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GOLDBERG'S BACK BABY

Now that my painful attempt at humor is out of the way, let's get to the meat and potatoes. Or carrots. Or maybe just a nice salad. I'm not a vegetarian, but I try to keep this blog open and friendly for everyone who wants to read it. After all, I'm probably gonna convert it to something else eventually. But on to Goldberg/Bird By Bird part Deuce Bigalow Male Gigolo!

I've talked about how much I like Goldberg before in my blog, I agree with a vast majority of what is said. I despise reiterating myself, I dislike saying the same things over and over again. Goldberg does a fine job of teaching students the best way for them to find their own creativity. Yes, these are lessons, but they aren't the juvenile memorization of a High School history class. They're personal, allowing students to work to become the best that they can be. Whether she does it by way of Samurai or by telling students to be truthful to themselves, her lessons WORK.

The "claim your writing section" was actually incredibly powerful for me. You see, I often have trouble believing that my writing is any good. Look at the poetry packet, I saw it as dreadful drivel (I apologize for all alliteration) and it got a perfect score. Though that might have to do with me not enjoying the writing of poetry. My fiction packet feels much better in my head, which makes me think that it will do poorly. It's... not ironic, that's something else entirely... oxymoronic maybe? Eh, whatever.

Bird by Bird part Deus Ex Human Revolution was less special to me. It hit me less hard, it felt harder to apply to myself than Goldberg. While Anne obviously has more than a few good ideas, they just don't feel quite the same to me. I believe it may have something to do with how she gets down to writing. She deals with K-Fucked, does the whole prayer schtick. But that's not how I operate. I sit down, I think for a couple minutes to get inspiration, then I write. I don't deal with self-loathing, I don't even think about myself. I think up a story, and I put it on paper, and I win awards and get tons of money.

Ok, so maybe I don't get awards and money.

YET.

But I do have a much different process of writing. And it makes it harder for me to connect. I dunno, maybe I'm just putting things into my head differently than I should. I'll give reading this another go before I'm forced to bring it back to Ned's. Maybe I'll catch the words a bit different this time.

Sorry about missing weeks

Hey, real sorry about missing a couple weeks. My computer's been janky as BALLS so it's hard to get this going. Internet's bad too, real bad. Have to post this at the... huh. It's actually 11 o'clock, so if I say 11th hour it means two things.

Neat.

Anyway, onto the writing.

So, we're supposed to talk about the... Wreckage book. Correct? Something like that? Well that's what I'm gonna do anyway. It's a good book, the stories are well put together and varied in style and content. You get a good mix of a few different techniques, which is always good. Some of it reads a lot more like poetry than fiction, so I wouldn't be surprised if that was considered as poetry-fiction. With such a wide array of writers, it would be impossible to point out any sort of over-arching style. However, there's a few things I can talk about.

As a book written by women, and ONLY women, it has an interesting perspective that a book with mixed genders or only men doesn't have. Getting to see society "from the other side of the playing field" is always informative and interesting. You learn things, about how said "other side" lives. For example, the one about the OJ-style case (sorry if I can't remember page numbers or names, having trouble finding that story in particular) shows that there seems to be some kind of gender struggle. Me saying "the other side" probably isn't helping, is it?

As I mentioned earlier, there are a few stories that don't read like purely fiction. The carriage one that we discussed in-depth yesterday was a lot like what I'm speaking about. It read much more... poet-y. I don't really have that great a word for it. That particular story wasn't the only one of its kind, but it's the one I'm pointing out. The words flowed, it was almost non-sensical in form. It definitely read differently than normal.


With there being no more Goldberg jokes to make, I need to find something new.... lemme just look at the author list...

Roni Natov... no...

Rosebud Ben-Oni.... no...

Gwen Hart.... that works.

Roberson Response

My response is to the poem on page 41, with the number 1 over it.

As buildings fall into the sea.
I realize it's not meant to be taken literally.

Poems are interpretation.
My mind a poorly formed machine.

The buildings are not crushing coral.
Just a little metaphorical.

He speaks not of vast ecological disasters.
Well actually he is, and that matters.
But he doesn't mean that buildings are actually made of junk.
That idea is bunk.
He talks of our pollution.
And of extinction our collusion.

My rhyming is not good.
I guess food?
But my poem response to Roberson.
Will be over soon.
He's quite a ways better at poetry than me.
A strange source of tranquility.




Boy do I hate writing poems. Cannot WAIT til we get into fiction. Now THAT I'm good at.

For today's blog, my goal is to speak about the City Eclogues book. I won't be touching on Bird by Bird just yet, but rather I wish to focus on Ed Roberson's contribution to our classwork. I have a few points I wish to make, and a few things I've noticed that I wish to point out. The tone, themes, recurrences, etc. But first, I would like to start from the perspective of the book. During class on Tuesday, you brought up a page that said Eclogues were about rural things. However, the book is quite clearly about cities. It's right there in the name! At first I thought that maybe this was from the perspective of a rural person speaking about a City. But certain poems made me rethink that. For example, the poem on page 56. I then thought that maybe it was a city person writing about a city. But that doesn't quite fit along with Eclogues, and it seems more complicated than that. That's when I made a possible realization: these poems were written by a city person SPEAKING FROM A RURAL PERSPECTIVE about cities. As in, someone from the city putting themselves into a rural person's shoes. I doubt I'm right, but it feels right.

