak? Do you consume dictionaries in your pajamas by the air conditioning? I find little time to read these days. I sit in an armchair and stare at pages. The words don’t dance like they used to. I imagine all kinds of excuses. Fatigue. ...
Folding Underwear
I wore a Calvin and Hobbes shirt to the gym. The run down 56th Street depressed me. I wheezed. Thought, as usual, about my last cigarette. Then about will power. Then about not writing. Then about trying to get the whole process started again. A stack of unedited bullshit sitting on my desk. Unanswered emails.
“What do you like about writing?” she had asked, sitting in front...
June 2010
1 post
(500) Words Per Day: (Re)rhetorical Throat...
Back to flying the friendly skies. Anyone else ever listen to Channel 9?
Wrapped sideways into a seat, I had the same falling dream, and woke up. Not drooling, luckily. Blonde next to me from Nebraska. Big thighs, naturally. She says something to the bearded guy across the row about hockey and says it HAW-kee.
I flew into Omaha once in late spring. As we descended out of low clouds, the...
April 2010
2 posts
Some more dialogue to get the ball rolling...
This was fun last time, so I’m going to try it again: All dialogue.
“Do you want pancakes?”
“No.”
“Do you want coffee?”
“No.”
“I’m going to go take a shower.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Do you want me to just stay here then?”
“Depends.”
***
“Seriously, you smell terrible.”
“Well you can’t spell intoxicating without toxic baby.”
“First of all, gross. Second of all, stop looking at me like...
Stuttering
The wide lawn of silence between us grew. Years passed in moments. In the tendrils of eventualities. In breaths that I realized smelled like stale bread, like morning, like the detritus of discarded somethings that I couldn’t quite give name to. Used up. Expelled.
March 2010
2 posts
(500) on Writing
Is writing about writing only interesting to writers? Is bad writing about writing only interesting to the person who writes it? How many writers have written about how difficult it is to write when all they really need is to chill the f*ck out? Here’s some self-important prose on writing:
They say write what you know, right? Or alternatively, “Write about yourself until you get bored. ...
(500) Words Per Day: Redux
A little rusty, but here we go:
By the light of the refrigerator in the darkened kitchen, standing in the small pocket of cold air, boxer-shorted, deciding between cheddar cubes and grapes. Used to these hours, intoxicated by their slow evaporation, feeling the minutes pass as a tingling in my nose. Constantly verging on something, like a record or a CD skipping on the same note and waiting to...
February 2010
4 posts
Love!
My Darling,
I love you with the kind of heat that is produced by the coils on an electric stove. As in, you might think that it’s cooled off but even after an hour of dish washing, you can turn around and SIZZLE, it’s still hot and you can accidentally burn yourself. And then you have to run your fingers under tepid water to try to bring down the swelling and reduce discoloration, but no matter...
(500) Words Per Day: The Looping Forehand
I haven’t written about tennis since freshman year of college….return of the repressed?
Jarvis had that unique ability to conjure slang out of thin air. Slang that Adam thought he should have known already. Words that dropped from Jarvis’ mouth like licorice dripped like globs of glue from Adam’s. His mother, who almost never emerged from the Jaguar when Jarvis arrived, would...
3000+ Words: Ben's Shorts
This is my 201st total post on Theoretically So and represents 41,000 Words (not including lists, updates, random emo crap). This post, Ben’s Shorts, marks major revisions of three earlier posts that I thought would be kind of fun to share. (Today’s earlier post on Los Angeles is another heavily revised, though still evolving story, that actually grew out of something that...
2000 on Los Angeles
Afternoon of Sales: LA
Stephanie Cutlass, one of Raytheon’s army of communications representatives, drank her Diet Coke with the probing concentration and hesitation of someone in serious maxiofacial pain. Her jaw looked swollen, but neither my boss Alice nor I dared to probe the specific nature of a recent “dental trauma,” to which Cutlass’ perky assistant Rossandra had referred obliquely in a...
January 2010
24 posts
(500) Words Per Day: Phonies
I hope the afterlife is full of only tolerable phonies.
I hang out with phonies. Not because I have to, like, professionally or anything. And not that I don’t think that I probably qualify as one too. More like, I do it because there’s no other choice. And that the idea of genuineness is something they beat out of me a long time ago. But maybe, I guess, I’m trying to win something back on...
Obsessions this Week
Organizing questions this week:
Being sick really limits one’s productivity when it comes to reading
Tao Lin. Poser? Genius? Both?
Man on Wire. God should I not not have seen that sooner?
SOTU: Barry crushed it.
Just because it’s boring doesn’t mean that it’s accurate….or good.
I kind of got the smackdown laid on me in class when I suggested that Tao...
Answers to Trivia.......I know you all got them...
