Conclusions

--final section from my paper on the Afro-Cuban identity; don't get lost--I'm hoping my professor doesn't as well--

The Splintering of the Left

Testing, testing

Tempest

In the fall semester, I took a fiction writing workshop. In the next few weeks (days, months, years?), I am going to retype a few of the stories written for this class. I was in the habit of printing them off without saving them, so this is my punishment. But retyping has always been a bit of an editing/reevaluating process for moi so it's excusable. I've stapled together a little selection & after the jump is the first. They won't appear particularly chronologically probably just as much because I can't remember when I wrote all of them as that I wanted to somewhat switch them up for this process. I'm calling it an "autopsy." Which makes this a tab grouping--I might add more to this in the future, digging through old work and throwing it up on the web. This story I've titled here "Tempest," and a few extremely minor edits are noted after with a touch of afterward. The assignment was to write a story to describe this photo or one very much like it, if I have not found the exact one our professor provided us with.

THE NAMES

Don DeLillo always makes me want to forget language. Just go back to simple thoughts that aren't thoughts because they don't know the word 'thoughts.' If DeLillo were writing this it would make sense, too much sense, and there would be ongoing little jitters and cringes between characters that you recognize between books. I can't help but associate him with Dylan on the Never Ending Tour, because the books run together. Maybe this is what Li-Young Lee was talking about book with 'poetry' in Faulkner, Melville novels. Anyway, what seems the least important of all in DeLillo's books is what's going on. You try to attach yourself to what's being said and what's being thought and who's lying to you. But you forget. It's like life in that respect. You forget and then there's this undercurrent running under the words for the next few hundred pages.

The Kind of Irony You Can't Write

One of the brilliant things about academia is how stupid it really is.

Because consumption is not enough.

dialogue [Anne Carson writes them better; my apologies]

PLAINWATER

"Bohemian Rhapsody," "Happiness is a Warm Gun," "Band on the Run," and "Paranoid Android" are all songs that are known for their diversity--the way that they slip around on you--and are commonly thought of as more than one song somewhat cut and pasted together. But done so very well, of course. Which gets me to thinking--why do we like this idea? I mean, the concept of a mini-album contained in one song falls completely flat on its face so hard it doesn't even have a nose anymore. So why do we like the idea of a song containing the diversity of an album? I would postulated this is an interest in disparate connections: we enjoy being stunned by two ideas the fit together so well that we can't even see the seams where they logically attach. It's like CatDog: at what point is one the other? And yet they are completely different! And that's, as they say, poetry.