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Rachel's Top Ten Reasons Not To Go Outside:
10. There's a bunny in the yard and I don't want to scare it away.
9. It's way too hot out and I don't do too well in severe heat.
8. It might start raining again and then I'd be soaked, and I already took a long bike ride through the rain today and got soaked there.
7. It's kind of windy and I don't want a tree branch to fall on my head again.
6. That huge dog the punk kid is walking on the street might eat me. Or the punk kid might eat me.
5. The bugs outside are large, numerous, and out for my blood.
4. The way the setting sun is hitting the trees and houses is almost unbearably poetic, and if I stay outside too long I might write something really dumb.
3. I have a huge stack of Paul Auster books I got from the library on the kitchen table and I don't feel like moving them.
2. If I get too much sun I will never become an albino with psychic powers.
1. I just ate half of a large pepperoni pizza and I don't want to be too far from the bathroom.
So, eh. I'm trying to write fanfic. I've got three or four things to work on. One Lorraine-centric fic involving "A Streetcar Named Desire", one "Marty in therapy" fic that I've been working on and off on (the June challenge for the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
backtothefanfic comm is "Write about Marty! Durr!" and at least it's a good excuse, but I need to figure out precisely how to bridge the gap between "quantum mechanics" and "going crazy"--might watch "Donnie Darko" tonight for inspiration), the bigass "Eye in the Sky" fic, and one inspired by this post on the crispinglover community (how fucking great would it have been to go in there with him? How fucking lousy would it have been if he'd converted?). Charismatic actor with a "cult", haha, following + fandom that involves a future SF writer being contacted by a pretend alien + crackpot religion started by a hack SF writer + deep-seated skepticism of all religions, no matter what = Rachel writing the silliest possible thing she can think of to amuse herself (which is still not as silly as Scientology). Be happy for me dammit, I'm distracting myself.
There's actually a Church of Scientology just a few miles from my house. I could go do research. "Hey guys, what up in this cult over here? Fear the clam, brother. Xenu loves y'all." Uh-huh.
Paul Auster is my new favorite writer of the moment. His writing style is so understated and serene; he uses such normal, unadorned language to express such astonishing and universal concepts. He does in his stories what I've tried to do in some of mine, reify metaphors into actual concrete events instead of coaxing them out from behind the story. One gets the feeling that he sees life as something not quite real, a symbolic narrative that is inexplicable because, it being the only thing in existence, it has nothing to be symbolic for.
The New York Trilogy is his first book, and the best one I've read of his so far. It's actually three books: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. They're all essentially the same story, or at least the same metaphor told through three different stories. The first two are most similar, a story in which a man is hired as a detective to perpetually watch another man. They are not straightforward mysteries, because the case cannot possibly be solved. In the first story, the man being watched is simply mad, and the detective is not even a detective, he just writes detective stories. (The first story also has a character named "Peter Stillman" who, in the movie version, if they ever make one, must be played by Crispin Glover.) The second story is even weirder, and focuses almost entirely on the detective's internal changes; the case is not meant to be solved, and the detective is simply a self-aware part of a much larger tableau. The third story...kind of explains it all, but not really.
A common theme in Auster's books is that of discarding an old, complicated, normal life for a non-conventional and simpler existence that is barely even a life at all. This isn't a normal midlife crisis stage where a man throws away his nagging family and cluttered house in the suburbs for a job flipping burgers or a private island somewhere, it's the actual discarding of one's self, of a deliberate limiting of one's existence in order to strip away the vestiges of personality. The main character sets out not to make new connections, but to lose them. He isolates himself from the rest of the world and humanity itself in order to stop being entirely human. It's like American Beauty meets Bartleby, and indeed, Auster seems to be a fan of Melville's story, making references to it several times in various books.
But I'm getting academic, and one is not supposed to be academic when one is on summer vacation.
I actually wanted to use a line from The New York Trilogy for last week'scontrelamontre challenge, but couldn't find one that wouldn't lead me to a mere retelling of one of the stories. Or maybe I just don't have the right amount of imagination to do that right now.
The other book I was going to use was Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth, which was really the only other book I had lying around. There are some great lines in there, for the subject matter. But I never got around to it, and the challenge has passed. Am currently kind of gasping at how great other peoples' short stories are, and that's good enough for me for now.
Or I could go try to pick a fight on some fan community and write something to piss someone off. I really don't pick fights, though. I tend to treat every argument like it'll be a court case later, a trait I learned from my father, who's a lawyer anyway. "Did you or did you not violate Godwin's Law at this point in the thread? Remember, Miss Weisserman, you are under oath." "Well, I did strongly suggest that the light by which the moderator read was filtered through the cured and lacquered skins of slash writers, but I never actually said the word "Nazi.""
Ah, that's unfair of me. Foxy Lady or whatever her name is has not been at all slash-phobic on the vanilla comm like she was on the board she moderated. Granted, I haven't really posted as much slash there as I have on, y'know, the actualbttf_slash community. I think it may be time for a test soon, a little blurt of slashy goodness before I toss Marty into Freud's waiting arms. Don't quite have an idea formed, though. Maybe I'll page through Alexander Portnoy's perverted Jewish head a little more and see what lines appeal to me.
