Portfolio- Prose Styles

This blog is a portofolio of assignmenets for Advance Prose Styles (Eng 6300). The posts are good except there's a whole month I missed becasue I was dissociating. 

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Experiments in Style Week One: Style Imitation: Hélène Cixous

Rendering unto and unto and unto and unto, the ocean, undying, prepares to seize back what was stolen. It rises and spreads, it extends and swallows and threatens extinction, or rather, promises us some return. It’s waited, patient, but now prepares to lift itself back to the land from which it was rejected, to claim violent reconciliation with the shore, all the while being fed, fed by melting ice, fed by the exhaust of movement above, by the fog of oil, oil: the undying blood of our ancestors, slick with impenetrable shine, slick with vicious fluidity, slick with power, part of the earth, drawn from the center and burned into dispersal. Like a damaged moth, the ocean crawls to the fire.

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Artful Sentences 11/27: Adverbs, Adjectives, and verbs

“Occulted dimensionality, print cryogenizes, but hypermedia melts together, disontologizing the person scizotech-dissasembly, disintegrated covergence:[...]”

Nick Land “Cybergothic” 356

This is not a “good” sentence. It is, maybe, a “bad” sentence. It’s a mess! But I’m fascinated by it.  It combines the worst impulses of science fiction and academia (the second half of the sentence is a mish mash of quotes from William Gibson and Delueze). The sentence takes those genres’ penchant for coining neologisms and stretches it into a ridiculous pseudo-scientific mess. Verbs act as nouns (”convergence”),  adjectives have been turned into verbs (”cryogenizes”), and words are made of Frankensteined prefixes and suffixes (”disontologizing” which starts with the root ontology, a noun, and turns it into a verb, negates with the “dis” prefix; )

By all accounts its a bad sentence. But it also presents a radical (??) new (prose) poetics. It conveys feeling. It works better as a piece of feeling than a piece of meaning; the style mirrors the content. The sentence, and the essay of its origin, describe the disorienting effects of the internet, and the trouble that traditional language has in keeping up.  The internet has radically shifted the role of language, and has proved especially challenging to traditional prose methods. Different writers have taken different techniques for writing about the internet. Some have abandoned traditional prose models altogether and produce a body of work that exists entirely online.  Other writers incorporate the conversational styles of social media into their writing. Land’s writing attempts to solve the same problem, but with a radically different process. He does not try to mimic the writing that exists online.  Instead, this sentence attempts to describe the disorientating feeling of being online with the disorienting language of post-structuralism, mixed with science fiction. It’s the sort of thing that becomes exhausting quickly, but is a refreshing (?) alternative to the commonly performed casualness of much about/ for the internet and an intriguing example of a way to warp language to capture the reality of the internet.

(edited 11/30)

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Experiments In Style: Flash Non- Fiction (11/23)

fi“On My Desk”: A Flash Non-Fiction Essay Inspired by Bret Lott

         My writing desk is actually a repurposed kitchen table I keep in my front room.  I bought the table from my friend Juliana about a year ago. I was living at my parents’ house and she was living across the street. We were both moving out at the same time; she was moving to New York City and needed to get rid of as much furniture as she could, and I was moving back into my own place, for which I needed furniture. Juliana is an artist (one of the best I know) with a great sense for design, and the table had been painted a light sky blue. I also bought a soft pink bell-shaped lamp that I used to keep on the table, but it was stolen by the person who sublet for me this summer. In exchange, she left her cat. She hasn’t responded to me in months, so I guess it’s my cat now. 

        The cat partially explains why my desk is so messy. He is constantly jumping and knocking things over; at this moment he is crawling over the books in front of me and staring intensely out the window, against which the table is positioned. He is at fault for the overturned vases and the extent to which the books on my desk are in disarray, but I can’t blame him for the entire mess. I’m a disordered person. My desk is covered, mostly in books I have been meaning to read, but also in unopened packages of dental floss, empty boxes of light bulbs and months old water bills (the bill has been paid, I just haven’t thrown away the letter).  There are a lot of poetry collections, half read issues of poetry magazines, and a few of Graywolf Press’ “The Art Of Writing” series.  There is also the top of a smaller, more broken table that I keep on an astroturf table runner.  Directly in front of me is an issue of the magazine Teen Bo$$ (the cover of which promises articles such as “how to use Instagram to grow your brand” and “become a billionaire boss like Kylie Jenner 👑”), a morbidly fascinating magazine that I can’t look away`from. On top of it is a copy of Louis Althusser’s Machiavelli and Us, which I was reading around the time I picked up a copy of “Teen Bo$$” and whose dour Marxism I thought would be funny to juxtapose with the dystopic hyper accelerationism of “Teen Bo$$” and haven’t gotten around to moving yet.