1) Absinthe….minus the wormwood, so don’t worry about going crazy.
2) Alexandre Dumas
3) Barack Obama (the Obamas lived at 51st and Greenwood in Chicago’s Hyde Park. Bigger and his family live around 46th near Stony Island Avenue, near the Kenwood neighborhood.
4) Shoplifting from American Apparel. Bonus: Shoplifting Shoplifting American Apparel from Urban Outfitters. ...
Ten Literature Trivia Questions
Try em out…leave your answers behind. I’ll post the right ones tomorrow. Keep the Googling to a minimum, cheaters. They range in difficulty, I think…
1. This favorite drink of Papa Hemingway and many of his more macho characters was recently legalized in the United States. Just don’t cut off your ear after you drink it. 2. Arguably the first commercially successful...
(500) Words Per Day: The Life of the Party
As soon as Nick attempted communication, something short-circuited. His tongue swelled or his back twitched and he had to scratch something under his arm. His gestures, in other words, fled. They evacuated his body and left him a blubbering blob of communication-less flesh. At first, the soupy concoction of his liquidated linguistic skills amused people. But eventually, he had to retreat...
“I’m not saying I’m able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems...”
– David Foster Wallace
(500) Words per Day: Flannel Sheets
They’re really comfortable. I don’t care what anyone says.
I had just put flannel sheets on my bed.
“Flannel sheets?”
“I don’t understand why you’re so surprised about this,” I said.
“Flannel sheets?”
“It’s ten degrees at night, I crack my window open. What do you want me to say? They’re really, really...
Guest Post at "The Straight Torquer" →
A great friend and up-and-coming DC architecture maven Kash Bennett has kindly let me post on The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and its influence 20 years (almost) after publication. Find it here at Kash’s fabulous architecture blog: The Straight Torquer.
Check it out and leave some comments if you’re interested in getting feedback from REAL! LIVE! ARCHITECTS!
Kash was...
(500) Words on Loss
Loss seems an apt topic after dropping our third intramural game in a row. At least we haven’t lost our dignity yet, right guys?
Losing games, losing notebooks, losing patience, losing time. I’ve lost hair, stamina, agility. I lost a cousin to heroin (he called my parents at three in the morning when he realized he had lost control).
“Hello? Hello?” my father said before he lost the...
3000 on H Street (My Old Hood)
So. Not “new stuff” technically, but something that I wrote when I left H Street, NE a few years ago. I’m way behind for 2010 so far and it makes me nervous, so this erases the deficit, and now things will get back to normal. I’m declaring this straight-up autobiography, with the caveat that some of it is made up. It is intended (still) as the start of Capital City...
(1000) Words Per Day: All Dialogue...
“Are you awake?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry I called you a hippo.”
“That’s okay. I’m sorry that you’re emotionally paralyzed by insensitivity.”
“Thanks.”
“Okay. Sleep time.”
“Okay.”
**
“What do you want to do?”
“I thought ice skating might be fun. Do you want to go ice...
Obsessions this Week
Organizing concepts and questions this week:
Racial and sexual identities: how can we talk usefully about different means of social/linguistic constructions of identity?
Photographs and meaning—why do some images seem to wound us when we look at them?
Frivolity in music. Outside of Lady Gaga, is there anyone making a real persona of themselves? Maybe Vampire Weekend has caught onto...
(1000) Words on Objects: Writing out Some Bad...
Sometimes bad habits are best repressed. Sometimes they only work themselves out through this kind of thing:
Show don’t tell show don’t tell show don’t tell. Foreclose the possibility of cliché, lock out everything except objects. Describe through consumption of paper, ink, bottles of cola, slices of pizza. Measure idiosyncrasies in teaspoons of sugar dumped into coffee—too many or too...
(500) Words Per Day: January Thaw
Ashley must have left sometime that January. I remember walking in Burnham Park to try to clear my head and noticing the sweat drip down my back. I had bundled up with long johns, a thermal shirt, a fur hat with earflaps, and my long coat. Only to walk outside and find the snow melting into a thin fog that rose above the field in front of the Museum of Science and Industry and curled toward...
500 on Arrival:
Take that time in San Francisco, for example. They gave me a cherry red hardtop mustang because they lost my reservation for a “supercompact-mini-tricycle-size-car.” I drove north to the city, through South San Francisco and directly into downtown. Henry was working late, and I was strung out from the long flight from the East Coast, so I just drove around awhile in the cool evening air,...
Ten Things Isaac Was thinking on the Way to Mount...
Edited out of early drafts of Fear and Trembling:
1) Uh oh. I forgot the compass. Dad’s gonna kill me.
2) Man, I can’t believe I skipped out on Spring Break Tel Aviv for this. I’d rather stab myself.