Next, I would like to talk about the tone of the poetry. Of what I could understand, due to my complete lack of understanding of poetry and the like, the tome felt quite dark. Depressing, angry, etc. The writer spoke from out of a dark place in his heart, about something clearly important to himself. Pollution, sex, the destruction of natural beauty are all common themes he touches on. We them over and over again, lending themselves to the darkness of the prose. This doesn't seem to be trying to be a happy book, certainly.

The final bit I would like to touch on is form. While some of the poems are obviously quite normal, several of them take unconventional paths to being written. Odd line gaps, etc. While it can make the reading more difficult, it also makes the reader wonder if there's a purpose. Is it supposed to evoke emotions? Make you think what the mindset of the writer was? Be a subtle clue at a deeper meaning? For someone like me, it meant confusion and deep resentment of all written words. For someone better equipped to read poetry like this... it may be a masterpiece.

Week 2

So I still don't know how to indent on here, but that shouldn't be problematic. Probably. In any event, I plan to spend the next few paragraphs talking quite simply about Goldberg Part Deux and the Poetry Packet. Now, I'm not the best reader in the world. I'm not saying I don't understand English or anything, I just don't do all the stuff that other people do. Highlighting, underlining, stuff like that. It's just never been my style, mostly because I never know what I'm supposed to highlight or underline. So if I go off on a tangent about how Shakespeare has long since this sonnet was written been surpassed by contemporary writers because I missed something important, that's my explanation. Now let's get right down to brass tacks, by speaking about...

Heh heh heh, recurring gags.

I'll start with how Goldberg part deux started: obsessions. As you can tell by the few videos I've put into my blog by now, you can tell I'm a wrestling fan. The spectacle, the grandeur, and all that other fine pomp and circumstance has long been an obsession of mine. And honestly, it's a lot like becoming obsessive for writing. If you want to be a good writer, you should be obsessive about writing. You get the basic gist of it, I assume. Goldberg very much stressed the importance of detail in the next few sections, which I very much agree with. The "Don't Tell But Show" also reverberates with me, as a fan of movies and movie reviews themselves. It's a theme I see constantly in criticism, that you shouldn't be telling us but rather SHOWING us. That it applies to writing as well makes sense.

I honestly don't have much that I can say about the sonnets. As I've said, I'm not the best reader in the world. I don't notice fine details, or anything like that. I just think "this sounds kind of prettiful I guess" and move on. Shakespeare, Dickinson, Langston, they were all... kind of prettiful I guess. They were nice to read, but that's about the extent my mental shell goes to. It's something I should fix, and plan to, but for now there's just nothing.

Welcome, I suppose

Hello and welcome to the introduction to my creative writing blog. Hm, that seems a bit unwieldy and fairly repetitive actually. Well, in any case, I truly do welcome you to this blog. Whether you're a teacher, fellow student, or me from an alternate Earth who somehow found his way into our internet, welcome! Unless you're the third one, then I have to absorb you for your power. The process is... unpleasant. But for the rest of you I assure you, there will be no horrifying magical processes! Just terrible, terrible, terrible writing.

Now, I'm still getting used to this blight of a word processor here on blogger, so excuse me if anything becomes randomly italicized or if the indents don't show up. But it seems simple enough, so who knows, maybe I'll figure this thing out soon enough. In any event though, this week is the first week of the semester. I'm supposed to do 3 or 5 paragraphs per week, on the readings and such. This week, the syllabus specifically says "blog introduction" so that's what I'm doing.

However, in order to cover my bases, I figure I should briefly cover Goldberg's Intro to Obsessions. Since this place allows for videos, I figure I'll post some kind of intro. I'll probably be doing this a lot, mostly for fun and partly to show what kind of person I am. But mostly the fun thing.

The Goldberg post, which I'll never NOT be able to think of as being written by a barely literate former WCW world champion as seen in the above video (if this damnable blog works as I demand it to), is written to my tastes and easy enough to digest. A guide to writing, I would HOPE that it would be easy to get into! It was smart, something I don't see often enough these days.

Writing Exercise number 15: What animal are you?

I am the Scorpion. I am hidden, in the shade. I have small claws, indicating a higher level of poison. I will not sting, unless provoked. I am November, in the stars themselves I am the most powerful in all of November. I do not eat the car. I am a Scorpion. It is silly to assume I ate a car.

That is my first blog. I don't know what I have comments set to, or how to change any of that, so it might be set to require my moderation to change them. If that is the case, I will fix it as soon as I learn how to. In the mean time, I have to go to bed so I can do incredible amounts of work tomorrow. Something about pulling a tree out of a lake with my bare hands, I don't know.