editing notes 11/30

changed semicolon to a period at the end of the line “I bought the table from my friend Juliana about a year ago.” Otherwise, I would have had two sentences in a row with semicolons, which I wanted to avoid to create rhythmic variation.

changed “and has a finer sense of design than anyone I know” to “with a great sense of design”. I spent a lot of time on the wording of this and I still don’t love my choice. The original was choppy and awkward, but the way it is now doesn’t quite get across the information I want to. I decided to put the flow of the sentence over creating a better picture of my friend's interior design ability, especially since it was a flash essay.

removed “incidentally” from the start of the sentence “ also bought a soft pink bell-shaped lamp that I used to keep on the table”. It added nothing and is a tic of my writing.

let stand “by the person who sublet my house this summer”, but it still feels like a slightly awkward construction. changed “my house” to “for me”. I still don’t love it.

removed “who is still a kitten” after “the cat” at the beginning of the second paragraph

changed period to a semicolon in the line “He is constantly jumping and knocking things over; at this moment”. With a period it was too choppy and terse, and the semicolon allows me to convey the two thoughts as one continuous thought/moment.

changed “I am to “I’m” to sound less stuffy

changed “i just still have the letter” to “i just haven’t thrown away the letter” for phrasing awkwardness 

deleted the line “There are books that I read for class and books that I bought for my personal reading, most of which I have yet to read” because it repeated something i already said.

added “also” removed “different” from the line “There is also the top of a smaller, more broken table”.

Deleted “It’s made of gold colored plastic with baroque flourishes and I bought for five dollars; I use it now to hold loose change and shoelaces. I keep it on an astroturf table runner.” Rephrased  “I keep it on an astroturf table runner” and moved it onto the end of the previous center. I deleted this becaue it was unneeded detail about one object on the table. I probbably wouldn’t have deleted it if this weren’t a flash essay.

combined the second and third paragraph, which would have begun at  “Directly in front of me”.

I thought about adding a closing line that summed up the essay, but I’m happy with the line I ended with.

The essay started with the images of the last two lines; everything else was built to get to that .I’m happy with this essay, especially after the revisions. It was fun to write and the condensed format allowed me to cut the lines that I didn’t thank were absolutely essential, which means that I am really satisfied with (almost) all of the lines that I kept in. There were a few lines i cut that I wish I had been able to keep, but I couldn’t get them to fit.

 Personal essays are the genre I have the most trouble with, and I usually avoid them entirely, but the constrictions of the format allowed me to access personal writing in a way that is sometimes difficult for me. I found the idea of expressing my personality through the objects on my desk allowed me to make revelations that I might otherwise be uncomfortable with. It provided a way to talk about myself without talking about myself. It also allowed me opportunities to tell tiny vignettes about the people in my life. 

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Passages To Reflect On 11/19

“Nursery fears made flesh and sinew; earliest and most archaic of fears, fear of devourment. The beast and his carnivorous bed of bone and I, white, shaking, raw, approaching him as if offering, in myself, the key to a peaceable kingdom in which his appetite need not be my extinction.”

Angela Carter “The Tiger’s Bride”

There were so many brilliant passages from this story; the biggest challenge was choosing one over the others. The above passage is beautiful. It just feels good on the tongue. The phrase “the beast and his carnivorous bed of bone and I” especially “jumped out” at me while I was reading. The alliteration of B sounds gives the sentence a propulsive bounce. What I especially love about the phrase is the “and I” at the end of it. This slightly unconventional phrasing creates an element of syntactical freshness. The additional two beats are essential to the rhythm of the phrase. “Bed of bone and I” especially stands out to me within the phrase for its rhythm and alliteration. It is an especially poetic phrasing of the scene. The construction of the phrase also reflects the themes of the story; the beast and his “carnivorous bed” take up 11 of the phrases 13 beats, while the female narrator is only allocated two beats. The beast’s bed is afforded a luxurious adjective and a preposition, while the woman is only given a small corner on the edge of the phrase. She is described right after, but it isn’t during the same part of the sentence. Her description is broken up by commas in economic prose.

