Sunday Scribblings: Inspiration Smorgasbord

For the first time, I'm giving Sunday Scribblings a whirl. What an opportune time, too--I have my pick of topics. I'm snagging "inspiration" off the list, but also "experiment," as I'm trying something new here.

I've joked about my muse in the past, as if it's a separate, sentient entity. Sort of like the classic Greek muses, only with less class--my muse looks like a gothic Tinkerbell, sitting on top of my bookcase, mocking me and making immature faces when I can't write. Why the bookcase? Well, she's got quite the vantagepoint that way, and where does inspiration to write come from if not from reading what others have written before, to enter into a dialogue of ideas. As to her wardrobe, well, I haven't the oodles of cash or the patience for clothing and makeup to maintain the "gothic" look, but it does fascinate me.

It's just silliness on my part, the personification of my muse. Inspiration comes from odd places. A story I wrote when I was about 13 was triggered by an odd moment. I went to the basement to do something and was fumbling in the dark when I bumped into something. I almost said "excuse me," knowing full well I was alone--or hoping I was, anyway. I envisioned a scene with a character alone in a house, bumping into something, saying "excuse me" as if there were a person there--only to find someone there, which led, naturally, into a kidnapping story. I was proud of it, working on it surreptitiously in school and marveling over the pages of my own words. At the time. I later pitched my 30-page magnum opus in the trash. The main character's name? Rose. Her middle names were also flowers, I'm wanting to say Iris and Lily. Last name? Smith. Oh, hella original, for sure. The kidnapper later turned out to be an older brother she never knew about who'd been taken away into foster care on a false charge years earlier. Oh, but wait, it's better. Somewhere in the sequence of events, he got shot in the arm, see, and she had to help him out and then I think it's in his delirium that he says something that gives a hint to his identity. Even richer still, he didn't know it was his kid sister he was kidnapping. I don't remember who he was working for or why he did it, but I think he was essentially a good guy in a bad situation. I think they all lived happily ever after. High melodrama, triggered by a bump in the evening.

I'd like to think my writing is a little more improved since then, but the inspirations are still largely chance. The (currently stagnated) story about Sept. 11 was inspired by an e-mail conversation with a friend about how the events awakened my socio-political sensibilities.

Or this start to a story, which is based on a real (awkward) experience:

I should have known better, should've known that "So what's your sign say?" is the leftist protest version of the standby bar pickup line. I thought we were just striking up innocent, albeit vaguely radical, discussion of the pitfalls of U.S. foreign policy. But one thing leads to another, and from a discussion of depleted uranium and post-traumatic stress disorder, he asked me out to dinner.

If it plays out the way I want it to, it'll veer off into a philosophical musing on sin and love and religion and the negotiation of identity against a backdrop of leftist agitprop. It, ahem, hasn't gotten far yet. A bit ambitious. Still, it was a chance incident that I was able to file away for later use.

Or this, based on a childhood memory:

"Trip-trap, trip-trap, who's that trip-trapping over my bridge?"

The little girl shivered in delightful terror and clutched her mother's hand tightly, half expecting to see the glimmer of sharp teeth and cruel eyes from beneath the bridge. The wooden bridge beneath them reverbated with her and her mother's stamping as they crossed[?] to get to the playground, and her mother's growl echoed faintly in the nearby parking garage.

They didn't have to cross the bridge; there was a walking path that circled around, but it was something they always did when they walked to the park. It was a ritual. With a snarling voice, mother became monster, and with the tight clutch of small hands, she became mother again, a guardian against any of the monsters that roamed the world, ready to prey on those vulnerable.

I have no clue where it's going. I just thought of it in relation to another story I'd written, a children's story that began with a mother tickling her kid and playing monster in the morning. My creative writing classmates had identified with that scene, so I was trying to capture another childhood scene, this one based on something my mom and I used to do to re-enact my all-time favorite book. I'm kinda thinking horror's the direction for this one. Who knows. I just snagged it when it came.

I'm trying to be open to inspiration, let the stories come as they will. I can't just toss up my hands and say the muse wasn't speaking. She's always speaking. I just don't always listen so well.


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Now playing: The New Amsterdams - Worse for the Wear
via FoxyTunes

Certifiable

According to the Stuff White People Like blog, one thing white people like is grad school. Now, I haven't always identified myself as "white" (racially, sorta, in that classic American mutt sense of the word, but I've never felt in step with mainstream whitebread American culture). I guess, though, if SWPL is as accurate in its depiction of white peoples' relationship to grad school as it is in other areas of satire, I'm certifiably white.

And certifiable here would be an operative term. As in, "Grad school? What are you, certifiably insane?"

When I graduated with my master's, I kept getting this question: "So, when are you going on for your PhD?" Sometimes it was in jest (from those who know me well enough), but most often it was a serious question from well-intentioned but nosy folks. My answer was usually an emphatic, humorless, "No."

Twice this evening I got a variation on the same question, "Are you going on for your PhD?" My answer? "Not right now."

Not nearly as certain and in no way as emphatic. It's almost coquettish how I say it, if I'm in the right mood. Six months of rebound from my master's, two months in a self-pitying unemployed funk, and however many odd days I haven't accounted for, and I've been entertaining the concept of more grad school.