10. There's a bunny in the yard and I don't want to scare it away.
9. It's way too hot out and I don't do too well in severe heat.
8. It might start raining again and then I'd be soaked, and I already took a long bike ride through the rain today and got soaked there.
7. It's kind of windy and I don't want a tree branch to fall on my head again.
6. That huge dog the punk kid is walking on the street might eat me. Or the punk kid might eat me.
5. The bugs outside are large, numerous, and out for my blood.
4. The way the setting sun is hitting the trees and houses is almost unbearably poetic, and if I stay outside too long I might write something really dumb.
3. I have a huge stack of Paul Auster books I got from the library on the kitchen table and I don't feel like moving them.
2. If I get too much sun I will never become an albino with psychic powers.
1. I just ate half of a large pepperoni pizza and I don't want to be too far from the bathroom.
So, eh. I'm trying to write fanfic. I've got three or four things to work on. One Lorraine-centric fic involving "A Streetcar Named Desire", one "Marty in therapy" fic that I've been working on and off on (the June challenge for the
backtothefanfic comm is "Write about Marty! Durr!" and at least it's a good excuse, but I need to figure out precisely how to bridge the gap between "quantum mechanics" and "going crazy"--might watch "Donnie Darko" tonight for inspiration), the bigass "Eye in the Sky" fic, and one inspired by this post on the crispinglover community (how fucking great would it have been to go in there with him? How fucking lousy would it have been if he'd converted?). Charismatic actor with a "cult", haha, following + fandom that involves a future SF writer being contacted by a pretend alien + crackpot religion started by a hack SF writer + deep-seated skepticism of all religions, no matter what = Rachel writing the silliest possible thing she can think of to amuse herself (which is still not as silly as Scientology). Be happy for me dammit, I'm distracting myself. There's actually a Church of Scientology just a few miles from my house. I could go do research. "Hey guys, what up in this cult over here? Fear the clam, brother. Xenu loves y'all." Uh-huh.
Paul Auster is my new favorite writer of the moment. His writing style is so understated and serene; he uses such normal, unadorned language to express such astonishing and universal concepts. He does in his stories what I've tried to do in some of mine, reify metaphors into actual concrete events instead of coaxing them out from behind the story. One gets the feeling that he sees life as something not quite real, a symbolic narrative that is inexplicable because, it being the only thing in existence, it has nothing to be symbolic for.
The New York Trilogy is his first book, and the best one I've read of his so far. It's actually three books: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. They're all essentially the same story, or at least the same metaphor told through three different stories. The first two are most similar, a story in which a man is hired as a detective to perpetually watch another man. They are not straightforward mysteries, because the case cannot possibly be solved. In the first story, the man being watched is simply mad, and the detective is not even a detective, he just writes detective stories. (The first story also has a character named "Peter Stillman" who, in the movie version, if they ever make one, must be played by Crispin Glover.) The second story is even weirder, and focuses almost entirely on the detective's internal changes; the case is not meant to be solved, and the detective is simply a self-aware part of a much larger tableau. The third story...kind of explains it all, but not really.
A common theme in Auster's books is that of discarding an old, complicated, normal life for a non-conventional and simpler existence that is barely even a life at all. This isn't a normal midlife crisis stage where a man throws away his nagging family and cluttered house in the suburbs for a job flipping burgers or a private island somewhere, it's the actual discarding of one's self, of a deliberate limiting of one's existence in order to strip away the vestiges of personality. The main character sets out not to make new connections, but to lose them. He isolates himself from the rest of the world and humanity itself in order to stop being entirely human. It's like American Beauty meets Bartleby, and indeed, Auster seems to be a fan of Melville's story, making references to it several times in various books.
But I'm getting academic, and one is not supposed to be academic when one is on summer vacation.
I actually wanted to use a line from The New York Trilogy for last week's
contrelamontre challenge, but couldn't find one that wouldn't lead me to a mere retelling of one of the stories. Or maybe I just don't have the right amount of imagination to do that right now. The other book I was going to use was Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth, which was really the only other book I had lying around. There are some great lines in there, for the subject matter. But I never got around to it, and the challenge has passed. Am currently kind of gasping at how great other peoples' short stories are, and that's good enough for me for now.
Or I could go try to pick a fight on some fan community and write something to piss someone off. I really don't pick fights, though. I tend to treat every argument like it'll be a court case later, a trait I learned from my father, who's a lawyer anyway. "Did you or did you not violate Godwin's Law at this point in the thread? Remember, Miss Weisserman, you are under oath." "Well, I did strongly suggest that the light by which the moderator read was filtered through the cured and lacquered skins of slash writers, but I never actually said the word "Nazi.""
Ah, that's unfair of me. Foxy Lady or whatever her name is has not been at all slash-phobic on the vanilla comm like she was on the board she moderated. Granted, I haven't really posted as much slash there as I have on, y'know, the actual
bttf_slash community. I think it may be time for a test soon, a little blurt of slashy goodness before I toss Marty into Freud's waiting arms. Don't quite have an idea formed, though. Maybe I'll page through Alexander Portnoy's perverted Jewish head a little more and see what lines appeal to me.