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Artful Sentences: 11/17

“Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, and barracks, which all resemble prisons?”

Michel Foucault:  Discipline And Punish

This is a sentence that is often held up as a standard of the bad prose of philosophers and theorists; I can’t get enough of it. I go back and forth on whether I think its incredible or awful, but I know that it isn’t somewhere in the middle. 

On the one hand: it's basically meaningless. It's redundant.  Its circular logic embodies the nearly mysticistic obscurantism that post-structuralism relies on so often. It is isn’t a good sentence. And yet, despite not being a good sentence, it might be a good sentence. It’s redundancy and circular logic are more obvious than most passages of theory; it’s not hiding anything. The circular path that the sentence takes mirrors its point about systems of control, which as an argument in defense of the prose is maybe a “slippery slope” towards the symbolic narcissism of signs that refer only to themselves, but should be fine. It’s a funny sentence. I think I like it, or at the very least I can’t stop thinking about. It probably read better in French.

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Artful Sentences: 11/14/18

“That effectively ended the press conference, except that a live mic caught Kantsky muttering something about a fruitcake to an aide, and the next day the story was neither the UFOs nor the outburst by the man, who turned out to be Rebbe Mustafah Elijah, the high priest and sole proprietor of a local sect called the Universal Synagogue of the Antinomian Demiurge, a weird millennial cult based out of the back room  of Elijah’s Africana store in East Liberty, but rather a subsequent press conference hastily arranged by City Councilwoman Mary Tremone, a presumptive mayoral challenger in next year’s contest, who cited Kantsky’s overheard comment as just one more indication of a heedless and uncaring administration displaying a shocking disregard for the feelings and emotional well-being of the city’s LGBTQ communities, especially its youth, who faced bullying every day, and who were The Future Of Our City.”

The Bend Of The World- Jacob Bacharach  

What stands out to me about this sentence is how long it is and the way key points of information are buried in casual asides. The sentence is so loaded with prepositions and conjunctions and modifiers and subordinate clauses that things like UFOs and cults are brushed over. This keeps any specific conspiracy from being taken too seriously on its own and rather focuses on the frantic, paranoid thought process of a conspiracy theorist. The sentence starts right away with the independent clause “that effectively ended the press conference” (based on the kernel “that ended” with the direct object “the press conference” and adverb “effectively”) and keeps branching rightward. The next clauses are  independent clauses: “a live mic caught Kantsky muttering something about a fruitcake to an aide” (based on the kernel “a mic caught”); “the next day the story was neither the UFOs nor the outburst by the man” (based around the kernel “the story was”). After that the sentence is constructed entirely of prepositions and modifiers piling on top of each other. The pile doesn’t collapse into a mess, but it threatens to, which is exhilarating. 

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Artful Sentences (11/6/18)

“Master was a little crazy; he had spent too many years reading books overseas, talked to himself in his office, did not always return greetings, and had too much hair.”

Half A Yellow Sun- Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche. Pg 1

A strong opening sentence sets the tone for the next 540 pages, and this opening is masterful. It begins with a brilliant independent clause: “master was a little crazy”. The novel opens with master, one of the most loaded words in the english langauge, especially in a newly “decolonized” Nigeria. The opening independent clause sets up both the primacy of the power dynamics that will run throuh the novel, as well as the insanity that power breeds. If the sentence had ended there it would have been a brilliant opening to the novel, but it expands into something even more powerful. A second indepedendent clause is added, seperated from the first by a semicolon. The semicolon allows the first clause to stand on its own while still being part of the larger sentence. A semicolon doesn’t break the momentum of the sentence the way a period would; instead it promises more to come, in this case an asyndeton description of “master”. If the semicolon allows for a deep breath, the commas that follow it are rapid, shallow breaths; the asyneton flow of information is almost (but not quite) overwhelming. This description of “master” lets the reader know exactly the kind of person he is, but it also foreshadows a theme of the novel; the distance between the educated Nigerian “revolutionaries”and cosmopolitan elites and the uneducated peasants. 