Certifiable, I tell you. Completely certifiable.

I miss academia. I kinda miss teaching. I kinda liked teaching. OK, I liked teaching. Correction: I liked teaching at the university; community college, not so much. I know that now. And I know the game, the racket, if you will, that in order to stick around in academia--in order to have a chance at sticking around in academia--I need a terminal degree. I also know that as much as Romantic-era British fiction interested me, it's not a viable long-term interest. But writing is. Creative writing, if the growing document list is an indicator. To make a career of teaching and writing, to teach more than just comp, to get into literature and ideas and yes, the creative stuff, too--

It's madness. Certifiable madness.

I only had one course in creative writing, and that was unstructured. I'm thinking to go back and take a few, get a little more polish, a little more experience in having other eyes see my work, a little more grasp of form and style and voice. And if I like what comes of that, more school to gain more of the same. And another diploma, one that qualifies me for a shot at a full-time position in the hallowed halls of academe (I know the bleak odds in the field of English).

So help me god, I'm thinking to go back for more grad school.

I'm certifiable, I tell ya. Completely certifiable.

Lost priorities

Last Thursday, I heard from a friend I haven't seen in a few months and probably haven't talked to in as long. I love hearing from her, her tales of academia and travel, and in exchange I try to make my life sound as interesting as possible. I'm not a huge phone talker, but our conversations, for as infrequent as they are, generally last 1-2 hours.

We'd been playing phone tag for a week or two before last Thursday. Around 7:45 Central Standard Time, my phone rings, and I do my usual sprint to catch it.

"Everything OK?" my friend asked. "You sound distracted."

"I'm fine. Just had to run to catch the phone, and I was eating dinner."

"Oh. Do you want to call back after you're done eating?"

"Sure." I paused, doing a brief mental calculation. "Actually, this is going to sound horrible. Can I call you back after Lost?"

She laughed, all was well, and I called back later. Still, it was an interesting moment to realize how I had arranged my priorities, if only on a temporary basis.

In lieu of content...

...I share a (an?) LOL Cat whose mission I thoroughly endorse. Carry on the good fight, Grammar Kitteh.


Enter the ICHC online Poker Cats Contest!

So long, and thanks for all the fish

I don't usually do "today in history" type posts, but today is a special day. Sort of. Douglas Adams would've been 56 today, and it's a damn shame he's gone.

Don't know who Douglas Adams is? Your education has been sorely neglected if that's the case. Where else would you learn the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything? Every person should read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy at least once before kicking the bucket.

Saw the movie? That monstrosity doesn't count. Read the damn book. Not only will you learn the answer to the above question (42), you'll be treated to some of the sharpest, driest, most uproariously witty writing ever. Don't let the science fiction genre intimidate you--there's something here for everyone, whether it's the satirizing of politics or the dig at bad poetry or even the appreciation of a good cup of tea.

Here's the introduction:

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.

This is not her story.

But it is the story of that terrible stupid catastrophe and some of its consequences.

It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy — not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or heard of by any Earthman.

Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.

in fact it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor — of which no Earthman had ever heard either.

Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one — more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?

In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.

First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words Don't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.

But the story of this terrible, stupid Thursday, the story of its extraordinary consequences, and the story of how these consequences are inextricably intertwined with this remarkable book begins very simply.

It begins with a house.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go re-read the book. If you're into sitting for hours reading text off a glowing screen, you can read the book in its entirety here. I still prefer the paper version.

Better late than never

There's a movie I've been planning to go see since it came out. I'm not sure when it came out (December? Oh. IMDB says November. Pfft.), but it's coming to DVD this week.

I finally got out to see it. No Country for Old Men was worth it. Sparse and violent, the movie was good. There was no soundtrack, so there were periods of dead silence punctuated only by, say, the ticking of a clock, as in the pauses in the last scene, a monologue. The characters, which were well written to begin with, were cast and acted well (especially Chigurh, the ultimate villain *shudder*). Cormac McCarthy's been described as a humorless writer, but his brand of humor is bleaker, more like gallows humor, and it came through in the movie. The ending was deliciously ambiguous ("That's it?" a couple other moviegoers asked each other as the credits started to roll).

I'm not pretentious enough to say how many stars or thumbs up it deserves, but I enjoyed it. Now I just need to go back and finish reading the book.

...Post is late again. Oh bother.

Now THAT's hot

Once again, a headline from Yahoo news has caught my eye: "Men who do housework may get more sex."

Forget the feminist movement and its struggles; news like that alone could do wonders for the ongoing struggle for gender equity. (Did that sound cynical? I'm more amused than anything else, among the reasons being the fact that the name in the byline is a man's--it kind of explains the spin.)

If you think about it, it's a win-win situation. Women don't have to come home to a house that's just as chaotic as she left it in the morning, and men get, well, laid. Seriously, there's nothing more aggravating than the frustration I see in many women over the fact that while they may be out in the workforce, they still shoulder an unfair burden in household tasks.

And there's not much sexier than an intelligent, well-read, handsome man . . . with a feather duster in one hand and the declaration that dinner is ready and waiting. Oh, yes.

Damn, that mental image is. . . uh. . . almost pornographically hot.