4) “Isaac wash the dishes. Isaac brush the mules. Isaac gather sticks together and put them on this strange-looking altar.” Dad is so lame.
5) @HagarsIshmael dude, so unfair. He’s making me...
1000 on Lilly, David, and an attempt to start...
Revisiting some old characters. A few narrative strands starting to come together. To catch up, check out the old post on David in Salida and of course, Beth’s first appearance from a few days ago.
I went on a date with a girl named Lilly who worked as a Japanese document reviewer for a law firm. Basically, no one at the law firm read Japanese, and she had been in a remote fishing...
Obsessions This Week
Trying out a new weekly: Efforts to compile the things I’m reading for class, life, and otherwise.
Organizing Concepts and questions this Week:
Realism and its relationship with postmodernism.
What is a realist novel?
What is an author?
How can a book open up new discursive categories and practices?
Continuing interest in Ken Warren’s project of “What Was African...
(1000) on the Kennedy Center Porch
Finally, one that I like…..I think. Maybe too many figures and jumps, but an “atmospheric” to borrow a term, that I think I want to build on.
Beth and I spent the summer in each other’s company, but it wasn’t obsessive. I moved out of Glover Park to a neighborhood in Northeast (“It’s fine, as long as you just stay alert,” I told my friends when they looked at me in horror). ...
500 Lazy Words on Seasons in DC
Mosquitoes. They’ll get ya.
The damned mosquitoes linger. They retreat to strongholds in Capitol Hill close to the water and to Rock Creek, but they hang around until the middle of November. Joggers in the park still swat haplessly at their legs while they run in their long sleeve University of Virginia t-shirts before work or on cool Saturday mornings.’
The period of decent into the...
500 on Mold and Healthy Relationships (?)
The simplest joys live with mold. At the bottom of the bathtub, which I fill with Comet bleach powder and scrub until my nails start to turn black and blue from the pressing. Soap scum, detritus, hair—and then voila! White porcelain, the heat of the shower water draining away the dirt. Spray down the shower curtain to remove the black dots of mold. Take the bottle of 409 to the floor and...
Grr 1000+. Not really well thought out, but...
Things that astound me increase. Proportions of books unread to read, deficits, number of people I should have called ages ago. The stack of unwritten letters teeters on the edge of non-existence. I think about them and sweat. The stored up unsaidness overwhelms. We are stunned into a silence of forgetting when we remember the words that we never spoke.
Let me put it another way. The...
4 tags
1000 On Taking Off Shoes
“Welcome to my ordinary: taking off my shoes in airports and letting everyone see my socks. I feel safer doing this because a man tried to blow up a plane using his shoes once and now they look at everyone’s shoes. When people ask me later what it meant to live in ‘those days,’ I will tell them how we lined up and shuffled with out belongings to a place where we untied our shoes together and...
3 tags
1000 on Dupont Chemicals....kind of
Ed Granger had talked for the last forty-five minutes about his time at the Dupont Chemical Company in Wilmington, Delaware. In 1973 he had patented a metallic liquid that became the precursor to ingredients necessary for certain types of computer displays. In 1982 he participated in a study that demonstrated the efficacy of certain proteins in the treating of precancerous lesions on a rare...
December 2009
32 posts
3 tags
How to Become a Writer (debt to Lorrie Moore)
Lorrie Moore’s Collected Stories includes How to Be a Writer which comes from a 1985 collection. Without getting all retrospective on New Year’s Eve, I thought I’d imitate again as a way of celebrating the first 21,000 words. Fun fact, 21,000 words works out to roughly 90 pages double-spaced.
Start early, with illustrated Star Trek stories in marble notebooks, or something...
3 tags
1000 on Cold and Wusses
I’ve been gushing about how great it is to be back in Chicago all day. Snow is, after all, in the forecast.
“What are you even doing out there?” she asked, investing a lot in the nasality of her incredulity. “Prime time starts an hour earlier. Everything starts an hour earlier. There’s no accounting for the strangeness of that. You’re existing in the past even as we speak.”
“You’re...
4 tags
(1006) Words on Chicago and Stuff
“I hate it here,” he shouted. But Ben didn’t hear him, wrapped in conversation with the same South African girl he had been prowling toward all night. There were roughly seven hundred flat screen tv’s in the bar, all of them showing highlights from the afternoon’s football games.
David reached across the table and tapped him on the shoulder.
“What?” Ben shouted, annoyed at having been...
3 tags
1000 on Lugano
I started with Lugano here and ended up somewhere way different. How quickly can a piece of writing move the reader from one place to another without it feeling too much like cosmic whiplash? I think this might be a little too fast, but maybe just by a hair. I guess my central concern is: can we follow writers into fantastic or exemplary spaces and then back into the realm of the everyday? I...