“Master” is soon introduced by his name, Odenigbo, but because he is introduced by his social role first the power dynamics of the novel are highlighted. For a brief moment he exists not as an individual person but as a “master”, a stand in for all masters. The moment is brief, but it is the first moment of the novel, and its powerful.

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Passages To Reflect On: Virginia Woolf (11/5/18)

One passage that stuck out to me was when Woolf wrote about grief and the effect it has on language as “the muffled intensity, which a butterfly or moth feels when with its sticky tremulous legs and antennae it pushes out of the chrysalis and emerges and sits quivering beside the broken case for a moment; its wings still creased; its eyes dazzled, incapable of flight.”

I am not grieving a death, but I relate to this passage nonetheless.  If I were allowed to be completely honest I would say that I have fallen into a deep depression lately, and it has limited my capacity for language a great deal, and I would continue to say that this loss of language only sends me deeper into the depression and reduces me to something less than human; the indeterminate moth/ butterfly, sticky and incapable of flight, is, at this moment, a creature I find myself relating to, yet I am unable to articulate it.

This also reminds me of another passage by Woolf, this one from her essay “Craftsmanship”, where she says of words that “they seem to like people to think and to feel before they use them, but to think and to feel not about them, but about something different.” And I agree, too many people speak without thinking or feeling. BUT, it is also easy to get trapped in the swamp of feeling-thoughts that proceeds words and not to be able to crawl out of it, towards language. I’m not sure I agree with Woolf’s assertions that “words need privacy” and that they live in our minds ( “Craftsmanship”). The mind is a swamp where words resemble an undifferentiated mass of feeling and thought; even the words that do exist in the mind exist in a weird undead state. The words haven’t really been born yet; they’re half-formed and covered in slime. Words find life in use, from one person to another. Bringing these undead things to life requires a kind of occult incantation, with both a speaker and a receiver, a writer and a reader. They live in the space between the two. They can’t be alive only in the mind. Even the words in a dictionary are more alive than the word shaped zombies of the mind. The dictionary is without energy, meaning, a point; the words within it have the dullest kind of life, but at least the book is an exchange between an author and a reader. I believe that language truly lives in communication. The last thing words want is privacy, I believe. Maybe the dictionary is not the best example of this, but it does communicate codes and rules. The process of communication is enacted. It exists beyond the swamp of thoughts and feelings.

I don’t know if I’m making myself clear, which is a problem I’ve been having a lot lately. I have become intensely private lately; I’ve withdrawn into my mind, and I have not found words there. I have found swamps of feeling bubbling with undead word shaped objects. This makes me disinclined to agree with the idea that words exist in the mind. The longer I am isolated the further I move away from language. For me words are at there most alive when I am talking to someone, or when I’m writing, especially something that will be read. They need other people to be living words, otherwise, they become zombies trapped in thought. 

editing notes 11/30

I was in a certain headspace (depressed) when I wrote this and maybe its a little weird but I stand by it. I have only made a few small changes.

added “a death” and “nonetheless” and removed  “;I don’t mean to hop on board the experience of losing someone close to me when I haven’t” to the sentence “I am not grieving a death, but I relate to this passage nonetheless.” ended the sentence rather than combining it with the next sentence using a semicolon

removed “Maybe I am assigning too much of my own feelings onto a passage that doesn’t really reflect them” added a semicolon in its place to connect “reduces me to something less than human” (removed “feeling”) and  “the indeterminate moth/ butterfly”.

combined second and third paragraph ( “BUT, it is also easy to get trapped in the swamp of feeling-thoughts that proceeds words and not to be able to crawl out of it, towards language. I’m not sure I agree with Woolf’s assertions that “words need privacy” )

changed “and in it words are more resemble to” to “where words resemble”

changed “and trapped in my thoughts” to “trapped in thought”

deleted “Hopefully this makes sense.”

this post was written coming out of a long period of writer’s block, which coincided with a long period of time I went without speaking to anyone or leaving my house. the long compound sentences were the result of language returning to me in a rapid flow, and me trying not to get in its way.

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Experiments in Style 10/30: Exercises In Style (Queneau) (MOST EMBARRASSING POST. JUST AWFUL.)

8 THINGS EVERYONE FROM PARIS CAN RELATE TO

1.When you have to take the S bus in the middle of the day. At rush hour.

2.When you see a guy in a stupid fedora with a dumb cord wrapped around it.

3.What you imagined happened to the guy’s neck, which is too long.

4.When the guy in the hat tries to start a fight with their neighbor for stepping on their toes. In the middle of a crowded bus.

5.When he throws himself into the first available seat away from the man he just picked a fight with.

6.When you get off the bus and into the fresh air, away from obnoxious passengers.

7.When, two hours later, you see the guy in the dumb hat in front of the gare Saint Lazare.

8.And his friend is giving him fashion advice (his button is wrong).

This is a version of the story told in Raymond Quenaeu’s Exercises In Style in the style of a “buzzfeed” “article”. These articles, from buzzfeed, tell a relatable story one line at a time, with a popular reaction image corresponding to each line. Sometimes this creates a call and response between word and image, but it often restates with pictures what was just written. The picture is usually from a 10 year old tv show. The sentences are clipped. A period is often used where one would expect a comma. To heighten impact. They are often written in second person to emphasize how relatable the experience is.  One of the most common formats is “when you x: then y”, where y is depicted with an image. They are very relatable and capture the quotidian experiences of the modern world with a fascinating mixture of image and language. We relate to them.  We can’t get enough. 

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In Class Exercise: Dr Stover (mood with punctuation)

Mood 1- Edgy, Nervous, Potentially Violent 

The sound of grinding teeth. Uninterrupted and louder than it ever should be.

(That’s all I got for this one. In class these were combined into one flowing sentence, but I am going to make the call and say that they are much more on the edge when they’re broken up and choppy. I’m not sure how I was going to develop this idea. I had a couple of false starts before landing on these sentences. For example . 

Pacing: “do you think we should go back to the bank”

“why would we go back to the bank?”

This attempt is closer to stage directions than typical prose. 

Ironically, while writing this prompt I got ~nervous~ and didn’t write much.)

Mood 2: Calm, Peaceful, Meditative 

We sat in the fading sunlight. Dead leaves scraped against the asphalt and were carried off by the wind to be hidden until spring.

(I relied more heavily on image to convey calm and peace than on punctuation use. I wrote a few drafts of this sentence in class. One of the drafts attempted to contain every image in one unbroken sentence. Longer sentences seem to lend themselves well to calmness [that being said, my first attempt at a nervous, edgy sentence was a run on]. The Virginia Woolf sentence we analyzed in class is a great example of the potential for serenity in longer, unbroken, sentences. There is something about the period, I think, that makes a person a little nervous. There is something about stopping a sentence and starting a new one that puts one on edge. The flow is interrupted. Of course, that being said my first impulse for both the nervous sentence and the calm sentence was a run on [neither sentence finished as a run on]. I relied more on image to set the tone than punctuation, which was not the assignment.

Mood 3: Joyful, exuberant, energetic 

The bonfire jumped about playfully we through a football to each other in loose spirals. I threw it over Danika’s head and she ran after it.

(I’m not a fan of this sentence AT ALL. It is way too laconic for the prompt. The images are lazy and the punctuation does nothing to encourage joy or energy. I’m not really sure what I was doing here. In general, joy is one of the moods I have the most difficulty capturing. Please don’t read into this.)

In general, I’m really disappointed with my sentences in this exercise. Capturing mood through punctuation is very interesting to me, and I will continue to work on it. I would love to be able to capture anxiety or anger or joy through commas. That is the sort of subtle color that mood to be conveyed with being heavy handed. It is subtle technique and I am going to work to improve at it. (Please do not misunderstand me, I am trying to be very good at writing, please don’t let my ironic distancing fool you. In this moment my writing is especially sloppy.)

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my last post was a disaster 

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In Class Exercise: Rebecca (semicolons): Fitzgerald Imitation

At sundown a family boarded the train with matching Montreal shirts and with a good deal of anxiety found four seats near each other, and with a shuffling bustle sat down. Once they sat the compartment was quiet again. Businesswoman checked their phones for last minute work emails and and breaking news; vacant youth stared, xanned out, into space; the train continued the same loop it had made for a decade.

I felt pretty good about this exercise. Imitations are always one of my favorite exercises (I should do them more often, on my time. They are a great way to practice writing and a great way to really understand writing you love). I’m not thrilled about outcome of the exercise, but I enjoyed doing it, and I need to be better about realizing that most of the output of writing exercises will not be, in and of itself, good writing, but it is part of the process towards good writing. I’m sorry my writing is so bad. I like semicolons. I think they are fun. I think they keep sentences from being too choppy, or childlike. They allow a sentence to contain more than one full idea at a time. This allows for the possibility of more sophisticated thought. Not to be a snob. Semicolons allow for nuanced thinking in writing in a way that periods don’t. Additionally, semicolons make writing prettier (ie semicolons allow writing to have a deeper more complex aesthetic palette; the complexity and depth of the aesthetic palette opens up the possibility for a deeper and more complex emotional palette. The aesthetic qualities of the writing, directly and indirectly, effect the “intellectual” qualities of a work; even if one believes that the primary purpose of writing is to convey information, semicolons provide a great aid.  Semicolons allow multiple ideas to exist in the same sentence; a sentence with multiple ideas is often more nuanced.)  Writing that avoids semicolons sounds choppy. I like semicolons.

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In Class Exercise: Lauren (commas)

The prompt sentence I choose: “the house stood abandoned... the moon shone brightly.”

-The house, the one at the end of the culdesac, had been abandoned for decades. (Clarity)

- The house was abandoned, but as kids, we would tell each other stories about vagrants and escaped criminals that camped out there, whether or not we believed it. (Connect)

-We always said we would break into the house one Halloween, but we never did. (Pause)

-When I used to walk by it every day on the way to school it would make my heart race with fear, now I drive past it on my way to work and feel just a dull twinge of nostalgia. It seems so much smaller than it did. (Passage of time)

I completely forgot to include the moon in this exercise. The goal of the exercise was to build a series of sentences around the prompt sentence. The exercise was supposed to include the four types of comma usage: clarity, connecting two or more ideas, a pause, and the passage of time. The sentences I came up with to fit those categories are clunky. 

Normally I feel like I have a pretty good feel for comma usage and a good ear for pauses, but I feel thrown off. I never quite got a handle on this exercise. I don’t quite understand the difference between the comma used for clarification and the comma used for connection. Usually, the two are distinct from each other and I am to tell which is which, but sometimes they blur together. My impulse is to say that when they blur it is less important to be able to identify the specific action is being used for, because the comma’s use is fluid and the descriptors are added after the fact. 

I am sorry if this is not clear. I had more difficulty with this exercise than I expected, and still understand the comma better by ear and feel than I do by grammatical rule.

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Artful Sentences

“I thought Izzy had dropped a dish, but when I came out I saw what Izzy had dropped was dead.”

Rich Cohen “The Mystery of Rabbi Voice” The New York Times (quoted)

This sentence doesn’t correspond with any particular lesson from the texts, but i wanted to include it in my “artful sentences” collection anyway. It is from an article in the New York Times discussing the speaking patterns of American Rabbis, and more generally the speaking patterns of Jewish-Americans, especially older Jewish-Americans. The sentence hinges on the verb “dropped”, which subtly shifts in meaning from its first usage to its second. The shift is unexpected, in tone, syntax, and meaning. The thing being dropped goes from a noun to a verb and the usage shifts from literal to expressionistic without warning, creating a comedically understated rhythm. The sentence constructed is perfectly correct grammatically, yet still sounds “off” to ears trained for standardized syntax. I am especially keeping my eye for sentences that, like this one, create unexpected rhythms while still maintaining “correct” grammatical form. 

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Experiments In Prose Style: Differing Sentence Length For Different Characters

This experiment was inspired by an exercise in Lukeman’s a dash of style. 

I have started a short story from two different points of view, one from a character who thinks in short sentences and one who thinks in long sentences. The sentence structure is reflective of their personalities and moods: the short sentences are reflective of a character who has trouble with emotional understanding and likes to break things into chunks of logic so that they are able to understand. The second character is emotionally and physically exhausted from taking care of the first, and the sentence structure is longer and streamier to reflect the exhaustion.

When I started the exercise I hoping to be able to combine the two points of view into a cohesive narrative, but I was unable to do that. As it stands, the exercise is two starts of the same story from two points of view, with different sentence construction. 

Mom doesn’t yell that much, but every time she yells she makes that face. What does that face mean? She doesn’t yell every time she makes that face, but every time she makes that faces she looks like she is about to yell, so you prepare yourself for yelling, because you’d rather be prepared for yelling that doesn’t come than unprepared for yelling that does. Why is she yelling? People yell when they’re angry. People don’t yell when they aren’t angry, but they don’t always yell when they are angry. Mom isn’t yelling, but she is making the face she makes when she yells. You’ve learned to connect the face with yelling, and by connecting the face with yelling you’ve connected it with anger. This kind of deduction doesn’t work all the time, but its the most consistent method you have for determining feelings.

The face she’s making means she’s probably angry. Why is she angry? Is she angry at you? Why would she be angry at you? What are the reasons she’s been angry at you before? She is mad when you get mad. Especially in public. Like last month when you flung yourself onto the grocery store floor and refused to move or when you had a meltdown at your soccer game. But you're not doing any of that now. You’re sitting quietly in your seat. You are sitting quietly riding the Chicago transit system like you have been all day. You’ve been excited about this trip for months, and Mom seemed excited too. She was always bringing it up to you. She seemed a lot more excited for it than Dad did. He never talked to you about it. It’s not surprising he didn’t come. He doesn’t like trips as much as Mom.

If asked, Meagan would say that the joy the trip to Chicago brought Jackson made all the trouble of the trip worth it, and maybe it did, but right now she was too exhausted to muster the energy to believe it. She loved him, so much,  and she wanted to be able to provide the endless well of patience that taking care of him called for, but every day left her feeling more drained than the one before, and the weekend they had spent in Chicago had been especially draining; she was ready to be back in Knoxville, where she could at least pillow the stress of raising Jackson with the comfort of home.

When Jackson found an interest it consumed him. Like many little boys he had always been interested in trains and other machines, but as he got older his passions became more focused and more intense, and for the past year and a half all he had talked about was Chicago’s transit system, the L, so his parents decided to take him to Chicago for his summer trip: something at work came up for his Dad at the last minute, and he and his Mom made the trip alone. Riding the L was cheaper than Disneyworld, where Sharon and Ted Radkey had taken the three Radkey boys for a vacation that Meagan watched on Instagram while riding the apparently endless redline loop. The stories were carefully curated to show the family at max fun, the most presentable version of what was assuredly a stressful trip to Orlando, but at least they had highs to capture and lows to hide: her weekend just felt like the same looping gray steel at every point.

She knew he was grateful in his own way, and rationally she understood that he had great difficulty expressing or even understanding emotion, but she wished he would give at least some indication that he was grateful for this trip, or even some indication that he was enjoying himself, that he was having fun. He sat there, silently staring out the window, taking it all in as they boarded and reboarded, trading Red Lines for Green Lines for Blue Lines, always returning to the same central loop, Jackson never taking his eyes off the seemingly shifting structures that formed the single circle. She tried to get his attention with a glance, but he was in his own world.

editing notes 11/30

only minor spelling and grammatical fixes. nothing worth noting. this is one my favorite things I have written for this class. I was thinking about expanding on them, but looking back on these two stories they can almost stand on their own as flash fiction.

[occultportfolio]

Experiments in Prose Style: Prepositions (Embarrassing !)

As the east coast turned away from the sun, my grandmother and I slid on the ice that covered the hill leading away from the tower.

Below this shared thought was an even darker one, unspoken, but there since the beginning. 

[occultportfolio]

Artful Sentences: Pulse

“May in Ayemenem is a hot brooding month.”

Arundhati Roy, The God Of Small Things, opening line

The line that opens Roy’s wonderful novel is one of the most most musical lines I’ve ever read in fiction. It is twelve syllable pulse that instantly breathe life into the rest of the story to come. The first half of the sentence is especially impressive. Building around the inherent musicality of the town’s name,t he first six syllables are divided into three feet. The first two feet rhyme, or nearly rhyme: May-Ay, In-Men. The pattern spills over into the third foot but slips into “is” before the repetition becomes too much and the reader becomes slapdrunk offf the sounds. The toungue twisting of the first half of the sentence sets up the relatively simple back half, because by the time the reader reaches that they are already slightly dazed by the opening, as if they had been sitting in the sun all day. The long oo of brooding breaks up the short ah and uh of hot and month, but they are all hitting the same spot, again dazing the reader like the hot brooding sun.